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Jack Gladney posted:Cap quit his job to do movie reviews full-time because he believed God would provide, but nobody has donated any money to him since. The latest "new release" on his site is Spider-Man 3. He should make a godstarter
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Mar 28, 2015 14:14
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Snapchat A Titty posted:He should make a godstarter He'd probably do well with a GodFundMe He could even take donations through Papal
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Mar 28, 2015 15:46
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bobkatt013 posted:The Battle of Algiers JC Superstar is mad cornball but is a great watch. Pasolini has already been mentioned.
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Mar 28, 2015 18:45
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DoombatINC posted:He'd probably do well with a GodFundMe Actually, fundamentalist Protestants like Cap don't like Catholics very much at all and would never take money from them. and it would make more sense with regular monthly expenses to do a Praytreon anyway
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Mar 28, 2015 19:55
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The mission is an amazing Christian film with a great Morricone score.
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Mar 28, 2015 21:07
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And come to think of it, Terrence Malick is a Catholic, and it seems like it comes through pretty strongly in his movies. Tree of Life is obviously religious at least and could easily be read as specifically Christian. I haven't seen To the Wonder or Knight of Cups but they look very, very Catholic. Then again a lot of Protestants don't consider Catholicism Christian, so they wouldn't count as Christian films 
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Mar 28, 2015 21:32
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Lars and the Real Girl is a pretty good example of a well-done film about modern people and relationships that doesn't caricature either them or Christianity. Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) clearly writes from a Christian (and Catholic) viewpoint, and while I wouldn't expect those films to be screened at a church, they are still exploring themes that aren't often touched on in in that way.
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Mar 28, 2015 21:41
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The original Bad Lieutenant is explicitly a Catholic film.
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Mar 28, 2015 21:44
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The first Chronicles of Narnia movie is a pretty good Christian movie. Kinda glad the series seems to have died off before it could reach The Last Battle, though.
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Mar 28, 2015 21:47
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So I guess the real problem isn't Christian film, It's conservative films.
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Mar 28, 2015 21:49
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The_Rob posted:So I guess the real problem isn't Christian film, It's conservative films. The problem is bad and mediocre films. If Christian filmmakers had a bigger budget and even slightly more secularized beliefs, their melodramas, family flicks, and comedies would be just as dispensable.
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Mar 28, 2015 22:01
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Yeah but the devotion to conservatism/evangelism prevents the films from being any better. Even if one of these directors was capable of making a good movie and had the money to do it, they would still be constrained by the requirement to reassure religious people with a persecution complex that they're right
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Mar 28, 2015 22:05
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K. Waste posted:The problem is bad and mediocre films. If Christian filmmakers had a bigger budget and even slightly more secularized beliefs, their melodramas, family flicks, and comedies would be just as dispensable. Yeah. Its not that the focus is in the message, how many movies do you see year in year out that are exactly that?
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Mar 28, 2015 22:05
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icantfindaname posted:Yeah but the devotion to conservatism/evangelism prevents the films from being any better. Even if one of these directors was capable of making a good movie and had the money to do it, they would still be constrained by the requirement to reassure religious people with a persecution complex that they're right It's also possible to do things like my example of Chronicles of Narnia, which was a strong and widely appealing Christian movie that just barely wasn't explicitly about Christianity.
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Mar 28, 2015 22:11
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Also I mean conservative films more in the political sense than the ideological sense.
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Mar 28, 2015 22:13
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icantfindaname posted:Yeah but the devotion to conservatism/evangelism prevents the films from being any better. Even if one of these directors was capable of making a good movie and had the money to do it, they would still be constrained by the requirement to reassure religious people with a persecution complex that they're right This is one of those 'all films are political/ideological' things. Christian filmmakers are not limited by the ideologies that their films espouse - that is what the movie is actually about. The ideological limitations are brought to it by the spectator, who already has their own secular ideological equivalent of the escapist fantasies that popular cinema creates. The vast majority of films are not about questioning status quo ideas and values, whether they be religious or political or social or economic. They are about the didactic, comfortable arrangement of familiar themes and motifs. The thing that makes The Last Temptation of Christ, Bad Lieutenant, and The Gospel According to St. Matthew such good Christian (specifically, Catholic) films is not that they are less ideological - it's that the ways in which they engage ideology is uncomfortable and alienating, coupled with a greater command of cinematic language, areas in which both their low budget indie and secular mainstream contemporaries are largely lacking. All of these films are consequently limited because they are frequently more extreme in their spiritual ideological frameworks. In Last Temptation, gnosticism and secularism desecrates traditions of moral absolutism and breaks the promise between God and man. In Bad Lieutenant, the police force and prison industrial complex are presented as ideologically antithetical to Christ's doctrine of forgiveness. In The Gospel, Jesus is an apocalyptic prophet and antisocial rear end in a top hat who is trying to scare you into being a good person. These ideas are just as limiting to contemporary secularism as the Evangelical independent cinema. These are great works of cinema because they break away from the comfortable consumerist indoctrination and escapism that is the vast majority of commercial cinema. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Mar 28, 2015 |
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Mar 28, 2015 22:27
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There's tons of low-budget secular movies every year as corny and preachy as the Christian ones in this thread, it's just these tend to float to the top because they're marketed a little more aggressively and embraced by their philistinic built-in audience, as opposed to just getting dumped to VOD, or a few airings on basic cable in the daytime, and sinking without a trace.
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Mar 28, 2015 23:45
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Jack Gladney posted:Cap quit his job to do movie reviews full-time because he believed God would provide, but nobody has donated any money to him since. The latest "new release" on his site is Spider-Man 3. I saw reviews for Avengers and Captain America 1, though. So he's been active at least up through 2012, I guess. His reviews were always sort of amazing and I tried one time to figure out a film that would hit his 100 perfect clean score. Turned out it was Mary Poppins. http://www.capalert.com/capreports/marypop/marypop.htm It's sort of interesting that in a lot of films ANY sort of display of people doing incredible things with superpowers is deemed some sort of offense to God, but excused is Mary Poppins. Even the 'magic' is excused on account of "Well, she's not a WITCH!" It's been a while since I've seen it, but there's got to be something in there worthy of a point or two deduction... Meanwhile, The Little Vampire had points taken off for Wanton Violence/Crime for: "two kids sitting atop an aloft blimp"
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Mar 29, 2015 00:40
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Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a fascinating movie directed by a gay Christian. Unsure what to say about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev2d92_W47Y
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Mar 29, 2015 03:13
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Nckdictator posted:Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a fascinating movie directed by a gay Christian. Unsure what to say about it. drat, score by Riz Ortolani and songs by Donovan?! Sign me up! edit: Lol, I find it hilarious that this is also the guy who made Endless Love. What a psycho movie that was, this has to be good. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Mar 29, 2015 |
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Mar 29, 2015 03:16
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I think the problem is that it's the conservative ideology that holds Christian movies back. Good ones would probably come off as liberal and the audience for these movie will have none of it.
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Mar 29, 2015 03:30
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JediTalentAgent posted:I saw reviews for Avengers and Captain America 1, though. So he's been active at least up through 2012, I guess. I remember that he loves original Star Trek, even though probably 30% of it is Captain Kirk being smug about killing or discrediting somebody's god. I wonder if he saw the one with the Roman planet where the twist at the end is that Jesus is real and just shows up on different planets sometimes. He also says The Next Generation ruined Star Trek because the character of Riker was too promiscuous. Not like Captain Kirk, you see. Anyway, the guy's a huge hypocrite and I can believe that he easily dismisses Mary Poppins' magic and willful undermining of Mr. Banks' authority while blasting, say, Spider-Man for unnatural and ungodly powers.
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Mar 29, 2015 03:55
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It's interesting in his review of Mary Poppins that he says LOTR is an example of what not to do because I read an essay by a Christian about how the magic in LOTR was an example of how to write good magic in a Christian framework. Namely, the essayist said that any "good" magic user must fit the following criteria: 1. They must not be the protagonist; we must not see things from their point of view 2. When we meet them they are fully-formed; they aren't learning magic, they already know how to do their stuff 3. Their magic is used only to help the protagonist in their quest or help the protagonist grow as a person They emphasized that in such a story it must always be clear that the protagonist can never become like the magic user or learn to do what the magic user does, just as a human can never become an angel. It was an interesting essay, I wish I could find it. Of course, I wonder what the essayist would say about all those apostles that ended up doing Jesus power things.
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Mar 29, 2015 04:26
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Xibanya posted:Of course, I wonder what the essayist would say about all those apostles that ended up doing Jesus power things. I imagine it wouldn't make a dent in his theory. It's never been a part of Judeo-Christian mythology that only Jesus could do 'magic' things. The more important idea, which I'm glossing from the bullet-points you're giving, is that the 'magic' within a story isn't something that is arrogantly learned by the protagonist, who assumes they have the right to yield such powers. Rather 'magic' comes to them via deux ex machina, some moral force that acts under the auspices of invisible author as God, and assists/blesses the protagonist. Basically, 'Christian fantasy literature' shouldn't enchant readers with fantasies in which they identify with characters who just decide that they are the Lord's elect. They should confront them with scenarios in which the protagonist cannot accomplish anything without divine intervention, where the Lord decides if and how they are worthy.
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Mar 29, 2015 04:34
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Evangelism just doesn't make for a good plot. You can write whatever you want but if the absolute core of your movie is "We're right, and everyone else is wrong up until the point they accept our incredibly narrow point of view", then anyone who hasn't already accepted it as the truth or a vulnerable person is going to be moved by it.
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Mar 29, 2015 04:48
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I liked this bit in his review of Frequency about the potential offense to God that was the time travel plot of the movie... "I can find no specific Scripture speaking directly to altering the past to improve the future or about changing the past to change what has happened or will happen. If anyone can fund such Scripture, please let me know"
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Mar 29, 2015 07:31
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Casimir Radon posted:Evangelism just doesn't make for a good plot. You can write whatever you want but if the absolute core of your movie is "We're right, and everyone else is wrong up until the point they accept our incredibly narrow point of view", then anyone who hasn't already accepted it as the truth or a vulnerable person is going to be moved by it. Yeah I think this is really the heart of it. Catholic movies can focus on intellectual, emotional, or even material crises (again, see Malick) without touching evangelism, so there's a lot of flexibility in terms of plot. It also means you can have "loosely" Catholic movies. Conservative Protestant movies are virtually all "Will this nonbeliever come to Christ? Watch to find out!" From what I can tell, Old Fashioned seems to be an exception to this, though, since I gather the characters are all Christian from the start of the movie, though even then the movie revolves around the fact that they weren't when they were younger. This is actually why I'm hesitant to say that Christian Mingle is a Christian movie without seeing it - people ragged on its premise but it seemed to me that the trailer hinted that the movie's message was actually "you shouldn't place too much emphasis on dating people within your own faith, agnostic people are no different from Christians". Maybe someone can correct me on that. edit: Corbin Bernsen seems to be irritated a lot with Christian movies so maybe Christian Mingle does have a slightly different message? I'm not about to see it to find out
Cognac McCarthy fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Mar 29, 2015 |
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Mar 29, 2015 08:30
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Xibanya posted:Of course, I wonder what the essayist would say about all those apostles that ended up doing Jesus power things. Sounds like Papist idolatry/crypto-paganism to me
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Mar 29, 2015 12:10
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I have no idea if Christian Mingle is any good(I would assume it is not) but this Christian movie podcast Corbin Bernsen was on is neat http://morethanonelesson.com/episode-122-with-special-guest-corbin-bernsen/
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Mar 29, 2015 12:39
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Hat Thoughts posted:I have no idea if Christian Mingle is any good(I would assume it is not) but this Christian movie podcast Corbin Bernsen was on is neat
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Mar 29, 2015 14:21
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I'm really loving this thread right now, but I keep getting caught on the use of "conservative." There's no reason there couldn't be a good theologically conservative Christian film. A politically conservative Christian film, however, would probably suck. For example, and I can't recall if it even has Christian leanings, The Ten Commandments is conservative, and it's a very good film. Same with The Prince of Egypt. Contrast with Jesus Christ Superstar, which is theologically liberal. All are awesome.
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Mar 29, 2015 16:37
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lol at the people itt unironically saying that "a movie that advances a conservative agenda cannot be any good", when that exact sentiment reversed politically is what leads to the movies in this thread.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:37
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DStecks posted:lol at the people itt unironically saying that "a movie that advances a conservative agenda cannot be any good", when that exact sentiment reversed politically is what leads to the movies in this thread. How so? Do you mean that Old Fashioned and Alongside Night are going to radicalize someone into making communist propaganda films structured around a bricklayer being pressured into reading Marx and building bombs in the basement?
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Mar 29, 2015 17:42
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DStecks posted:lol at the people itt unironically saying that "a movie that advances a conservative agenda cannot be any good", when that exact sentiment reversed politically is what leads to the movies in this thread. But think about it: a conservative agenda involves deferring to already established power structures. So a conservative story involves obeying power and/or opposing those with less power. That just isn't a very fun narrative. Haven't you ever heard of an underdog? It's much more interesting to see a story about defending the powerless AGAINST the powerful. Probably why the best religious films use actual stories from the bible, since the protagonists can be reasonably construed as not being part of the dominant power structure of their society.
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Mar 29, 2015 17:44
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Jack Gladney posted:How so? Do you mean that Old Fashioned and Alongside Night are going to radicalize someone into making communist propaganda films structured around a bricklayer being pressured into reading Marx and building bombs in the basement? I literally cannot parse what you're saying, so let me drop out of GBS mode to explain that what I meant is that these movies exist to appeal to people who can't tolerate movies with what they view as liberal agendas. I know some of them, and they literally consider the film's "moral correctness" as the primary, or even only, measure of its quality; so saying that a right-wing movie can never be good is the precise thing these people are saying, just swap out the word left for right. Xibanya posted:But think about it: a conservative agenda involves deferring to already established power structures. So a conservative story involves obeying power and/or opposing those with less power. That just isn't a very fun narrative. Haven't you ever heard of an underdog? It's much more interesting to see a story about defending the powerless AGAINST the powerful. Are you going to genuinely argue that the only good narrative is an underdog story? Because that's a laughably simplistic and shallow view of, well, storytelling as a whole. I ask you to think about it: are all detective stories inherently bad, because a criminal, inherently, is an underdog against the police. Your position also disregards that a fictional story can frame a political conservative as an underdog: would a movie about a senator trying to pass anti-gay legislation, fighting a liberal controlled government, be a "much more interesting" story purely by virtue of his being an underdog? The fact of the matter is that there are dozens, hundreds of films that we would consider great that still have a politically conservative perspective, the currently hippest example to name being Ghostbusters. You can even make an argument that the action genre is inherently conservative, due to inherently being about the righteous application of violence. At the end of the day, you're rating a film's quality by its political stance, and that is exactly what the people who pay money to see God's Not Dead do, they've simply arrived at the opposite conclusion to you.
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Mar 29, 2015 18:03
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There's a fundamental difference between Atlas Shrugged and (say) Red Dawn, but it's not because of the politics of the filmmakers.
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Mar 29, 2015 18:16
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I'm pretty sure we're just trying to figure out what makes conservative Christian films frequently suck on an objective level.
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Mar 29, 2015 18:20
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DStecks posted:I literally cannot parse what you're saying, so let me drop out of GBS mode to explain that what I meant is that these movies exist to appeal to people who can't tolerate movies with what they view as liberal agendas. I know some of them, and they literally consider the film's "moral correctness" as the primary, or even only, measure of its quality; so saying that a right-wing movie can never be good is the precise thing these people are saying, just swap out the word left for right. Right, but for different reasons. When people say that conservative movies like that are bad, they're assessing the quality of the art, which is what makes regular movies good. It's not only ideological to laugh at people who don't know how to make movies in the same way that it's ideological to say that God's Not Dead is the only good movie made in the last five years because god wins and women know their place.
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Mar 29, 2015 18:21
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Cognac McCarthy posted:I'm pretty sure we're just trying to figure out what makes conservative Christian films frequently suck on an objective level. In that case it's probably because few to none of them are actually trained/educated as filmmakers.
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Mar 29, 2015 18:23
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Kangra posted:Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) clearly writes from a Christian (and Catholic) viewpoint, and while I wouldn't expect those films to be screened at a church, they are still exploring themes that aren't often touched on in in that way. you seen Calvary yet? written/directed by Martin McDonagh's brother John. one of the best films of 2014 and one of the best religious films in a long time Uncle Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Mar 29, 2015 |
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Mar 29, 2015 18:28
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