It's that time again: Starbucks changed their disposable paper cups to reflect good tidings, holiday credit card offers are in the mail -- it must be Christmas. Opening this Friday at Cinema Village in New York -- and then around the country -- Rob Van Alkemade's hilarious, eye-opening documentary What Would Jesus Buy provides a simple and surprisingly powerful directive to the American people: Stop Shopping.
This is no frivolous request. Interviews reveal a nation addicted to shopping. Egged on by the media, working class families go into debt to provide their loved ones with expensive gifts. Shoppers are trampled by their fellow men while racing down aisles to get that first flat screen TV. Behind all the gaga consumerism lies real pain -- not only for the consumer, but also the workers of the world.
What Would Jesus Buy? may be a kitschy title, but the film is anything but. Would you buy those sneakers, that striped sweater, if you knew that children were working eighteen hour days in a factory in Indonesia to make them? The film explores the direct correlations between our compulsive consumption and the sweatshops across the world.
The film is framed by Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, a committed group who travel across the country in a beaten-down bus to spread their mission to the people. Starting in New York and ending their tour at Disney World on Christmas Day, the choir sings in small churches and shopping malls, in crowded parking lots and in front of Walmart headquarters in Arkansas. Bleached-blond Reverend Billy, an actor by trade, is also a convincing evangelist. When he talks, people listen and they laugh and unfortunately, they also call for security.
