Newcity Chicago . An older woman pacing the protest area sloshed holy water left and right, a real-life John Waters caricature. Smith, as he will, now takes the time to delineate the church's evolving picture of hell as metaphor and physical place. The sprawling story follows a pair of fallen angels, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who think they've detected a loophole in church doctrine that will return them to heaven.
Accusations fly, judgment is proclaimed, the angels take their bloody slaughter.
It's shocking, if only because satire is usually defanged in our culture's cowardly deference to corporate power. The corporate politics of the church are as scandalous as anything that goes on in Washington today. It's been in existence for only 150 years or so. It wasn't divinely inspired so much as politically inspired. A pope would decree something and the pope who followed him would knock it out of the box.