DVD Reviews and the Jesus-Derek Jeter Connection

Every week, either on Tuesday or Wednesday, I receive my list of movies that are available for me to review on DVDVerdict.com. Two weeks ago was a strong week, featuring No Country for Old Men and Darjeeling Limited among some others so, of my list of eight releases, I received my fourth choice, a short film series called Crave. A lot of the movies available to me are complete unknowns, so I have to judge things off of sight and recommendation. This case was a black cover with a red fingerprint on it and no real indication of its content. The links on Amazon pointed to horror films, so I assumed it was a series of horror shorts. This would have been fantastic, but how wrong I was.

I got horror of a non-traditional kind, with a DVD of Bible study material featuring three ten minute shorts and discussion questions before and after the film presented by the church founder, Edwin McManus. To be fair, this name is on the cover but I took this as the director's name. If you recognize the name, it would turn you on or scare you off. Anyway, it was dumb and pandering, but at least it was short. I wrote the most fair review I could, negative for sure, but fair. It was no problem, at least two-thirds of my reviews are negative, but nobody ever really cared until now (actually, there were a bunch of people who didn't like my review of Masada, but that's mostly because people are blinded by Peter O'Toole's shoddy, drunken acting).

Part of the site is a feedback function where people wanting to write to me directly comes straight into my email box, seemingly unfiltered. All tolled, I had previously received four email: two from my mom, one from an old friend of mine who found me through the site, and somebody who was compelled to agree with me that Masada sucked (he was totally right). The review of Crave posted last Tuesday, its street date and, since then, have received four pieces of "feedback," or spam more appropriately, in regard to this review. All of a sudden, as soon as I review a piece of religious material (something I masochistically like to do and did a lot of on an old job), people come out of the woodwork to tell me the most bizarre things. They seem to be form letters, but I've deleted them in my rage, so can't reference them to be sure. I guess this came about because of the mild negativity, but it's amazing the things I've been told this week.

Apparently, Jesus is a reader of the website, as my review is sending me to Hell. I'm not surprised at this, a lot of things are sending me there. More troubling is information given to me about Satan's conspiracy to take over the World Bank and his continued attempts to resurface Communism and his fostering of radical Islam to destroy the Christian way of life. All this because I thought some crappy film series pandered to its audience. I guess that kind of libel is now punishable by an eternity of hellfire and brimstone. Either that, or it's my ticket to the head of the World Bank if I formally align myself with Satan. Not a bad deal, really.... My real trouble, though, is the frequency I hear about America's attempts to squelch the voice of Christianity. In every way, it's obviously a ridiculous thing to assert, yet I hear it more often than I can believe. If I wrote a review slamming a series of Atheist short films, a bunch of Christ-hating jerks wouldn't be writing me telling me how stupid I am, but the Christ-loving jerks do at will. Anti-Christian conspiracy my ass. Jesus is like the Derek Jeter of religious figures: defended to the point of suspicious doubt, and a lot more aggravation than he's worth.