celluloidnotes

I recently reviewed the new Morgan Spurlock produced documentary What Would Jesus Buy?. (you can find the full review here.)

It’s a pretty solid documentary focusing on The Reverend Billy (not actually a reverend) and The Church of Stop Shopping, an activist group that advocates smarter spending, e.g. not buying from Big Box stores and spending to keep money within the community. They are a pretty amazing group of activists/performance artists, taking the Elvis inspired televangelist persona and his choir into the streets to preach to the “unconverted.” The documentary focuses on their 2005 “Shopacalypse” tour across the US.

The documentary is interesting and a good primer for the uninitiated, but it doesn’t do justice to their complex mission and the great work that they are doing. Nonetheless, I recommend the film, it definitely has the tongue-in-cheek tradition of Morgan Spurlock at it’s heart, which is generally a good thing. It’s interesting and funny. I’ve included the trailer at the bottom of the posting.

If you are interested in finding out more on Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir they live digitally at revbilly.com. Also I just completed an interview with the Reverend today and it will posted later this month at InDigest Magazine (indigestmag.com). (Also if you’ve never been to InDigest before I highly recommend checking it out, it’s an online literary magazine that focuses on fiction, poetry and art, but also has monthly columns and interviews.) I’ll throw up a post when that interview becomes available online.

photo taken by Fred Askew