Saved!
Published June 19, 2004
If you hate Christians and social conservatives, this is the movie for you!
- Jena Malone as Mary
- Mandy Moore as Hilary Faye
- Macaulay Culkin as Roland
- Martin Donovan as Pastor Skip
- Eva Amurri as Cassandra
Irreverent religious satire can be done right (think Dogma). It can also be done horribly wrong. This film is a fine example of the latter form of satire.
Mary is a good Christian girl who goes to a good Christian school and is dating a good Christian boy. Unfortunately, he's gay. She tries to "cure" him by fucking him, and (because her evil backwards fundamentalist religious school didn't teach sex-ed) she gets knocked up the moment her hymen breaks.
Mary is friends with the popular ultra-super-duper-Christian girl Hilary. Hilary is a complete phony, as well as a cunt. Her brother is the sarcastic and crippled Roland, who winds up dating the rebellious, anti-social Jewish girl Cassandra. (Despite being Jewish, showing up at school drunk, pretending to speak in tongues during a school assembly, and claiming to worship Satan, Cassandra is allowed to attend the same Christian school as Mary, Roland, and Hilary.)
Oh, and then there's Pastor Skip, the school Pastor who's in a loveless marriage and wants to bang Mary's widowed mother, who dresses like a 16 year old slut.
So. What you've basically got is a movie that is set up to, in an overtly contrived manner, make Christians look like hypocritical swine, while those who have out-of-wedlock children, homosexual relationships, commit credit card fraud, chain-smoke, shoplift, and engage in other un-Christian behavior are portrayed as the decent human beings.
Attacking an organized religion is fine. That's essentially what Dogma did. This film, however, belittles the followers of a religion. To me, that's a low blow. (And I'm not even religious.)
The message of the movie seems to be: If only those silly Christians would just use White Out on all the passages in the Bible that don't fit the worldview of the secular Left, then everyone would live happily ever after, bastard children, cuckolding, and all.
Oh, and the acting is piss-poor as well. Mandy Moore should stick to making unbearably bad music, and Macaulay Culkin should offer himself as a witness for the prosecution in the Michael Jackson pederasty case.
RJ Elliott is a graduate student studying Criminal Justice at the University Of Central Florida. His likes include nature, sports, and pierced blondes. He dislikes daytime television, left-wing dictators, and lead-tainted Chinese imports. He is ambivalent about Angelina Jolie.
- Saved!
- Published: June 19, 2004
- Type:
- Section: Video
- Writer: RJ Elliott
- RJ Elliott's BC Writer page
- RJ Elliott's personal site
- Spread the Word
- Like this article?
- Email this
Save to del.icio.us
Comments on this articleComments
What nobody is saying is that if you like ELECTION, you'll love SAVED!...the two movies are very similar...obviously this person has not seen ELECTION or else they would make that connection (SAVED! flat out steals a subplot point from ELECTION [vandalism of the school and who actually does it])
Saved! is to hypocritical Christians as Election is to HS politics/HS goody-two-shoes...
Add your comment, speak your mind
(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/16643)
This isn't as good as Dogma, but it is funny, better than most teen movies and had good performances from Jena Malone and Eva Amurri.
And there is a certain fondness for the people it makes fun of. The cast did go to Christian events and talk to Christian teens.
What it is critical is the hypocrisy of taking a religion that talks about love and using it to be intolerant of gays, non-believers and others.