Keeping the Faith

By sheer chance, we watch our second religious themed movie in a row, so I guess we're celebrating Lent (if in fact you're supposed to celebrate a person being trapped in the desert for 40 days and nights, if that happened to me and people celebrated it, I'd reevaluate how I've been treating people). There aren't nearly as many good Lent movies for us to watch completely by accident as Christmas movies. What's the Lenten version of Die Hard, for instance? Boondock Saints? No Alan Rickman, not nearly as fun.  Anyway, Keeping the Faith is another of the late '90s, early '00s movies that aren't really made anymore. At least not with several well known actors for wide theatrical release. Everything's very meta and self aware now (which is fine, we liked Deadpool almost as much as the theater full of 13 year olds who saw it with us did, but we liked it more than their horrified parents who clearly did not do their research before coming to that film), and sometimes it's nice to just sit down and watch a comedy that somehow takes itself very seriously and has Ben Stiller in it. Is it a good film? I wouldn't say that. Is it a bad film? Probably not. It's background noise. Sometimes it's nice to just have some background noise. You're doing something completely unrelated and you can look up and say "Wait, Edward Norton directed this? The guy from American History X? What is that guy's deal, anyway?" Or you can wonder why Jenna Elfman's career in film didn't really take off because she's totally fine in this, and then Wikipedia her and wonder just a little bit less. To summarize, it's a solid film with some laughs, but the real laughs are the friends we made along the way.