Directed by Kevin Smith
Starring John Goodman. Yeah, that John Goodman.
Dude, I shit you not.
I watched this 10 times before I researched it's authenticity. It's legit.
and WOW. It's like the Christian Right meets Hostel.
Compelling, cruel, entrancing, like I said, holy shit, you must watch this preview. Google it. Tweet it, make it viral, because this is movie looks outstanding, and Erick Erickson is going to shit a brick when he sees this.
And of course, make sure to bring popcorn . . .
Let's all go to the lobby . . . .
A movie about rednecks with extremist views, puritanical sex issues, religious obsessions and too many guns? Wherever did Kevin Smith get the idea?
The Guardian of UK interviewed director Kevin Smith this Thursday.
In the end, he sought private financing for Red State, so it could be made independently. It finally went into production last year, with Michael Parks as the extremist preacher Abin Cooper and John Goodman as the FBI agent sent to manage a siege on Cooper's compound. It's uncompromising in its horror, but seems more interested in politics than exploitation.
His approach to Red State was all or nothing. "This is me on the way out," he tells me now, referring to his plan to retire from film-making in the near future. "I wanted to go out as strong as I came in, and to try to make art films again. Not just comedies, but all kinds of flicks."
The Westboro Baptist Church picketed Red State's Sundance premiere in January, where Smith asked his fans to organise a counter-protest across the street. His opponents do not intimidate him, he says. In fact, writing Red State was "freeing, because I'm not sitting there trying to decide what's funny, and there's no one asking: 'When do Jay and Silent Bob step in?' With Red State, I just get to make a movie. It's just me starting from scratch."
A movie from scratch, one that paints Red Staters as violent overbearing assholes who are armed to the teeth, hateful of everything that is not like them, pushing a cross on you at gunpoint while saving you from yourself because the voices in their head say they are Jesus. I'm glad this pisses off Fred Phelps, I hope it will make the rest of the wingnuts howl in fury too. Fred Phelps indeed served as the inspiration for the extremist preacher in Smith's film.
"It's certainly not Phelps himself," Smith reassured me of his film's subject. "But it's very much inspired by a Phelps-like character. It's about that subject matter – that point of view – taken to the absolute extreme."
The Guardian
The movie Red State is set for general release in September, according to The Guardian. As we watch Rick Perry, Bachmann, and the rest of the GOP try to out Jesus each other during the GOP/Fox News primary race to win the support of the True believers who vote in GOP primaries it will sure as hell be funny to see the reaction coming out of the right wingers over this. Heads will explode.
And as I reminded you above, be sure to bring the popcorn.
Cheers
3:39 PM PT: I just want to update this diary to reflect the fact that I do not believe that everyone who lives in a red state is, as I say above, a bunch of "violent overbearing assholes " or whatever, most of them are normal and kind people who are forced to suffer because a voting majority of simple minded Fox viewers have a shared hatred of everyone who is unlike them. My apologies to all the kind-hearted non wingnuts who have to live in Red States.
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