|
When Soul Surfer was released and did so well, I thought we'd see a lot more Christian film companies trying to follow in its footsteps--the kind of Jesus Lite, positive-message movies that could cross over as family-friendly entertainment in the mainstream market. It seemed like a no-brainer--you get a movie that Christians can watch and feel good about, functions as proselytizing for the mainstream market, and makes a bunch of money. The fact that nobody's really tried to duplicate that formula kind of blows my mind. Daniel Radosh, who wrote a book on Christian pop culture (a weird stunt journalism trend there for a while), articulated the major problem with Christian film in his review of Fireproof: "Committed to promoting an unambiguous message that God solves all problems, Fireproof never portrays Christians doing anything untoward, or even experiencing any sorrow. . . In the perfect world of Fireproof, good Christians do not have bad marriages, any more than they drink, gamble or swear." In Soul Surfer, the protagonist actually claims that getting her arm chomped off by a shark made her life better, because, you know, Jesus. Christian movies are unwilling to let their protagonists suffer in any kind of significant way, because it would undermine their message that God will take care of you. There's never any narrative tension, because you know that by the end of the movie, you know that anyone who's doing what they Biblically "should" be doing will be handed a 100 percent perfect ending with a shiny red bow on it. If you're looking for "good" Christian movies, Steve Taylor's films (The Second Chance and Blue Like Jazz) come up heads and shoulders above their competition, although both are still pretty mediocre compared to similar secular films. But they're an interesting experiment within the boundaries of Christian film, and there needs to be lots more exploration in that direction if the genre ever wants to be taken more seriously. (Taylor actually swore up and down that Blue Like Jazz was not a Christian film when he was promoting it, because he knew that being associated with the genre would absolutely destroy any credibility that the film might otherwise get. And to be fair, it's not really "a Christian film" in the sense that Fireproof is a Christian film.) As a weirdo agnostic but Christian-film junkie, I would love to discuss: - Christian film's race problem - the Kendrick brothers' professional split from Sherwood Baptist Church but I figure this is long enough for a first post already.
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2013 06:19
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 20:59 |
|
|
The racial treatment in Christian films consistently strikes me as about two decades behind the times. The filmmakers usually want to appeal to both white and black Christian audiences, so they make sure they include black sidekicks for their white protagonists, but in doing so, they almost inevitably play into really dated stereotypes. The Sherwood Pictures stuff in particularly is full of it, as other posters have already noted--the women always have a sassy black lady friend, the men have a tough but good-natured, tell-it-like-it-is black man friend. There's a lot of Magical Negro poo poo going on, a lot of POC characters who are only there to propel the white heroes' journeys. Lots of Whoopi Goldberg "You in danger, girl" speeches. Racial tropes that were common in a lot of early '90s films, basically. To be fair, they haven't been completely eradicated from mainstream film-making either, but the difference is that with mainstream films, there is inevitably somebody in the mainstream media calling them out on it, and sometimes they learn. There is largely nobody serving that "call out" function for the Christian films, and so they never learn and these tropes tend to get recycled at a much greater frequency. One of the reasons I liked The Second Chance is because it didn't play upon those tropes nearly as much as I was expecting. I was uncomfortable with the set-up--a rich white pastor from a wealthy church comes to help a poor black pastor at an inner-city church--because I knew Christian films' track record on race and was expecting a white savior bent. The movie definitely isn't perfect when it comes to race, but it does go in directions you wouldn't expect. There's another movie I watched, called (I think) The Grace Card, about a black cop and a white cop that have to learn to overcome their prejudices when they're partnered together, and while it's still pretty terrible (as you might have guessed, reading that premise), I appreciated that it was at least trying to address racial issues in a realistic way rather than sweeping them under a "You go girl" rug the way the Sherwood movies and a lot of other Christian films do. Beyond that, I think pretty much every single Christian film I've ever watched has included at least one scene, stereotype or trope that is straight out of 1993. Also, please feel free to share the absolute worst Christian movies you've ever seen. I think mine has to be this one, which inexplicably has the premise of a horror movie (and is shot vaguely like one)--due to a sudden road closure, a bunch of strangers are trapped in a roadside cafe . . . where the cafe's owner seems to know a creepy amount of information about their lives. Because he's Jesus, of course. When Jesus isn't coming off like a serial killer, he comes off like a controlling, abusive husband. I'm not sure how anybody, believer or non-, could watch it and want to be a Christian afterward, but there you go.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2013 08:11
|
|
|
Jesus Christ Superstar comes out of the hippie-Jesus movement of the late '60s and '70s (see also: Godspell, to a lesser extent Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, to a way lesser extent Hair) as opposed to the more right-wing evangelical Christian movement that began in the early '80s. Still definitely Christian, but its purpose was quite a bit different from most of the stuff in this thread, which all comes from the later conservative trend.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2013 22:28
|
|
|
Christian movies have been a thing for a while now, but I think this was the first year that so many of them got wide releases. (Prior to this, most of it was straight-to-video or limited to Christian film festivals and/or specific theaters in, mostly, the South.) I don't know if that's because the Christian film industry is exploding or because movie theaters are branching out to more niche stuff in order to bring in audiences that wouldn't normally attend. It seemed like around the time that Soul Surfer came out, a lot of the mainstream studios were opening faith-based lines or trying to find Christian films that might be able to cross over to a non-evangelical (but still mildly-to-moderately religious) audience that's looking for family friendly stuff. I'm guessing we'll see more and more of it in the coming years.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2014 03:33
|
|
|
Wapole Languray posted:
Definitely Christian, but way more Catholic than evangelical. There's far too much premarital/extramarital sex/swearing in it for evangelicals, Fantine is presented way too sympathetically (anything evangelical would require her to be way more sorry about the whole premarital sex thing), and Catholics are the heroes of the story--Valjean's entire arc is set in place by the bishop, not to mention the role that the nuns play in helping him and Cosette. If you look for Les Miserables reactions from Catholics, you mostly get blog entries and articles about how the Christian/Catholic themes in it are really great and well done. If you look for reactions from evangelicals, the reaction is more mixed--in some cases you get people praising it; in others, you get poo poo like this. (In fact, some evangelicals actually think Les Mis is explicitly pro-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism--with Valjean representing Catholicism and Javert representing Protestantism.) This probably isn't terribly surprising, given that Les Miserables's relationship to religion is moderately more complex than, say, Left Behind or God's Not Dead, and evangelicals prefer as little complexity as possible in their Christian messages.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2015 01:10
|
|