Waiting For Sunday

This is a dated topic, but I write it now because yesterday someone gave me the poster you see here from the Rocky Balboa media push for churches.  I’m grateful to the person who put it on my desk, and I plan to put it up.  But the campaign itself, to promote Rocky Balboa to churches, seems odd.

I saw the movie, and commented on it here.  It was good.  Of course, I felt like I had seen it before, since it was the same movie as as the previous ones.  But there wasn’t anything especially Christian about it, and the “good fight” Paul speaks of (quoted on the poster) certainly wasn’t a sixty-year-old man vs. the heavyweight champ.

Sylvester Stallone learned from Mel Gibson the value of connecting with pastors, although Stallone’s marketing push wasn’t nearly as far-reaching as Gibson’s, nor was it as successful.  (BTW, when is some Hollywood director going to invite ME to a pre-screening?)

NPR covered the church marketing strategy here, and Christianity Today Movies abetted the project to some degree too.

I have no problem with Bible-based discussions on movies.  I just see this as another warning to be careful.  It IS flattering to be noticed by Hollywood.  But it would be easy to be used.

P. S. - Just today, Christianity Today posted an article about movies and church marketing citing the dangers.

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Up until a year ago, whenever we rented a DVD, I’d always grab the full screen version. I figured the wide screen image would be too small on our TV. Then one night, on the DVD extras for the movie The Interpreter, I saw a feature by director Sidney Pollack on why wide screen is better. He convinced me for life in about five minutes. I won’t even consider renting the full screen film anymore.

OK, so this isn’t the most important post I’ve ever written. Nevertheless, I consider myself a minor wide screen evangelist. Most movies are filmed and shown in theaters at a 16:9 width-to-height ratio. To fit on a standard 4:3 TV screen, the movie is edited by a process called pan and scan in which somebody chooses a 4:3 rectangle from each shot and crops the rest out. Since the director is responsible for laying out each shot, Pollack said that pan and scan is in effect redirecting the movie. He showed 4:3 cropped scenes from The Interpreter and said: “I didn’t direct that.”

Turner Classic Movies occasionally runs a short feature on wide screen vs. full screen. Check it out the next time you run across it, or just watch this short demo to see what I’m talking about.

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Cindy and I finally saw The Nativity Story last night. What a perfect way to close out Christmas Eve. I was impressed.

The Nativity Story captures several themes that Christians have heard developed repeatedly in generations of sermons - the fact that Joseph and Mary belonged to the “working poor”, that the pregnancy probably caused something of a scandal, and that the Romans were oppressive rulers. And the film does a great job expanding on Matthew’s statement that Joseph was a righteous man. As the story progresses, Joseph shows himself to be a humble, strong, servant-like husband, willing to do everything he can to care for his wife and her child. Mary moves from an attitude of resignation over their arranged marriage to a state of genuine love for Joseph.

The Nativity Story plays essentially by The Book, a fact that some critics have found disappointing but which many Christians will appreciate. All the elements from the Gospel accounts are there, and the supernatural element is in no way downplayed or called into question. (The Magi arrive at the same time as the shepherds, which almost certainly did not happen, but have you ever seen a Nativity pageant played any other way?) Sam Van Hallgren at Filmspotting criticized the film for being no more than a professional version of the same kind of Nativity play one can see at any church this time of year. Actually, he’s right. But the difference the pros make is refreshing. Even Van Hallgren says that if you’re looking for a straight telling of the story from the Bible, this is it. I say “Amen” to that, and I mean it as a recommendation.

Someone with young children asked me if The Nativity Story (rated PG) was kid-friendly. It isn’t, not for young kids anyway. The brutality of Roman rule, Herod’s massacre of the innocents, and the realistic portrayals of the labor pains of Elizabeth and Mary may disturb those under 10. But for older folks, The Nativity Story is a realistic, well-crafted portrayal of the events leading to the Incarnation.

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This is the weekend that the next big Bible film opens in theaters. The Nativity Story stars sixteen-year-old Australian actress Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary. Castle-Hughes starred as a Maori girl-who-would-be-tribal-chief in the wonderful Whale Rider a few years ago. And fans of 24 will recognize the actress who plays Elizabeth - Iranian-born Shohreh Aghdashloo, who played the awesomely wicked Mom-next-door/terrorist in season four.

David Neff at Christianity Today Movies gives the film a positive review for its realistic rendering of first-century peasant life and for developing the idea, only briefly mentioned in Scripture, that Joseph was a just and compassionate man.

I’m glad to say that, unlike The Passion, this film hasn’t been aggressively marketed to churches as “the greatest evangelistic opportunity since the feeding of the 5,000!” It’s just a movie, after all. Hopefully it’s a good one. I look forward to seeing it.

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My wife and I recently watched The Ground Truth, a great documentary on the Iraq war, particularly its effect on the women and men who fight it. This 78-minute gem, directed by Patricia Foulkrod is pro-troops, anti-war and non-political in the sense that (as far as I remember) no politicians or political parties are named. Instead, the focus is on how these young people are drawn into the military with sanitized sales-pitches, trained to become killers, unleashed into an impossible situation, then dumped back into society. The Ground Truth looks unflinchingly at the horrors of civilian casualties, and anyone who remembers the horrendous moral dilemmas faced by the troops in Vietnam will find this all very familiar.

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I wondered when this would finally happen. When Titanic hit video stores in the late 90s, a company called CleanFlicks began selling edited copies with nudity and foul language removed. Since then, CleanFlicks and a couple of competitors have built a nice business around cleaning up other feature films.

I sympathize with this idea, but the practice never seemed quite legal to me. Last week, an appeals court in Denver agreed, saying that cleaning up films without permission is an illegitimate business.

OK, but I have to scoff at this bit of sanctimonious pap at the bottom of the article: “Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” said the President of the Director’s Guild of America.

Hey, I’m in favor of artistic freedom, but follow the money on this one. Every movie you watch on TV is cleaned up, edited for time, chopped up for commercials, and (worst of all) “panned and scanned” to make a wide-screen feature fit your TV, in effect redirecting the movie by reframing every shot, often without the director’s approval.

OK, so this post is nothing but a rant. And the point is…CleanFlicks can keep doing this by making it profitable enough to fit the “vision” of the filmmakers…or at least the studios.

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Dave Terpstra has an interesting post at Out of Ur about the contradictory way Christian react to movies. When the first Harry Potter movie came out, there was considerable debate about whether Christians should see a film featuring a wizard-boy hero. One local church here in Kingston put an anti-witchcraft Scripture on its sign that week. I have never heard of anyone protesting either Pirates of the Carribean movie on faith-based grounds. Yet Terpstra notes some commonalities:

The similarity in material between the two movies that should concern parents is amazing. First, both films focus on activities contrary to the teachings Scripture, piracy and witchcraft. Second, the hero of Pirates, like the hero of Potter, is practicing what is considered evil—not just battling against those who practice it. Third, there are dark forces involved in both. Harry Potter films are amuck with sorcery and the like. Pirates of the Caribbean films are full of curses and the undead. The list could go on.

More than this, the real star of the Pirates movies is Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, a conflicted hero if ever there was one. An important theme in both The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest is that a person can be a pirate AND a good man. Few parents want their little ones following THAT example.

The answer isn’t protests, which Terpstra shows to be mostly knee-jerk, but discernment. I haven’t seen the Potter movies (will there be one called Welcome Back, Potter?) but I love Narnia and The Lord of the Rings (the books are better) which could be criticized in the same way that the Potter films are. And I really liked the first Pirates movie (the second suffers from bloating caused by sequel-itis) but if I had kids, I’d want to talk to them about the moral ambiguities of Jack Sparrow. CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow, that is.

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Even though I love movies, I rarely go to the theater. But I usually make it to the multiplex for the big blockbusters that are released at Christmas (Lord of the Rings 1-3, The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia) and at the Fourth of July (Minority Report, Terminator 3, War of the Worlds). This year I think Superman Returns will get me there.

It isn’t just the big-budget effects that attract me, but the idea of Superman himself. When I was five, I put my underwear on outside my pajamas and pretended to be Superman. I haven’t done that in awhile (honestly) but I do have in my heart a lasting esteem for the super-hero.

At some point in our lives, didn’t we all see that same appeal in Jesus?

In his book The Myth of Certainty (more about it here), Daniel Taylor has a fictional professor at a Christian college describe her attraction to Jesus:

“When I was a young girl, I had a love for Jesus that I’ve never quite matched since. He was so clearly everything I wanted to be - not just good, but a force for good. I didn’t want to just be good, I wanted to do righteousness - like Jesus did when he healed the sick and cast out demons. I looked at my own little world and at the bigger one beyond and said, ‘Sarah, there’s casting out to be done here and you and Jesus are going to do it.’”

You’ve seen that in Jesus at some point in your life, haven’t you? And yet it’s easy to lose sight of it, easy to make Christianity more about being good than doing righteousness.

Don’t get me wrong: What we do has to flow from who we are. The Pharisees illustrate what happens when action replaces inner righteousness. But Jesus attracted people by acting as a force for righteousness. He still does.

Superman is one of those good stories that remind our hearts of the One True Story. And remember, Jesus came not just to do righteousness himself, but to create followers to be a force for righteousness: He said in John 14:12 - “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”

For some good reading on Superman Returns, check out Christianity Today’s interview with director Brian Singer, and this wonderful article at Relevant Magazine.

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I mentioned in my sermon on Sunday that I heard a secular film critic mention that homosexuality was a subtext behind the latest X-Men movie (about mutants and those who want to “cure” them). Even if that subtext is present, there is certainly more to the movie than that. Here’s a story (thanks to Linda M.) about X-Men producer Ralph Winter, a Christian who sees his work as a bridge-building exercise between culture and faith, and he offers another interpretation, as well as other interesting observations about movies.

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Last year I found a recommendation at Christianity Today Movies for a documentary called Stevie. It was praised so highly that I knew I had to rent it. I finally did and after watching it last night, I haven’t thought about much else since. Stevie is a study of a young man who has lived in a kind of hell all of his life, and he bears the scars. The consequences are heartbreaking. Yet the film is not without hope. In the middle of this human wreckage, we see glimpses of the grace that might make a difference for people like Stevie.

“Stevie” is Stephen Fielding, a man from southern Illinois who is 23 when the film begins. The movie’s director is Steve James (Hoop Dreams) who served as a volunteer “big brother” to Stephen Fielding in the early 80s when James was in college and Fielding was a child. After college, James moved to Chicago and on to a career and family, while Stevie lived through years of sexual abuse, foster homes, and juvenile detention centers. Steve James decided to reconnect with Stevie after ten years, thinking he might produce a thirty-minute update on Stevie’s progress. Instead Stevie is a 140 minute foray into a torpedoed soul.

Shortly after the film begins, Stevie is accused of an appalling crime. The backdrop of the movie becomes Stevie’s slow walk through the justice system. But in the foreground is Stevie’s family, nearly all of whom have failed him in every way, and continue to do so, on camera. You get the sense that Stevie’s present pain is just an ugly repetition of his mother’s and grandmother’s before him. Both women appear in the film in all their wounded bitterness.

Why watch a movie like this? Because of the window it gives us into the damaged souls of many around us. This film pulls the viewer to within understanding distance of Stevie, but it doesn’t ask you to take his side. I thought about the painful ending for a long time and finally decided that there was no other way to deal with Stevie.

But more than this, watch Stevie for the grace. There is true grace in the way his fiancee Tonya loves him with a simple, unconditional love. She’s an angel in this story, almost untouched by the repulsive world surrounding her. (There is a startling five-minute sequence where Tonya sits by the bedside of her best friend Patricia and listens while Patricia speaks through her cerebral palsy a message of amazing courage, truth and love). There is grace in the way Stevie is received and loved unconditionally by a former foster couple. One wonders how different his life might have been had he been raised in their home. And there is grace in the way Stevie is treated by the director himself. Steve James comes to the sad conclusion that he can’t fix Stevie or his problems, yet James decides that he can at least continue to be Stevie’s friend.

In the end, all of this grace is too little or too late to save Stevie (at least for now). But it is clear in this film that this persistent, unrelenting grace is the only hope for Stevie or for any of us.

One scene rises above the others for me. Judy James, the director’s wife and a counselor, looks Stevie straight in the eye and tells him that she knows him for who he is and what he has done, and that she bears no illusions that everything is OK with him - yet she says that she cares about him anyway and is willing to help him find the power to change. That’s the gospel.

Stevie is rated R for rough language and descriptions of abuse.

Roger Ebert on Stevie

Interview with director Steve James

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United 93 is a film I knew I should see, but probably wouldn’t have, except that my Thursday Bible Study group decided that we would. I’m glad I did.

The film begins with four young men in their hotel rooms, praying, shaving, preparing. We see passengers arriving at the airport, checking in, chatting on cell phones - things we’ve all seen many times at airports. Then United 93 immerses us into the events of 9/11 in real-time, beginning around 8:15 am when Air Traffic Controller Ben Sliney (who plays himself) walks into the National Air Traffic Command Center in Herndon, VA, and ending with the crash at 10:03 am of United Airlines Flight 93 into a field near Shanksville, PA. In between is a grim, gut-wrenching journey where ordinary people courageously respond the best way they can to a world that has shifted off its axis. On the film’s official web site, Director Paul Greengrass says that the 40 passengers and crew “were the first to inhabit our new and terrifying post 9/11 world.”

“The terrible dilemma those passengers faced is the same one we have been struggling with ever since. Do we sit passively and hope this all turns out okay? Or do we fight back and strike at them before they strike at us? And what will be the consequences if we do?”

The genius of United 93 is perspective. The film makes no judgments, no political statements. There is no explanation of why the terrorists do what they do - no Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida, or the Taliban. We get no background information on the passengers (their names aren’t even mentioned). The effect is to place the viewer on the plane with a group of strangers to experience what they experience.

It is the group that is heroic in this tragedy. In about 20 minutes’ time, they learn through phone calls with family about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they make the decision to act, and they fight back.

United 93 is based on the two dozen phone calls the passengers made to loved ones, as well as about 20 minutes of cockpit recordings recovered from the plane. Though the details of much of what took place must be speculated, those phone calls are heartbreaking because we know they are real. But Greengrass doesn’t exploit our emotions or the passengers themselves. We overhear these conversations almost in the background, as if we were listening from a seat across the aisle.

United 93 is not only an important film, it is excellent and even beautiful. The intro screen on the web site contains two words: “Never forget.” That is, in essence, the purpose of United 93.

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Here’s a Reuters story by Claudia Parsons about how Hollywood has reassessed religious movies in light of the success of The Passion and Narnia. The article reminds me that people thought Gibson’s foreign-language Jesus film was going to be the least commercial movie ever made until a month or two before it opened. I also remember that people said he had lost his mind, spending thrity million of his own money on his project. When it made more than ten times that amount, people said he just did it for the money.

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We just got back from the stores at Turkey Creek where I perused the book sections at Target and Wal-Mart, and I noticed an interesting thing: Not only are Dan Brown’s books everywhere (The Da Vinci Code and others) but half-a-dozen other fiction authors have also “found religion” and have produced new novels about conspiracies involving church history. At the Lifeway Christian bookstore, it’s the same thing only different. Nearly every shelf holds an anti-Da Vinci Code book.I read The Da Vinci Code last year and found it to be a highly entertaining fantasy, but I’m basically ignoring it in my teaching (and sticking with The Andy Code).

But I do want to direct your browser to a good article at Relevant.com by Brian Lowery that deals with the hoopla and discusses why this movie attracts our attention more than others.

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Peter T. Chattaway of Christianity Today has posted a list of his top ten Jesus movies. I’ve seen only four of his picks - The Passion, The Miracle Maker (a wonderful animated movie from 2000), The Greatest Story Ever Told (with a slow-paced but interesting performance by Max von Sidow as Jesus) and Jesus, a made-for-TV movie from 1999 which I thought was poor. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen 1977’s Jesus of Nazareth, a six-hour mini-series that looks excellent (from the few clips I have seen).

Film is a great medium to explore the Gospels, and it tends to reveal our interpretations of Scripture. For example, The Visual Bible’s version of Matthew (which we’ve used at MHCC quite a bit) is word for word out of the NIV, but when you watch it you’re struck with things like tone of voice, facial expression, and emotion, and you find yourself thinking: “I never pictured it like that.”

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Michael Medved wrote an interesting article for USA Today about the reaction (or lack ot it) of conservative Christians to Brokeback Mountain. While secular critics have tried to best each other in singing the movie’s praises, Christians have been relatively silent about it. No major evangelical organization has called for a boycott. Medved says that this isn’t apathy, but rather a sign that our movement has matured and Christians feel more secure in our place at the cultural table. After all, our movies are getting made too, and making big money (witness The Passion, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia). I think he’s right, and I’m sure it would have been a terrible strategy to picket theaters and try to shame movie-goers.

With the move to the new building in February, I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing about the start of my ministry here, and if I think back to 1988 (my first year at MHCC) I remember another controversial movie to which we responded differently. The movie was The Last Temptation of Christ, and I hate to bring it up even eighteen years later because of all the emotion that surrounded it then. Many Christians felt that the movie defamed Christ. Director Martin Scorsese said that, on the contrary, it showed how wonderful Christ’s sacrifice really was by asking the big “what if”…what if Jesus had come down from the cross and lived a normal life?

I’m not interested in revisiting the debate over the movie, but I can’t help mentioning the difference in our response eighteen years later to Brokeback. Back in ’88 there was a lot of picketing of theaters, name-calling and calls for boycotts in response to Last Temptation. I thought at the time that Christians who took part in this merely helped publicize the movie and came off looking angry and mean.

I agree with Medved that our recent response to Brokeback has been better and more mature. The film hasn’t been ignored by Christian leaders and publications, but neither has it become a rallying point for cultural war. Medved implies that the film makers may actually be disappointed in this response.

Of course the other possibility is that we just don’t care anymore, that we’re not willing to take an unpopular stand. What do you think? (Click on the link below that counts comments if you want to reply).

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Here’s some hilarious fun with movie trailers. A little music puts a new spin on Back to the Future and Top Gun. Also, I heard someone once say that the romantic hit Sleepless in Seattle isn’t all that far removed from a stalker flick. The trailer here proves it.

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Christianity Today Movies has posted a list of Black History Classics, films about the black experience from the past eighty years. These movies have all been released recently on DVD in honor of Black History Month.

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I highly recommend this new film which is currently in wide theatrical release. It tells the story of Jim Elliot, Steve Saint, and other missionaries who were killed in Ecuador in 1956 by the tribe they were trying to reach, and it focuses on how God used that tragedy to bring many in that tribe to Christ. This movie won’t enjoy the crossover success of something like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so you’ll need to catch it in the next couple of weeks.

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Today’s theme - You Are In Control. You choose when you want to listen to music or watch a movie or TV show, and you choose the content. The old model that I grew up with was that the radio station or TV channel set the schedule and your choices were “take it or leave it”. In the 80s, the Walkman and the VCR began to change that. Now we’re moving toward total choice, on demand programming where you and I make the choices. Several church members recently told me that they’re watching “Lost” a season behind the network schedule, renting or buying the DVDs (no commercials this way!). Practically every show with any audience at all is becoming available this way. For those with a video Ipod, you can now buy many shows the day after they air and watch them as you wait in the doctor’s office (on a three-inch screen, but still).

RE: Music - I’m really impressed with a music concept called Pandora. It’s an internet radio station but one that goes way beyond the normal way of doing things. You start by entering a favorite song or artist. Then Pandora creates a radio station for you that plays songs that are musically similar to the music you named. “Musically similar” is no accident either because Pandora employs dozens of professional musicians to analyze songs according to many criteria. In fact, they call this analysis the Music Genome Project. It works pretty well. I’ve got three stations set up so far. With a free (and totally legal) account you can have up to 100 stations for your ever-changing moods, and you can refine them as they play by adding new criteria to guide Pandora. There is also some weight given to lyrics. Example: I kicked off my currently-playing station by typing in “Audio Adrenaline” and the first six songs were by Christian artists (Audio A twice, Reuben Morgan, a cut from a Promise Keepers CD, Bleach and Switchfoot). I then refined the station by telling it to play songs like “Meant to Live” by Switchfoot, and now the seventh song playing is by Third Eye Blind, non-Christian but musically similar. Pandora pays no attention to the popularity of artists or songs which means it is likely to introduce you to new music rather than play only what’s “hot”. Pandora increases your content control but obviously limits your choice of where you can listen.

More on this subject later…

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Hello all, and welcome in to the new MHCC Blog (a contraction of “web log”). Check back here often for our observations on life, faith, art and the web. We hope it will be fun and instructive. If you ever have comments on what you see here or suggestions for future topics, email me.

Today we start with movies. If you want in-depth reviews from a Christian worldview, there’s no better place than Christianity Today Movies. This is the site I recommend for adults and teenagers who want a good idea of what’s worth seeing in the theatre or renting. I used their lists of the best movies 2004 by critics and readers and most redeeming films to make my own “to rent” list. It has saved me from wandering aimlessly through the video store or accidentally renting trash. CT reviews go beyond counting expletives and body parts and dig into the content. Great site.

For parents deciding what their kids should watch, go to Plugged In. You’ll find enough information there to decide if even a good movie might be more than your young children can handle. PI covers music and TV too.

Lately I’ve gotten hooked on listening to movie discussions at Cinecast. Adam Kempenaar and Sam Hallgren do this twice-weekly podcast from Chicago and it is absolutely GREAT listening for anyone who loves movies. They recently did a Western-a-Week marathon where they dug into some old classic Westerns, and now they’re working their way through some Hitchcock films. They review new releases too. You don’t need an MP3 player to listen. You can listen at your computer or burn a disc for the commute. It’s fabulous.

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