Holiday videos!

Welcome to San Francisco!

Happy Eastah! We're taking a break from power-blogging at the Hub Review today, but here are some Eastah-themed videos to tide you over till Monday.

First, what would Eastah be without a party? And what's a party without our friend Art Hennessey dressed as Peter Rabbit, uttering the immortal lines, "I-Party!" and "Great!"  Don't worry, Art will forgive us for posting this, and in the meantime you can savor a brush with artistic greatness:



Next - a nod to what I think should be our de facto Eastah movie. I know, I know, The Ten Commandments is fun - slow, tantric fun - but isn't Ben-Hur (below) really a whole lot better?

Yes, these are the dimensions of the original 65 mm image.

I mean this combination soap opera/sermon/boy's adventure is just as long and just as ponderous as Cecil B. DeMille's gargantuan biblical parade float, BUT you get more of Charlton Heston in a loin cloth, PLUS the Battle between the Model Ships in the Gigantic Bathtub, AND (best of all) the terrific chariot race, which I'd probably rate as the single most spectacular sequence ever recorded on film. You can watch it here; due to copyright issues I can't embed it, but I can embed the same sequence from the original 1925, silent Ben-Hur (with an added soundtrack from 1931), which is plenty amazing too - indeed in some ways is more spectacular than the 1959 remake, for which it essentially served as template.



Finally, something in a different key (a somewhat different key). Christianity is almost unique among faiths in its effort to fill just about every psychological familial niche with a primary deity (father, son, mother, etc. - no sex allowed with these gods!). Thus all the explicit erotic content of other religions is crowded into the subtext of Christianity, where it marinates into something pretty lurid; and nobody knows that better than San Francisco's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who parody the homosexual and sado-masochistic underpinnings of the Passion story annually in their Hunky Jesus contest in Dolores Park (this may have become America's most prominent public celebration of the holiday). Now I know Jesus doesn't deserve this - we're big fans of Jesus, of course, at the Hub Review, and know we should be more like Him. But honey, Christianity deserves this - and how! Below is the 2011 edition (set your offense meters on stun - and take that, Pope Benedict!).