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DIRECTED BY: Katie Madonna Lee, A Great Male Artist
FEATURING: Avalon Rayne and assorted misfit Catholics
PLOT: Shavon rebels against her Irish-Catholic family only to find herself similarly repressed by the gaggle of punks she moves in with.
COMMENTS: Katie Madonna Lee and A Great Male Artist [sic] really hit the nail on the head with this one. Indeed, they hit so many nails on the head that, once her baseball bat has been bolstered by the nails, it’s ready for them to truly wallop something—and boy-howdy do they wallop it. All of it: Catholicism, sisterhood, hypocrisy, the patriarchy, inflexible feminism, shame, conformity, and all manner of other injustices and annoyances of life. Irish Catholic is appropriately staged and shot like a morality play—with tunes!—with young Shavon navigating adversity as she frantically paddles toward self assuredness.
The lights come up, and we open on a bedraggled, middle aged mother praying for a parking space. Her makeup is slapdash, her eyes as keen as an irritated hawk, and her hair is festooned with a bouquet of infant dolls. Shavon and her siblings are crammed in the vehicle space; her sisters pray along, in song, with the mother, and Shavon tries to silence her demanding stomach (which has its own voice credit), ultimately bowing to the temptation of the bag of potato chips being brought to the soup kitchen. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The family serves the poor with guilt, and they sit through a guilt-themed sermon which ends on the hymn line, “Guilty, Forever Guilty.”
Oddly enough, Irish Catholic is also a rather fun, sometimes whimsical experience. Sure, Shavon’s brother is molested by the hot priest, but that’s offset by the smirk-inducing machinations of the sisters as they attempt to out-pray to God (the competition here being just how many starving Africans they hope to save when they grow up). Shavon’s slide from her miserable lower middle class Irish Catholic family existence to bohemian life with a quatro of questionably punk “enlightened” types is tempered by various visitations from (the appropriately credited) Hot Jesus, who at various times pines for Arby’s and is stoned out of his mind. There’s also the special celebrity guest, “the Poop Bucket” (with it’s own musical number), but I won’t get into that.
All told, Irish Catholic has quite a bit to say; much of it about religion. Greenaway came to mind more than once, despite his comparative grisliness; this skewering is far more of a romp, despite claims of how very dark (very dark) the film is. Young person hates her life, falls in with a seemingly carefree crowd who ultimately prove to be just as controlling and image-conscious as the ostensibly more repressive traditional life she has fled. I’ve seen this, but I was happy to see this spin on it. Life can be frustrating and much too difficult. But as Jesus famously preached, “Your life’s gonna get worse, so you might as well learn to sing and dance. …it worked for the gays.”
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
The Craft