"...the years wasted in useless prayer..."

[onager]

Yes, yes, Aunt Prunella, I KNOW...I waste way too much time parked in front of my TV. But since atheists are not exactly over-represented in the culture, whenever I run across a work by/for/remotely sort of alluding to atheists, I like to share it with my fellow grumps.

The SUBJECT line is a quote from the 2008 sorta-documentary movie Of Time and The City, a (sometimes poisoned) cinematic love letter to the city of Liverpool. Produced/written/narrated etc. by former resident Terence Davies. I just caught it on Sundance Channel, and it's playing a few more times this week.

I love historical films anyway, and Davies has assembled archival footage of Liverpool from the early 20th century on. Though mostly concentrating on the time of Davies' memories, from immediate post-WWII to today.

The on-topic part of Davies' film is his hilarious savaging of the Catholic Church, which dominated his childhood and seriously conflicted with his homosexuality.

"I grew up with Pope Pius XIII, Pope John XXIII and Pope Clitoris The Umpteenth, which would turn anyone into a raging pagan. But for years I have been a happy, contented born-again atheist. Thank God!" He also calls religion "all a lie," etc. etc.

Getting almost equal time is the royal family - or in Davies' acid description, "the Betty Windsor Show." Davies reads a list of Coronation gifts, then notes that "the monarchy (was) privileged to the last," while the Queen's subjects "survived in some of the worst slums in Europe."

Though the council housing that replaced those slums wasn't much of an improvement: "We had hoped for paradise. We got the Anus Mundi."

(Warning and strictly my personal opinion - Davies occasionally comes off as a pretentious, self-indulgent old grump, but at least a person of average stupidity can understand his furrin language references and allusions. Using myself as the benchmark for average stupidity.)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232790/