Tagline:
Being bad has never felt so good.

Wide Release Date:
July 24, 2020

Directed by:
Karen Maine
Written by:
Karen Maine
Produced by:
Katie Cordeal, Colleen Hammond, Eleanor Columbus, Rodrigo Teixeira

Starring:
Natalia Dyer
Timothy Simons
Wolfgang Novogratz
Francesca Reale
Susan Blackwell
Parker Wierling
Alisha Boe
Donna Lynne Champlin

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I love Stranger Things. Natalia Dyer, objectively, plays the least interesting character on that show. Actually, it’s a tie between her and Jonathan Byers, who is also awful, but I’ve already digressed.

I found this movie scanning Netflix, and I’m always intrigued by creepy Jesus stuff, light-hearted or otherwise. I’ve never heard of Yes, God, Yes before, and I was quite surprised to see Natalia Dyer in a starring role about a Catholic retreat and/or guilty high school libidos. So why the hell not? Maybe I’ll gain some newfound appreciation for her outside Nancy Wheeler and her whole who-gives-a-shit Stranger Things plotlines.

Timothy Simons sealed the deal on this one. That guy is always great.

THE 500(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Welcome to the year 2000. 9/11 wouldn’t happen for, like, three or four years or something. The country was recently gifted with “Who Let the Dogs Out?” A teenage girl named Alice (Natalia Dyer) is a Catholic school student who is being told during morality class that any kind of sex outside of heterosexual marital procreation is considered a sin worthy of eternal damnation. This is because God is really interested in when and why you fuck. Alice’s sexual curiosity brings about strong feelings of guilt and shame. She accidentally gets involved in a cybersex situation over AOL Instant Messenger while playing a chatroom game and gets interrupt while attempting to jerk it.

Ahh, the good ol’ days of the early internet. Cybersex has never been quite as tasteful!

After a rumor goes around the school that Alice tossed some kid name Wade’s (Parker Wierling) salad at a party over the weekend (a phrase of which she is unaware), the faculty are wary of her possible promiscuity. Desperate to get back on God’s good side, Alice attends a spiritual retreat with her friend Laura (Francesca Reale) and led by Father Murphy (Timothy Simons). Both Laura and Alice want to win over their respective spirit leaders; Nina (Alisha Boe), whom Laura wants to impress, and Chris (Wolfgang Novogratz), whom Alice wants to hella bone. Chris has really hairy arms. Alice likes that. She tries to jerk it again in her bed with her contraband cellphone’s vibration setting during the first night of the retreat, but stops herself after seeing Jesus on the cross hanging in her room. Sexual frustration increases. Guilt increases. The next morning, Nina discovers the phone on confiscates it. She is assigned by Father Murphy to do chores around the retreat house as an ACT OF ATONEMENT.

That day, while cleaning the house, Alice sneaks into Father Murphy’s office and asks a chatroom what “tossing salad” means. This conversation is later noticed by Father Murphy, who calls upon any guilty party to fess up during lunch. No one fesses up.

During another session of cleaning, Alice witnesses Nina giving a boy a blowjob through the window. She tries to tell Laura, but since Laura is trying to get on Nina’s good side, she accuses Alice of lying about it. Alice also tries to confront Wade to confirm he spread the rumor about the whole salad tossing thing, which he denies sorta but not really. She enacts her revenge by slipping Wade’s relationship bracelet under the keyboard in Father Murphy’s office, which FINGERS WADE as the culprit. So to speak. Now, this part’s important: she catches Father Murphy jerking it to some hella porno on his computer.

Ohhhh, God have mercy!

Later, Alice gets weird with Chris and starts kissing him. He’s cool for about five seconds before he pushes her away. Embarrassed, she leaves the grounds and winds up at a lesbian bar. The owner of the bar, Gina (Susan Blackwell) lets her have a drink and they discuss how fucked up Catholicism is. Now Gina’s open about who she is and wasted a lot of youth fretting. This is Alice’s eye-opening moment.

At school, after the retreat, Alice makes nice with Chris. She implies during a confessional that she caught Murphy playing with himself at the camp. Then, at long last, while alone in her house, Alice flicks the bean while watching Titanic

I come to the podium today, ladies and gentlemen, to tell you that this religion stuff is super fucked-up.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — Christianity Is Creepy

There, I said it. I say it a lot both directly and indirectly when I get a chance, so I have a chance and I’m going to say it directly again. Christianity is creepy.

I was loosely raised Catholic, but I never bought into it. In fact, even as a youngin’ I found the whole idea unnerving. I remember picturing God as a crescent moon with a star next to it. Like the Turkish flag, for example! Like many flags! And it was all downhill from there. I had to go to catechism until I was 13, which was complete bullshit. I got confirmed and everything.

I never had to do a multiple day retreat, but my mom helped chaperone a day trip to some campground where we had to sing about Jesus. My friend laughed so hard while joking during lunch that he threw up his pizza. That’s the only specific thing I remember about the whole day. Clearly, it all made a significant impression.

A multi-day retreat sounds like Hell to me. Literal Hell! My idea of literal Hell is a Christian retreat. Also being eternally conscious in an empty avoid, I suppose, but a Christian retreat sounds almost equally terrible. I like Yes, God, Yes‘ portrayal of overly-smiley religious teenagers. I knew people like that in high school and it was pretty spot on. Of course, I don’t think I knew any that were getting blowjobs during their various pious excursions, but I’m willing to bet it was a non-zero number!

Time for a confession! Who is responsible for drawing this picture of Jesus? You got the eyes ALL WRONG!

TOPIC 2 — Catholic Guilt

Oh hell yeah. Alice just wants to get her rocks off and she never gets to until the end of the movie. Every time she’s interrupted, you can see the look on her face that she’s worried about eternal damnation just for touching herself. How unfair is that?

Catholic guilt is pretty rough. I know middle-aged adults who still fear God enough to avoid (sometimes unsuccessfully) their vices. Even swearing, which has been extensively studied and theorized to be good for your health, is a one-way ticket to getting your little butt poked by Beelzebub himself until the end of time and beyond. It darn frikkin’ stinks to have a religion rooted in fear of the afterlife to keep people in line during regular life. That can really mess you up beyond rehabilitation.

Oh shit, that smiling, vacant kid over there looks like someone gave him a lobotomy with a steak knife.

I only remember a couple of times where I felt that pang of Catholic guilt, but the strongest instance was a week or two in 9th grade when I kept thinking stuff like “God sucks” and “God can go fuck himself” and then I kept spiraling into obsessive-compulsive territory where every time I worried that you can sin with your thoughts, I kept thinking stuff like “I hope God dies” and “God is a fucking moron”. Maybe this was an important step for me, in hindsight. Look at how well-adjusted I am now!

I wonder if feeling bad about telling people that I’m not religious is part of the guilt?

TOPIC 3 — Alice’s Awakening

A lot of us who decided Catholicism wasn’t very cool had treaded this path of self-actualization at a young age. It took me until early college to finally admit to myself that I didn’t have a place in my life for God or any of his little minions, and it took me even longer to have the courage to admit to myself that I simply don’t believe in any of it at all. And that’s just a childhood of very loose Catholic upbringing. I can’t imagine struggling through this growing up in a religious household.

Alice’s awakening, ironically, comes during a retreat meant to bring people closer to God. To put it more specifically, it comes during her witnessing Timothy Simons jacking off in his office! That would snap anyone out of religious devotion. My favorite part of the movie was Alice’s encounter with Gina in the lesbian bar. In a defining moment, this woman relieves Alice of almost all of the guilt weighing her down throughout the awful week. Then she is advised to check out some of the more liberal colleges in America. Excellent advice for anyone who doesn’t want to spend their adulthood hating women and the LGBTQ+ as a whole, I always say.

If I had a nickel for every 16-year-old that came to my bar for a wine cooler…

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Feature film adaptation of the short film of the same name, Yes, God, Yes (2017), which was released online in 2017.
Boring.

Francesca Reale and Natalia Dyer starred in 2016’s Stranger Things
Boring.

The retreat “Kirkos” is a play on retreat Kairos that catholic high school students all over the country partake in. The Question the first , Weep the second, Accept the third and Live the fourth is the actual mantra of the retreat and students are not allowed to share what happens at Kairos with students who haven’t been. Most of the retreat moments in the movie actually happen on the retreat.
Super boring. Maybe I should watching movies people actually, you know, see. I need some better trivia.

That’s right, Alice. Confess your sins to Big Daddy. Let it all come out.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

It’s ok. Not essential. It’s a fluffy teen movie about a teenage girl in the year 2000 who desperate wants to get herself off without guilt. I heard that the portrayal of a Jesus retreat was fairly accurate. As someone who never had to go through with this, I’m supremely relieved that I didn’t have to spend a week trying to jack off in total privacy with a priest lurking around.