Just saw The Shift. It is marketed as a Sci fi flick. It is a heavy handed blatant retelling of Job. It was so hard to sit thru the whole thing. The Sci fi made no sense and all the science was just a tool to preach the message. After it was over I looked up who put it out. The same people who did Sound of Freedom. Totally deceitful. When the story ended, the lead talked to the audience giving a QR code to buy tickets for other people to come and see the message of ‘hope’.
Well I’m here to warn all of you: don’t bother.
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If there were no shitty religious movies being made, the God Awful Movies podcast would run out of new material. They need to keep churning this junk out so the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm folks can spin it into gold.
No shitty Christian movie will ever come close to matching the batshit insanity and hilarious Ed Wood-level filmmaking skills that were achieved with “If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?” so they should probably stop trying despite the podcast.
It’s on YouTube if you’re curious. And you should be curious because it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
I remember that one. The crazy starts with the title and doesn’t end until the credits. There’s a GAM episode for Footmen too: https://audioboom.com/posts/5055189-gam029-if-footmen-tire-you-what-will-horses-do
I’m not a big fan of podcasts, but I did listen to that one particular episode and enjoyed it.
I feel like Job could make a pretty good movie if done right. It’s one of the least boring parts of the Bible IMO. Of course, you have to pull no punches and show what a complete asshole God is to Job. I doubt this movie does that.
Robert Heinlein made an excellent scifi story with a modern retelling of Job. Yaweh did not come across well, but I’d hang with the book’s version of Satan any day.
I’ve got Orphans of the Sky on the list. What book is this?
It’s called Job: A Comedy of Justice
Probably my fave Heinlein novel, Job is fun, has a good pace, and it gets very cheeky and blasphemous at the end.
Right up there with Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff 🤘🏼🤣
Job was the story that turned me away from Christianity. I was in a youth group, and we read it. I started asking questions, and the youth pastors could not form a cohesive defense of God’s actions. They got upset that I wouldn’t drop it, and they basically asked me not to come anymore if I was going to be “disruptive”.
It really only makes sense if you remember that the ancient Jewish god was basically a big bad motherfucker who would fuck you up if you did anything he didn’t like.
Given the book is an adaptation of the earlier dialogues on suffering, The Babylonian Theodicy, it “only making sense” given Judaism’s portrayal of Yahweh really isn’t the case.
The dialogues are about how there is no knowable rhyme or reason to suffering.
If anything, the Job version is worse than the original as they felt the need to add a preamble to set the stage, which is also plagiarized from earlier. In this case, bearing a close resemblance to the beginning of the Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat where Anat goes to El to petition killing the son of Danel the protagonist who finds out his son is dead at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined and tears his clothes in mourning.
So the Biblical story is basically two earlier stories stitched together, but so poorly that during the monotheistic reform they just change the supernatural goddess petitioning the chief of the pantheon to be an unmanned adversary (‘Satan’), an editorial change that caused quite a lot of fanfiction down the road.
Though my favorite aspect of the story is that while the author certainly intended that Job’s suffering was because he was persecuted by Satan (the meaning of ‘Job’ in Hebrew), arguably his greatest source of suffering was that the way he was conducting his life was with an expectation of a reward, and when that reward was lost he had an existential crisis because he had been so ‘good’ all his life. So it’s a bit ironic that though entirely unrelated etymology his name went from meaning ‘persecuted’ in Hebrew to “doing a task with the expectation of a reward” in English today.
Every hypnotist screens their “volunteers” before getting into their act…
When the story ended, the lead talked to the audience giving a QR code to buy tickets for other people to come and see the message of ‘hope’.
That might be their new MO to inflate numbers cause it worked for The Sound of Freedom. Just because you buy people tickets doesn’t mean people will see it. But I guess they make their money so they don’t care/mind.
Similar to political campaigns buying up huge numbers of copies of their candidate’s book to make it look like it’s a bestseller.
