Preparing

I've in LA for the past few days, waiting with my sister and brother-in-law for the baby to come. He's officially one day late now, but, I've always thought that whole "due date" thing was a scam. But my sister explained, yesterday on her due date, that for nine months you tell people that the baby's due on February 23rd, and you want to have the baby on February 23rd, dammit. I think I added the dammit. I'm developing a theory that these folk remedies for starting labor are completely worthless (I'm talking to you, the The Salad.)

In an effort to destract ourselves from other matters, we've been watching a couple of nominated movies - Venus, for which Peter O'Toole was nominated for Best Actor, and Jesus Camp, which is nominated for Best Documentary (give me a break, Al Gore's got that totally wrapped up.) Venus was beautifully made and has a tight story-line about a slightly lecherous elderly actor who becomes enamoured with a sort of gritty young woman with no goals (outside of "modelling") besides sitting on the couch and eating take-out. (Make that "take-away" - it's British.) O'Toole's character is fearless and cheerful, even when getting rebuffed by the young woman, he seems happy enough to be near a girl in a mini-skirt. It's a thoughtful and beautiful movie - I'd recommend it.

Last night we watched Jesus Camp, a documentary about Evangelical christian children and their indoctrination. Although it made us scream and shout and pause the movie so we could vent and rant, actually, it's not a very good documentary - it just follows a few of these extreme evangelical's around (with little explanation) and offers no commentary or altering points of view. The camp, which teaches a right-wing message of hate, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality and creationism, did not, as far as the documentary showed, focus at all on the actual Bible, and what was most disturbing with interviews with the children in which they said they were soldiers, or "being trained" and seemed to have absolutely no idea what they were being trained for (except to "train others"!) What really chaps my ass about these extremists is that you don't have to scratch hard to expose the rampant hypocrisy that lies beneath, but those sorts of issues were not explored in the documentary. For example, the movie features Ted Haggard, a former mega-church leader who was accused of drug use and homosexuality and ousted from his church in disgrace. Sure, that happened after the film was released, but take half a look at that guy and you can tell he's hopped up on goofballs.

I find it hard to belief that anyone could watch this movie and not be disturbed by the images of very young children being manipulated like this - flopping around on the ground, crying hysterically and speaking in tongues (not to mention being forced to sit through hour-long sermons by a scatter-brained nincompoop who speaks only in mixed metaphors) but apparently the church's reaction to the documentary was not negative - for them, it's just a good representation of what they're all about. When challenged by a radio host that what they're doing is not "teaching" these young people but rather indoctrinating them, camp leader Becky Fischer was quick to agree that that was correct.