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from the issue of November 29, 2007
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What Would Jesus Buy?' explores commercialization of holidays
The docu-comedy "What Would Jesus Buy?," exploring the commercialization of Christmas, is playing through Dec. 6 at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center.
| | PREACHING TIMES - Reverend Billy preaches in Times Square in the movie "What Would Jesus Buy?," playing through Dec. 6 at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center. Courtesy photo.
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The film follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir as they go on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse: the end of mankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.
Bill Talen (aka Reverend Billy) was a lost idealist who hitchhiked to New York City only to find that Times Square was becoming a mall. Spurred on by the loss of his neighborhood and inspired by the sidewalk preachers around him, Bill bought a collar to match his white caterer's jacket, bleached his hair and became the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. Since 1999, Reverend Billy has gone from being a lone preacher with a portable pulpit preaching on subways, to the leader of a congregation and a movement whose numbers are well into the thousands.
In the film, Reverend Billy and his followers exorcise demons at Wal-Mart headquarters, take center stage at the Mall of America and head to the ultimate promise land - Disneyland.
Also playing through Dec. 13 at the Ross is "King Corn," a documentary about two friends, an acre of corn and the subsidized crop that drives the fast-food nation.
In "King Corn," Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America's most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat - and how we farm.
"King Corn" runs through Dec. 13.
For more information, including showtimes, go online to www.theross.org or call 472-5353.
GO TO: ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 29
ARTS HEADLINES FOR NOVEMBER 29
What Would Jesus Buy?' explores commercialization of holidays
BFA Capstone exhibition opens Dec. 3
COLLEGE NIGHT
'Globilization and Labor in Textiles' opens Dec. 3 in the Hillestad Gallery
NET Television presents concert at Masada Dec. 1
Sheldon 'Winter Escape' is Dec. 7-8
String Beans to play the Ross Dec. 1
White to lead orchestra's Dec. 1 holiday concert
733009S37633X
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