Woods Hole Film Festival 2009

The Mother Lode of all Dichotomies: the One Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, and Fabulous Las Vegas! In 'Tales from the Catholic Church of Elvis!', Mercy Malick wraps the two together in a tightly-wound package that skips happily and harrowingly through eleven years as a Catholic schoolgirl living in Sin City, USA. With a passing nod to everything from Monty Python to Benny Hill, way beyond South Park and Napoleon Dynamite, and well on the far side of recent films like Little Miss Sunshine and the Farrelly Brothers fare, 'Tales' is a remarkable immersion in a world all its own. Staged within the framework of a shockingly schlock Vegas stage show at the eponymous Catholic Church of Elvis, 'Tales' follows a young girl from her early fascination with Vegas glitz, accompanied by prayer, of course, along a time-twisting series of adventures that bring into delightful juxtaposition brain-boggling epiphanies that include colostomy bag as alternative to babies, and pizza box as indoor-outhouse. Much like our surrogates, the peripatetic audience of the Catholic Church of Elvis, we stagger out of 'Tales' into the garish neon night among the crowds of loafers, losers, and legitimately weird, our consciousness raised a bit, and our heads still reeling at what it must have been like to grow up Catholic in the least Catholic place on the map, and marvelng about the inspirational true story of turning bad experiences into strengths.