Everyone Knows Jesus Christ Didn't Train MMA Fighters. What 'The Carpenter' Presupposes is...
There's a new movie about Jesus Christ mentoring a Judean-era MMA fighter. Obviously I had to see it.
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since I started FilmDrunk in 2007. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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One of the many obsessions I have is with goofy UFC sponsors. You can basically track the growth of the UFC, from fringe sideshow into semi-respectable mainstream sport, just through the lens of their featured sponsors — how it went from Condom Depot and Dude Wipes to Crypto.com and VeChain (which additionally tells the story of how much less fun it has gotten).
One of my favorite sponsors was always “Jesus Didn’t Tap,” a t-shirt, er, “apparel” company founded by the guy who played the Green Power Ranger. So when I saw, during the last UFC pay-per-view, an extended trailer for The Carpenter, which seemed to be about the historical Jesus Christ mentoring a Judean-era MMA fighter, I thought “hell yeah.” It promised to be a movie-length adaptation of a “Jesus Didn’t Tap” t-shirt.
I reviewed the whole thing over at GQ. To paraphrase Eli Cash, “Everyone knows Jesus Christ didn’t train MMA fighters for proto-gladatorial combat. What our movie presupposes is… maybe he did?”
The Carpenter turned out to be a $3 million independent production financed by a wealthy Mormon construction magnate and starring his two sons, Kameron and Kaulin Krebs, who both played football at Cal. Reviewing the film allowed me to explore my various obsessions, like defunct UFC sponsors, why Mormonism seems uniquely compatible with capitalism, and why virtually every MMA and jiu-jitsu athlete these days seems to dabble in at least light fascism — when, not so long ago, MMA was pretty apolitical.
“my running theory is that, in training the weakness out of themselves, fighters come to resent weakness in others. Which can easily spiral into all sorts of victim-blaming ideologies, especially when deliberately exploited for those purposes. And conservatism is, at its heart, a way of blaming victims for their plight to deny our own susceptibility to suffering. Couldn’t be us, we’re exceptional! Being a fighter, to some extent, is to believe in your own exceptionalism. Which doesn’t have to mean being uncharitable towards the poor and downtrodden, but in practice so often does.”
Anyway, like I said, you can read the rest over at GQ.
Foodstuffs
Been a while since I wrote about food things, so I’m lumping all of my half-formed ideas into a single newsletter. You’re welcome!
A Belated Chicken Big Man Review!
While I’ve mostly left stunt-eating (like sampling 30 tacos or 34 cheesecakes, or reviewing Denny’s Hobbit menu) to younger, less IBS-prone commentators, McDonald’s Chicken Big Mac brought me out of retirement. In a world where I haven’t eaten one of their burgers in years and their fries mostly suck now (I’m still a sucker for an Egg McMuffin and hash brown, especially on a road trip, but breakfast is a different matter), McDonald’s has mostly maintained their ability to fry chicken product. I know there’s probably some weird stuff in a McNugget, but damned if that weird stuff doesn’t still hit the spot.
So yeah, the Chicken Big Mac. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a Big Mac, two all-chicken patties, special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onion on a sesame seed bun (to paraphrase the old commercial jingle us Gen Y kids all remember). I actually went to a McDonald’s for a full sit-down lunch experience for this one. I brought some packaged kim chi with me for a healthy side as an alternative to their french fries (which, as I mentioned earlier, are almost never good anymore), and because I’m on a good gut bacteria kick. Yes, I brought stinky kim chi to a McDonald’s. Roast me if you must. I know deserve it.
Not opting for drive through the way God intended turned out to be a mistake. This particular McDonald’s turned out to be one of the locations doing the thing where you can only order from an automated kiosk, where even if you manage to stand at the counter long enough to get someone’s attention, they will still direct you back to the kiosk. Training the robots is mandatory!
Now, it’s not so much that I hate ordering from an automated menu or app (though it’s true, I don’t love it). It’s more that they never fucking work. There’s always some little thing that’s easy to explain to a person but impossible to convey to the software, even assuming it actually works under normal circumstances, which it often doesn’t. The internet discovered this phenomenon long ago, illustrated with the immortal “None Pizza Left Beef.”
So there was a kiosk for ordering, numbered placards for in-house eating, and a separate numbering system for to-go orders, all of which seemed very glitchy. For one thing, if automated ordering kiosks are meant to reduce staff, why are we also trying to do institute table service? At the same time? No one who plans these things has any fucking brain. The dining room ended up being an even split between patrons standing around confused (often trying to find someone to explain that they’d been delivered the wrong order) and overworked staff trying to manage all this (not to mention fulfill drive-thru orders) running around in the back.
Anyway, I did actually to get my Chicken Big Mac without them delivering it to someone else. My initial thoughts:
It was mostly exactly what I was hoping for and expecting. The iconic third bun, which I love in a beef Big Mac, does make the chicken version a touch dry (chicken generally being less juicy than beef). But there’s still a certain magic that happens when you combine shitty iceberg lettuce squares with thousand island dressing and melted American cheese. It made me remember how much I used to love Big Macs. Didn’t necessarily justify the existence of the chicken version, but the chicken got me in the door.
In fact I enjoyed it so much that two days later, when I was coming home from golfing and on the way to pick up my son and only had time for a quick bite, I made a pit stop at McDonald’s for another one.
This time around (different location, drive through this time), it was even dryer and not as good. I started to notice how crappy the buns were (if In N Out buns are like deli bread, McDonald’s buns are like the sliced bagged bread that comes in a truck). The chicken was still crispy and with that focus-grouped McDonald’s twang (which I love), but more styrofoamy inside this time. Suddenly I found myself missing mayo (unlike Drew Magary, I enjoy mayo, and usually make my own). If we redid this thing with mayo instead of thousand island/cheez and some more, better pickles, I think we’d really have something here, but that second experience kind of killed any lingering craving I had for it.
All in all, the Chicken Big Mac was batting .500. It ended up kind of reminding me of the fries: if you can get them perfectly fresh, yeah, they’re still good. But as soon as they sit for more than five minutes they turn into useless cardboard. As a whole, McDonald’s ends up being too inconsistent to trust (outside of breakfast) and too expensive and too far from being the only cheap/fast option anymore to be worth it. Ah well, we still have Egg McMuffins.