The Book of Clarence

Clarence, a non-believer in the messiah Jesus and a debtor, is willing to do anything for the woman he loves and his mother. With the deadline for his debt fast approaching, Clarence decides to do something drastic. Clarence declares himself a messiah and travels around Jerusalem, spreading his word of knowledge and performing "miracles." The possible conflict with the Romans and God comes with the success of being a messiah.

This film is part satire, part Biblical re-enactment, and part alternate history. The satire comes from applying modern ideas, concepts, and solutions in ancient times. The Biblical re-enactment comes from many of the people from the Bible are characters in this movie and are portrayed the same way. The alternate history take is how Jesus is shown compared to other Biblical films. The movie has comedy, morality, drama, spirituality, and aspects of Christianity. The movie is broken up into parts and is a good length. This is a decent watch for anyone willing to approach history, religion, and spirituality with an open mind.

When I saw that Samuel was following up The Harder They Fall with a Black Biblical satire, I got pretty excited. I actually don't mind sacrilege or reinterpretation. Life of Brian? Blessed are the cheesemakers. Last Temptation of Christ? Other than Keitel's accent, I was onboard. Anyway, the problem with this one isn't the religious satire. It's that it tries to succeed at a few too many things. It wants to be an effective satire, drama, and romance all at once. It is hard enough to make a movie like Leap of Faith that cuts across all those genres, but doing it with a story that takes place at the time of Jesus might be just a bit too ambitious. In order to make everything work, the movie rushes through multiple genres (sometimes in a single scene) trying to fit it all in. As a result, the cast nails it and Samuel directs it well...but I still never quite settled in enough to care.

This movie was being recommended on Netflix several times and I finally gave in and watched it.

I only know regular things about religion just as much as anyone else, I am not really familiar with anything more than this. At the end of the movie, I just found myself confused. I think the issue lies with the audience of this movie.

I am a casual movie fan who likes to watch various films whenever I have time. I am not an expert on anything specific, so I cannot speak on depths of knowledge.

I feel like you can only understand this movie properly if you are accustomed to religion to a certain degree. Apart from that, the pacing of this movie was confusing. I felt like some moments had too much spotlight while other scenes didn't get enough details.

Are we expected to know things about religion in order to get what is the purpose of the movie? I mean sure I have a general idea but the execution is so messy even I am having a hard time coming up with an opinion.

I literally just made an IMDb account just now so I could leave a positive review of this film. It definitely deserves it. A fun ride of a non believer who slowly learns lessons through God he didn't know he needed. The music is also so nice. The ending was pretty perfect to me. Don't want to spoil things! Lakeithe Stanfield 100% deserves Oscar buzz for his performance. He made me laugh, think deeply and cry within this movie. There aren't many movies I can say that about. I saw it a week ago and I still am thinking of his character arc. To anyone that's said it's blasphemous and hasn't watched the movie, I assure you, this movie is great, it's not making fun or Jesus in any way. You watch and you will understand!

This movie was an interesting take on making a camp, religious mix. Lakeith was incredible (obviously), especially toward the end as the film grew more emotional. Omar Sy was also a phenom as a stoic side character.

Many jokes landed, but the script did not. Many of the female characters were quite one dimensional (although that may be due to the time period of it). Some of the allegories the film attempted to make were forced. The slapstick comedy with religion was pretty clever, but it didn't make up for a lot of the unexplained hijinks throughout the film. Although, it did make some great, hilarious use of both McAvoy and Cumberbatch in some minor yet great roles. Jeymes Samuel certainly has unique visions and a place in the future of filmmaking, but for me, this one fell a little short.