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Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

I'm more than a little cautious these days when it comes to accepting the words of thinkers — even brilliant ones, like Dawkins — when they're delivered outside the area of their expertise. Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and an evolutionary biologist, but he is not a philosopher — as I had the misfortune of learning when I showed an essay Dawkins had written about the nature of truth (published in A Devil's Chaplain) to my girlfriend, who has studied philosophy. The hour and a half talk regarding truth, post-modernism and cultural relativism that followed doesn't bear repeating, and though I still don't know where I stand on the issue, I have learned to tread lightly.

Having said that, Dawkins is a brilliant scientist: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable are absolute must-reads, both for the knowledge contained within and for his accessible, entertaining writing style. The God Delusion is a different beast, however, to his other books, even the not quite so scientific ones — it is, principally, a philosophical treatise, a rebuttal of religious faith. If you're at all like me, then, yes, it does seem a lot like kicking someone when they're down because — and I don't know how to put this gently — religious faith doesn't really have a leg to stand on. You don't, after all, need a Dawkins to neutralise the impotent argument of Pascal's Wager or to point out that, just because science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god, it doesn't follow that the possibility of either must, therefore, be equiprobable, etc.

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The Passion of The Christ

For those who came in late, Mel Gibson relented and subtitles are found throughout The Passion. Unlike Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon though, Chinese wasn't spoken. Instead, Aramaic and Latin. Presumed languages of the day and while it would have been great to experience an alternate reality borne of the string theories to witness the movie without the subtitles, that's a feat for more travelled Sliders.

Armed with the main gist of The Bible over years of references and sidebars would be enough to weather through the foreign tongues and faces of the men and women who show up during the course of the film. Flashbacks present a rounded way of setting up and showing how these people came to know and walk with Jesus.

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Bruce Almighty

Jim Carrey has never been my favourite. His goofy face, overused in The Mask and Ace Ventura and wotnot just got on my nerves too much. However, the "serious" performances in The Truman Show and Man on the Moon impressed me, and as these films were the most recent films of his, I figured he'd be a similar character. But from the get-go, his face was contorting unnecessarily into a few hundred exaggerated expressions. To me, it was just not needed and really turned me off the film.

After the initial 30 minutes of "worst day" shenanigans, Carrey's Bruce puts the jive on God Above so much so that God (Morgan Freeman(Alanis must have been busy)) bestows all his power unto him.

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