Orphaned Letterboxd Reviews #1 — TIM MINCHIN: SO F**KING ROCK LIVE! (2008)
[Originally published on Letterboxd on January 14th 2019.]
(NOTE: This is part of a little series, wherein I’m archiving old Letterboxd film reviews of mine that were deleted by proxy when the films themselves were removed from the site. However, these reviews were saved as “orphaned” text files in my downloaded Letterboxd data, which has allowed me to resurrect them in a somewhat more quasi-permanent form for posterity.)
“Imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet, on the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it, if he could look forward just a few short hundreds of millions of years, to see one of his descendants, an Israeli Jew by the name of Jesus, having a nail hammered through his feet — the very feet that Tony provided him with! — as a punishment for having a sort of schizophrenic discourse with a god who was created by men to explain the existence of feet, in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of Tony. I think that would blow his little fishy mind.”
It is emphatically quite the understatement to say that Tim Minchin is one of the biggest influences upon my life that there has ever been.
When I was between the ages of 15 and 18, back during the 2008–2011 period when Minchin first exploded onto the comedy scene — before he then spent the next several years after that being quite mightily busy writing the songs for two hit musicals (Matilda and Groundhog Day), and acting in things he was much too good for (Californication and 2018's Robin Hood)— I was still mostly enshrined within the religious beliefs my mother had enforced upon me as a kid, when in the mid-90’s she had joined (and then pushed me and my sister into) the LDS church, a.k.a. the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a.k.a. the Mormons (But Not Those Mormons With The Multiple Wives).
So when Minchin materialised before thine eyes during this time, I had no reason yet to doubt the existence of God and Satan, angels and demons, Heaven and Hell, the power of prayer, the Bible being sacred and true, and/or Jesus Christ being a sandy-haired, square-jawed, long-haired white dude, as all the portraits and pictures of the guy presented him as within the various LDS wards and temples and textbooks and copies of The Book Of Mormon (not the musical, the actual book).
Heck, I was even baptised, for crying out loud!
I mean, yeah, it did take six attempts for them to fully dunk my whole body under the water of the baptismal pool — both because the pool was slowly leaking and was unable to maintain the requisite level of water needed for the ceremony, and because the baptism required me to be dunked backwards with my feet planted immovably on the pool’s bottom (heh heh, “bottom”), yet my knees just couldn’t bend in the way needed for that to even be possible — but I GOT THERE IN THE END! (Sure, I’ve done a hell of a lot of things that the church would describe as “sinning” since then, making any supposed soul-purifying baptismal benefits entirely null and void by this point… but still!)
Lo and behold, then, as Tim Minchin sauntered in from stage left — barefoot, guy-liner’d, wide-eyed, his ginger hair¹ wildly styled like Russell Brand² circa 2007 — and thusly proceeded to inject ideas and arguments and philosophies into my mind that would eventually fundamentally change my perception of the world, forever.
His songs, and his stand-up segments in-between, altogether introduced me to the hypocrisies, impossibilities, stupidities, and logical fallacies within the very fabric of any-and-all religions, but especially of the people in those religions who fervently espouse the most harmful, absurd, toxic beliefs their faiths may-or-may-not preach.
Not only that, but Minchin’s work also shone a light for me upon the idea of critical thinking in the face of superstition, be it with charlatans peddling alternative forms of medicine, psychics pretending to talk to the dead, or just the simple notion of correlation not equalling causation.
More than anything, though, Minchin showed me that life, the world, the universe, and everything basically, doesn’t suddenly become devoid of meaning or morality or joy once you remove the element of religion from the equation, because on a macro level, science makes every big or little thing a squillion times more fascinating and awe-inspiring; and on a micro level, you have friends, and family, and the little things in life that make life itself worth hanging around for.
Of course, Minchin wasn’t the only factor that came into play in my eventual relinquishing of my religious beliefs… but he was the foot in the door that allowed in more than just the church-based ideas I was so often taught, without any argument or contradiction.
And yes, while this switch to (I guess?) atheism did lead to my mother telling me that my lack of faith meant that while she was going to Heaven, it was now assured that I would be going to Hell, and that in the inevitable Great Celestial War between Heaven and Hell — where I’d definitely be fighting in Satan’s army, and she’d definitely be fighting in God’s army — she was going to have to kill me in the ensuing battle… I would still much rather believe in the science-y kinds of stuff I believe in now, than in anything resembling what she thought to be the one great unequivocal truth of life and death.
Plus, it’s not for nothing that to this day, roughly a decade on, I still have an abundance of momentary snippets of jokes, ideas, and songs from this very stage show automatically thrust their way to the forefront of my mind whenever I see or hear things that remind me of them — particularly from the pre-encore finale performance of ‘Dark Side’, which has forever made it impossible for me to hear any songs sung by singers using that silly Eddie-Vedder-copycatting vocal style (referred to by such monikers as “yarling”, “grunge drone”, “nose yodelling”, “ham singing”, and/or “Hunger Dunger Dang”; see The Calling and Matchbox Twenty for just two of infinity examples), without me then hearing Minchin warble the lyrics:
“I can have a dyark syide, if you want me to-hyoo / Well, I can develop my brooding potential, if pain’s what you want in a man / Pain I can do-hyoo / I can have a dyark syide too-hyoo…”, etc.
So, in conclusion:
Praise be to Tim Minchin, and from me doth I give my sincerest thanks to him, entirely free of hyperbole, for having quite genuinely changed my life…
***
- ¹ (Yes, I know “only a ginger can call another ginger ‘ginger’”, but I’m, like, half-ginger, therefore I can say it, ’cause them’s the rules!)
- ² (Oof, now you can really tell that this review isn’t contemporarily written, because considering the numerous serious accusations that have recently been levied at Brand, if I had written this review now, I would drop any sort of superficial comparison between Minchin and Brand. But that is what Past Me wrote, so I’ve left it as is.)
