Tuesday, June 29, 2004
SAVED!
2004
Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are best friends. Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are also the most popular girls in their high school. Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are envied by others around them.
Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are also fanatic Christians obsessed with saving all souls in the name of the Lord...at any price!!
Saved! is a brilliant, refreshing dark comedy that fuses the same biting wit from the likes of Heathers and Election with the irony of obsessive God worship. Debut film director Brian Dannelly brings us more adult humor than hormone humor...a relief these days with all the useless teeny bopper movies out these days that struggle to entertain the brain. The result is a more tongue in cheek approach at the world of teenage angst, obsessively lost adults and the meaning of true acceptance.
Mary (Jena Malone)and her friends Hilary-Faye (Mandy Moore) and Veronica(Elizabeth Thai) look forward to their Senior year at an affluent, seemingly progressive Baptist high school. Most of their days are spent building three story high billboards of Jesus & forcing everyone around them to embrace the one and only true God and refining the art of prick-teasing.
But when Mary's boyfriend, Dean (Chad Faust), reveals to her that he is gay, she has a vision from Jesus that she must not leave Chad...she must be with him and help him through this ordeal. Mary does what any true Christian girl would do in this situation: she sleeps with him. Of course, this does not turn Chad straight, but you can't blame a Christian girl for trying.
Dean's parents eventually find out about his dark side and he is sent away to a Christian boot camp compound for un-wed Christian mothers and Christian homosexuals. Scared and shocked, Mary confides in her two best friends Dean's deep secret. But these are teenagers we're talking about, right? Christian or not, the word soon spreads, and Mary finds herself appalled by the surrounding hate towards her ex-boyfriend.
Ahh...the first epiphany of spiritual freedom: Mary starts to realize that the world of godliness is wrought with sin. As if things weren't bad enough, Mary now finds herself pregnant and alone with a gay man's baby. Keeping her pregnancy a secret, Mary's begins to spiral deeper into isolation and doubt about her faith. Her friends try to kidnap her, exorcise her and finally ostracize her when she fails to meet their strict policy of Jesus-worship.
WWMD?
(What Would Mary Do?)
Never fear, gentiles! Enter Rowland (Macaulay Culkin) and his punk-rock sex maniac girlfriend, Cassandra (Eva Amurri). Together they devise a plan to show the students, teachers and parents of their Baptist high school a thing or two about acceptance and love. And this time, without the help of Jesus, but the help of eachother.
2004
Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are best friends. Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are also the most popular girls in their high school. Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are envied by others around them.
Mary, Hilary-Faye and Veronica are also fanatic Christians obsessed with saving all souls in the name of the Lord...at any price!!
Saved! is a brilliant, refreshing dark comedy that fuses the same biting wit from the likes of Heathers and Election with the irony of obsessive God worship. Debut film director Brian Dannelly brings us more adult humor than hormone humor...a relief these days with all the useless teeny bopper movies out these days that struggle to entertain the brain. The result is a more tongue in cheek approach at the world of teenage angst, obsessively lost adults and the meaning of true acceptance.
Mary (Jena Malone)and her friends Hilary-Faye (Mandy Moore) and Veronica(Elizabeth Thai) look forward to their Senior year at an affluent, seemingly progressive Baptist high school. Most of their days are spent building three story high billboards of Jesus & forcing everyone around them to embrace the one and only true God and refining the art of prick-teasing.
But when Mary's boyfriend, Dean (Chad Faust), reveals to her that he is gay, she has a vision from Jesus that she must not leave Chad...she must be with him and help him through this ordeal. Mary does what any true Christian girl would do in this situation: she sleeps with him. Of course, this does not turn Chad straight, but you can't blame a Christian girl for trying.
Dean's parents eventually find out about his dark side and he is sent away to a Christian boot camp compound for un-wed Christian mothers and Christian homosexuals. Scared and shocked, Mary confides in her two best friends Dean's deep secret. But these are teenagers we're talking about, right? Christian or not, the word soon spreads, and Mary finds herself appalled by the surrounding hate towards her ex-boyfriend.
Ahh...the first epiphany of spiritual freedom: Mary starts to realize that the world of godliness is wrought with sin. As if things weren't bad enough, Mary now finds herself pregnant and alone with a gay man's baby. Keeping her pregnancy a secret, Mary's begins to spiral deeper into isolation and doubt about her faith. Her friends try to kidnap her, exorcise her and finally ostracize her when she fails to meet their strict policy of Jesus-worship.
WWMD?
(What Would Mary Do?)
Never fear, gentiles! Enter Rowland (Macaulay Culkin) and his punk-rock sex maniac girlfriend, Cassandra (Eva Amurri). Together they devise a plan to show the students, teachers and parents of their Baptist high school a thing or two about acceptance and love. And this time, without the help of Jesus, but the help of eachother.
