#billy corben

11 Days of Canadian and International Cinema TIFF 2025 Volume 2 The Toronto International Film Festival wrapped its 50th Anniversary celebration from September 4-14, and I was lucky enough to be there for my third year in a row. This time around, I dove into 41 films—a slightly smaller haul than last year since I did most of my viewing in Toronto rather than catching advance screeners. But what…

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Jerry Falwell Jr.’s fall from grace was, like everything else over the last five or so years, predictably trite. The son of Jerry Falwell Sr., Junior stepped into his father’s camel-sized shoes and used his father’s political connections to promote the very lucrative (and tax exempt) morality of evangelical Christianity. At the peak of his powers, with Donald Trump by his side, Falwell Jr. and his wife came under scrutiny for what sounded a lot like what evangelicals and other conservative Christians would call an immoral lifestyle. The evangelical school his father began, Liberty University, called it his “loose lifestyle” in its 2021 lawsuit against the former leader. A “pool boy” with whom the Falwells maintained both a business relationship and an intimate relationship came under investigation.

People’s intimate lives are none of my beeswax when they don’t effect millions of people. If you make untold millions of dollars and use your political power to take away the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans based on a “moral” stance that you yourself cannot be bothered to even attempt to live up to, then your intimate relationships become everybody’s business.

You have only had to watch one soap opera in your life to know at least some of what happened next. In 2006, film director and Florida native Billy Corben hit the scene with a wildly entertaining documentary about the cocaine trade in the late 1970s and 1980s that burst out in Miami. Called Cocaine Cowboys, Corben’s fast-paced, uptempo soundtrack style of documentary filmmaking became a hit. Since that time he has done a lot of documentary films including the 30 for 30 series The U film about Miami University’s storied college football program. His newest documentary will be coming to streaming service Hulu on Nov. 1, and the trailer looks great.

Called God Forbid, it chronicles the rise and fall of the Falwells and promises to expose the “evangelical” family’s very un-evangelical lifestyles. (Or maybe I have it wrong and it is an “ultra-evangelical” lifestyle?)

God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty – Trailer

The trailer for the upcoming documentary hitting Hulu God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty has arrived, and we have it to share with you. Premieres November 1 on Hulu In this revealing documentary, Giancarlo Granda, former pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Hotel, shares the intimate details of his 7-year relationship with a charming older woman, Becki Falwell, and her…

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Alli, Brandon, and Britnee watch Stepmonster (1993). Boomer: Did you ever have one of those movies that’s stored so far down in the back of your brain that it just haunts you? I don’t know how old I was the first time I saw Stepmonster. I know that it was…