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Footnote: The Book of Job

Note to scriptwriters: the (biblical Old Testament) Book of Job does not make good source material. Please stop strip mining it.

We all have our hobbyhorses, ridden stridently until everyone around is tired of hearing. One of mine, occasionally tweaked in these pages in the past, is this: I do not like the Book of Job. ("I do not like green eggs and ham.") Movies patterned on the Book of Job have a lot in common: the endless and often imaginative heaping of trials and tribulations on an undeserving but plucky schmuck, inevitably a radical mismatch between cause and effect, gross violations of logic and reason. I do not and cannot find them at all entertaining -- they are usually pointless exercises in the enjoyment of someone else's pain and embarrassment, no matter how much of a laugh track we are led to believe should be present. But these screenplays would seem to be (much too) easy to write.

I've complained about this tendency, peripherally, in both the first and, more notably, the second Harry Potter movie. In these two cases, however, there happens to be some redeeming aspect of character to relieve the boredom of tribulation. But the most egregious misuse of this source material (recently) was in Anger Management, where there is no such reprieve: the characters are neither interesting nor compelling.