Reviews

Christian Propaganda. Good acting though.

IMO, the story (and movie) is a wasted opportunity to really go the whole nine yards. Guess it did not because then it would have come to another "conclusion"?

The only skeptical person was essentially the lead. All experts and points of view he meet and interview are believers.

The movie builds the case primarily upon so-called eye witnesses of the Christ resurrection 2000 years ago, and our hero then proves that no human could have survived the described crucifixion.... ergo; Christ must be super natural. Ergo Christianity is right.... this is his line of evidence in his presented research.

In any usual progression of knowledge, this is just a silly approach.

Our hero first aimed to prove that Christ did not die on the cross, and therefore it could not be an actual resurrection that was witnessed a few days later... only woke up after a hard night out, I guess. But as he progresses in his "research", he finds that Christ (or any human) could not have survived what apparently had happened on the cross, and so when Jesus is supposedly witnessed later, he must have returned from death... This is his body of evidence, this is how he arrives at his conclusion...that is it... and he then jumps to the believe that all of Christianity etc. must then be truth.

This is frankly impossible for a skeptical and scientific thinking mind to make this stretch, and to get to this conclusion in that way. Silly.

His way of thinking can also prove that since no known aircraft can fly like UFO sightings claim they fly, UFO's are real? Same stretch. Same silliness.

One CANNOT come to this or any other conclusion here or in the UFO example. The only "conclusion" they can reach is that perhaps something extraordinary occurred and so deserves attention and further inquiry. And then hopefully this attention will substantiate the anecdotes with evidence and data to support them.

Her forgets how scientific knowledge works:

"Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence"

• Carl Sagan

"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

• Pierre-Simon Laplace

"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence".... "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

• David Hume

In truth, all he can ever hope for - even with the best of efforts - when analyzing eye witnessed events thousand of years ago about something unnatural and extraordinary, is to end up in a dead-end situation where he has to make a choice: Does he believe in those witnesses or not?

And so the premise of this movie is fundamentally flawed or rather silly, because he can only ever end the exact same place he starts. It is a battle of opinions, unsubstantiated. The actual case for Christ is inherently impossible. Of course it is, this is why Religion is still considered relevant. It cannot be proved and so cannot be disproved.

With his collected body of evidence and as a Skeptic and scientific thinking mind, he will firstly never be able to conclude anything above his own suspicion and secondly cannot abide to a suspicion that is not rooted in logic and supported by the current scientific knowledge of how the world works... since he does end in a conclusion under these circumstances, he is no Skeptic. He simply cannot be.

The movie is an oxymoron. Or at best, a dishonest tale on how he became a Christian.

Or

Perhaps I misunderstood the story.

Perhaps it is really and at its core about a reasonable guy who is afraid of losing his wife and kid to a religion and then does what he can to convince himself to join them on their path, however silly it may seem to him at first. This would explain his biased and one-sided naïve approach to the Case for Christ.

As my headline states this was a big disappointment (at first, read on). Not because of its acting, or production value and not because of its way of telling the story. All done very well, which is why I give it a pretty solid score. But simply because of the story it chooses to tell.

Dirch Passer was a giant amongst midgets. He had a unique talent shining above almost anyone he ever shared the limelight with. Seldom do we see this and as few states elsewhere; he is the greatest comic ever produced by Denmark and to this day one cannot help but feel his magic when watching him. Even in the poorer movies, of which there are many, Dirch somehow radiates through them all. I salute him, and I was hoping to bask in his magic once more when watching "A Funny Man (2011)". I wasn't that lucky.

It is not the kind of movie that leaves your mind, it sticks and pricks... and grows.

The movie surprisingly focused solely on his stage career and not at all on his movie career, which is impressive by any standards (averaging more than 3 movies a year). And in doing so, I suppose we must accept that most of his life is left out – like his partnership with another great Dane (Ove Sprogøe). It was a shame not to tell his story more broadly, as many of us became fans from his persona on the silver screens rather than from the backseats of the theaters.

I was also surprised to how much Kjeld Petersen got of the screen time. Until this movie I did not realize his importance in Dirch's life, and I get the feeling that the movie overdid his importance a bit.

Ultimately, it chose not tell the story of Dirch Passer's life, but rather his struggles in life (where Petersen perhaps was an extraordinary catalyst).

Really, the movie showed us a drunk, a womanizer, a weakling... even a coward and I assume all of these traits are flip-sides from an extraordinary life constantly on the edge. The movie did to a lesser degree show us his good sides, and not much of the genius we all know and love. I resent this and it opted me to firstly dislike it in great roar.

But upon contemplation, I digress by saying that perhaps this was actually okay. His genius is still there for us all to enjoy, however the darker side less so. And the movie did give me a closer and much appreciated look into this kind giant's soul.... so, in the end I still say that it did not give me what I was hoping for, but perhaps it truly gave me what I needed.

-Minor Spoilers-

I was impressed with the acting, but pretty much everything else was a hit and a miss; poor scripted dialog, bad editing and the storytelling was embarrassingly obvious - radiated a lack of cinema experience from the directors side. Basically, a sweet attempt to make a farce, but nothing more.

Had a few moments of missed great comic opportunities like the scene at the attic which kept calling out for more (could have been great), the poison scene was blatantly non-mysterious when it could have been a jaw-doping scene of disbelieve and we have of cause the no-surprise buildup to the son at the airport in the end.

Its many quirks of techniques (e.g. the odd almost random present- day shots from time to time - and not because of the bad old-woman makeup - and the momentarily out of focus shots) did not work or support its purpose, thus repeatedly reminding us of itself and creating a theatre like distance which made it impossible to emotionally truly identify with any of the characters: A fatal flaw of any would-be comedy, be it black or not!

At its core I can see the story holds a hint of potential, but not enough to carry a feature film - well unless a serious makeover in the story was done, adding subplots etc. Film school 101.

Rome wasn't build in one day, but neither was Warszawa it seems ... so Polish cinema will hopefully learn from this empathy seeking mishmash of a dark comedy attempt and return at some point with some true heartfelt cinematic storytelling instead? (I intentionally leave this with a question mark)