Rob VanAlkemade and the Rev. BillyAs in: "Save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt!"
A new movie, What Would Jesus Buy, is hitting the big screens this holiday season. It's an unlikely Christmas film, billed as a "serious docu-comedy" about the evils of over-commercialization. It follows the Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they go on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from ...um, the Shopocalypse.
Why should you care, buried as you are in gift lists, stress and credit card debt? Well, for one thing, the movie has been making a splash, since opening on the independent film circuit. It comes to the Oriental in Milwaukee, for one week starting Friday, Dec. 14.
And for another, it was directed by a Racinian, Rob VanAlkemade. Well, Rob's a partial Racinian: born in Teaneck, NJ, he spent 10 years here, attended Fine Arts Elementary School for six years and Walden III High School. "My fondest, and least fond, memories are of Racine," he says. "I didn't graduate from Walden, I was a GED dropout. I did a lot of traveling and troublemaking, and finally realized I was twice as tall as anyone in my grade and took the GED and got out." Eventually, he earned an MA from the New School for Social Research in New York, where he lives now.
The movie was produced by Morgan Spurlock, of Super Size Me fame -- the guy who almost killed himself by eating mostly Big Macs for 30 days. It stars Bill Talen as the charismatic Reverend Billy, a cross between Jimmy Swaggert, Elvis and Bill Clinton.
Rev. Billy leads the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir
Reverend Billy, a crazy-as-a-fox hustler, led a 35-member Gospel Choir across the country in 2005, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, preaching against chain stores and rampant consumerism. He takes his message to Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Disneyland and the Gap, creating improvised street theater as he goes, and has been banned from most of those stores.
VanAlkemade shot 900 hours of tape during the tour -- almost getting killed in an accident along the way -- and then winnowed the footage down to 90 minutes. He won a special jury prize at Sundance last year for a shorter version of Rev. Billy's story titled Preacher With an Unknown God.
Reviews so far have been great. "It's a witty, engaging romp," said Jessica Reaves of the Chicago Tribune. Ain't It Cool News wrote, "It's "a brilliant documentary that never falls into the classic documentary traps of boring you with facts and figures." Box office receipts also have been good. "We're not making documentary history," VanAlkemade told me from Austin on Sunday, "but we had a very strong weekend. When it opened on Nov. 16, we had the third highest box office, per screen, in the country."
The film began in 2004, when VanAlkemade was working on a short political documentary in New York, and would run into Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. "They were hard at work that summer conducting First Amendment Flash Mobs, singing and preaching." A year later, VanAlkemade and Spurlock put together the tour that would become the movie.Two vintage buses were carrying choir and crew across Indiana when disaster struck: One of the buses was hit by a fully loaded semi, totaling both vehicles and sending 13 of the film crew to the hospital, three of them -- including VanAlkemade -- by helicopter into intensive care. "I was given a karate chop by an oak table, breaking three ribs and getting a cut liver. I was out for a week. But the first Christmas miracle of our journey turned out to be that we’d all soon recover, including the truck driver," he said. A new bus was found, and the tour resumed.
"We were all inspired by the idea of spreading the good gospel to the skeptical," VanAlkemade says. "I’m sure that many who may not be entirely receptive to performance activism in their everyday lives can easily connect with some of our themes: The story behind the product on the shelf matters; our own time is more valuable than any object; the holiday season is an opportunity to reflect on what means the most to us, and to act accordingly.
"Our intention is to start a conversation," VanAlkemade said. "But it’s also a holiday film, so we do need to enjoy ourselves even as we’re facing the end of the world from shopping."
So far, the film is being shown in a handful of cities, including New York, Austin, Dallas and Seattle, ramping up to 50 cities by the middle of the month. "It's kind of a brutal season" for independent filmmakers, VanAlkemade said, "but we're holding our own and glad to be able to launch this Christmas."
Although this is VanAlkemade's first full-length feature film, he has numerous credits, including three years as a videographer for Steven Spielberg's Visual History Foundation, and films about autistic children and schools, Kosovar refugee teens, Tibetan monks in India, Black Panthers in Cuba, UN weapons inspections in Iraq, Special Forces imprisoned in Afghanistan, and an activist church with a rap sheet for exorcising cash registers.
Congrats! WWJB was among The Onion's AV Club's Worst Movies of the year. Here's the exceprt:
ReplyDeleteThe problem with "issue docs" is that it's hard to criticize them without sounding like an opponent of their messages. So understand this: It's possible to believe American consumerism has run dangerously rampant and still think that What Would Jesus Buy? is glib, sloppy, and largely pointless. Filmmaker Rob VanAlkemade lionizes anti-corporate performance artist "Reverend Billy" to such a degree that WWJB? ends up only parroting what Billy says, without developing as either a character sketch or an informed polemic. Clumsy as journalism and indifferent as art, WWJB? is all anecdotes, impressions, and smug stunts.