After a week off for the annual Oscar Showcase tour, This Weekend’s Film Festival is back with a great lineup of some of the best documentaries from 2008. We have the Oscar winner and fellow nominees. If you saw the Oscar ceremony and saw, Philippe Petit balance the statuette on his chin, you know a bit of what you have in store. The films this week take us to great heights to Antarctica and around the globe to debate religion. Other films look at real lives — one about a famous movie director and the other about a baby boy whose mother murdered his father. The cliché is right — life is stranger than fiction. Find out why.
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Early on in comedian Bill Maher’s documentary on religion, he debates the existence of God with a group of truckers at a makeshift chapel at a truckstop, and one of truckers gets angry at Maher for denying his God and storms out. If you’re that guy, stop reading this review. If you’re like the other truckers who stay to debate Maher, or are like Maher and doubt the existence of God then keep reading and better yet see this film.

Maher, the host of the HBO talk show, REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, is not shy about his agnostic beliefs, or more so, his fear that religion can’t predict the end of the world, but might just lead us there. His film talks to many people of many faiths about their beliefs, throwing out insightful counters to their dogmatic way of seeing things. He talks equal pokes at most religions from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Mormons to Scientologists. Eastern religions get a pass this time, but it leaves room for the sequel, I guess. However, Maher isn’t afraid to give praise when someone makes a good argument. A Jesus re-enactor at a Florida Bible amusement park describes the Holy Trinity as God is in three forms just like water can be a liquid, a solid and a gas. The argument doesn’t persuade Maher, but he admits it’s a great analogy.

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Clint Eastwood’s Oscar winner took the sheen off the Wild West, at least how the Wild West was depicted on screen. That being said, the film holds to many of the traditions of classic Westerns. Eastwood seems to be balancing between classic Western mythology and the revisionist work he did in the ’70s. Based on David Webb Peoples’ script, the film challenges the noble legends of the Western genre, showing cowboys and outlaws as savage killers. The West was a rough and lawless place. Even the law was rough and lawless. As the aging assassin, Bill Munny, Eastwood shines in the role he seemed destined to play.

Munny was a notorious killer. But he met a woman and settled down, started pig farming. When his wife died, he was left to raise his two children alone. Then one day, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett, ROSEWOOD) rides in. The kid has heard all the tales about Munny and wants his help with an assassination job. A couple of cowboys cut up a prostitute and her friends have pooled their money to pay for revenge. Their town sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman, HOOSIERS) let the cowboys go in exchange for seven ponies to be given to the brothel owner Skinny Dubois (Anthony James, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT), who paid good money for Delilah (Anna Thomson, BIRD), who cut up won’t earn a cent. Munny isn’t interested at first, but the money seems better than he can fetch for his sick hogs. He recruits his partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman, MILLION DOLLAR BABY) to help.

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