July Churches

Just a few items as another weekend descends upon us.

The Civilians' Gone Missing is indeed as great as everyone says it is. Like Anna Deavere Smith crossed with This American Life, but with nifty songs and a better tailor...

I can't wait to see Greg Whiteley's new film Resolved, about high school debaters. I was an official speech-and-debate geek in my springtime years, though I confess I was in the thankless subset of "interpretive" (i.e., acting) events, which meant I was a geek's geek (though the words used in those innocent days were a little harsher). Still, some of my best friends were debaters--master debaters, as we never tired of calling them. Whiteley, whom I met in a Suzuki/Viewpoints workshop in L.A., has already made one fine doc (New York Doll). I have high hopes for Resolved (good article on it here)...

Finally, I've found a TV series that crystallizes several long-untapped facets of my sense of humor (is that a mixed metaphor or what?): Richard Curtis and Dawn French's BBC comedy The Vicar of Dibley. As an inveterate, never-quite-recovered Anglophile, liberal Christian, and Ab Fab fanatic, I find that this series, about a freewheeling female pastor in a dangerously twee Oxfordshire village, plays a bit like a British Roseanne plopped in the middle of Cold Comfort Farm, with a hefty helping of nun and Jesus jokes. In other words, sheer catnip.

(NB: This post's title, for all you Culture Clash fans, is from the troupe's first big show, The Mission, in which they imagined the Anglicization of a certain Latin crooner's name.)