Movie Log: Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

I wanted to see this movie after seeing a trailer for it before (and Sarah Silverman's segment during) The Aristocrats last summer, and my brother and I had vaguely made plans to see it together. But life intervened, the movie had a very short theatrical run, and I finally caught up with it last week at home.

Maybe it would have played better in a theatre (I know The Aristocrats would have fallen flat alone at home, but was screamingly funny with a good crowd), but Jesus Is Magic just didn't impress me very much. It's essentially an overgrown HBO special -- barely more than an hour long, even with twenty minutes or so of mostly non-funny off-stage stuff.

There's a very thin frame story -- the movie opens with Silverman sitting and talking with two friends, who both have great things going on, comedy-career-wise, so she lies and says she's filming a "show" that night. That show, dear viewer, is then the one we see. Unfortunately, the frame story is a boring way to start the movie, and the "Gotta Write a Show/Who'll Be My Star" song is the least appealing, and least funny, of all of the songs in the movie. (The others are mostly pretty good.) So it takes a while to get back all of the momentum squandered up front.

Silverman's comedy also doesn't seem quite ready for an hour-long movie -- she has a number of killer bits, but she doesn't really have a routine -- bits don't flow into each other all that well (which gets papered over in the movie with songs and other extraneous junk). Yes, her good stuff is almost all going to be offensive to someone, but I'm of the school that believes "it's funny" is the only defense necessary, so I liked it (since it was generally funny).

So this is a mixed bag -- as a movie, it doesn't really stand up. As the record of a pretty funny stand-up routine, it's much better. But it would have been stronger if it had been edited to fit a one-hour timeslot and had ended up on HBO in the first place.