Review
Imagine if Marilyn Manson was less concerned with playing dress-up than he was with being the brilliant, subversive artist he could be. Better yet, imagine if the so-called shock rocker really shocked us the way he thinks he does, uptight Christian conservatives notwithstanding. Imagine these things times a thousand (maybe a million?) and you begin to approximate Reverend Steven Johnson Leyba. Artist, madman, Native American, Satanist, sexpressionist, provocateur, and all-around fly guy, Rev. Leyba is many things to, well, a few people at least, but a bore is definitely not one of them. Let s face it, an expose on someone like me for instance, though surely provocative in its own right, would pall in comparison to Marc Rokoff s eye-opening/closing (emphasis on slash) Unspeakable: The Life and Art of Reverand Steven Johnson Leyba. Not since Myra Breckinridge has a film left me so conflicted, a mess of reactions ranging from outrage to intellectual stimulation to downright confusion. More than anything else though, Unspeakable was a direct assault on my so-called infinite liberal mindedness, which I could only salvage (barely) by repeating the Hans Suyin quote, Moralists have no place in an art museum over and over again. And then that old Nietschze chestnut, There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. fought for its place at the bar in my spinning head. Believe me, Sweet Dreams never had this effect on me.
(Review condensed due to size limitations...Go to FilmThreat to read entire review.)
If films were based solely on shock value, Unspeakable would be a masterpiece of sorts, even to this self-professed jaded critic. Rokoff spares us nothing, exposing Rev. Leyba in all his self-mutilating, deviant glory. For showing me things I ve certainly never seen before and doing so in an intelligent, even mildly skeptical fashion, I am grateful to the filmmaker. --FilmThreat.com
