Year One: Better than the Creationism Museum

I cautiously recommend Year One, the Jack Black comedy about the early chapters of the Old Testament.  Granted, my frame of reference is exceedingly narrow, since I am only interested in comedies these days and see very few of even those.  But the movie has a nice undercurrent of ironic humor that doesn’t try to draw attention to itself.   Jack Black is a hunter-gatherer loser who is banished from the jungle by his tribe after he eats the forbidden golden fruit—with no noticeable effect on his brain power.  He emerges from the dense wild greenery into open plowed fields and several centuries of Biblical history, getting drawn into the dysfunctional family of Cain and Abel and intervening in the abortive sacrifice of Isaac.  Isaac turns out to be a snotty teenager with a penchant for sneaking off to Sodom and Gomorrah for debauchery.  The pace of Iron Age technological change is sometimes more than Black and his touchingly delicate sidekick Michael Cera can tolerate: the blinding speed of an ox-cart, with those new-fangled wheel contraptions, causes them to get car sick.  Whether deliberately or not, the movie captures the weirdness of our making the goings-on of primitive Middle Eastern tribal societies our moral frame of reference.