Hickory Huskers

I'll keep this short... I just finished watching 'Hoosiers', the story of a small town, Indiana, a basketball team, a new coach, and their inevitable road to victory against all odds. You may have seen it under the title 'Every Sports Movie Ever Made'. Anyway... it was a decent enough film, and it stars the Hack-Man himself, so it gets no knock from me. What does this have to do with anything? It might just be a perfect 'Christian' movie! It's well made, well acted, and all that jazz... Dennis Hopper plays a mean drunk, ie. Dennis Hopper in every movie ever (save for King Koopa in the 'Super Mario Bros. Movie'.), but with a little love, he sobers right up. Sort of. He's still an imperfect character, which is FREAKING WEIRD to see in a movie anymore.

So, of the seven kids on the team (though at the end of the film, they show eight... I have no idea where the extra guy came from), one of the 'stars' of the team is a very strong Christian and the son of the local preacher/team bus driver. So, before every game, they hunker down and get things right with God (the PK taking much longer to pray to God than the rest of the team is a running gag), and you know what? IT FEELS TOTALLY NATURAL. No one is making fun of the kid for praying. Hack-Man himself doesn't really pray, but he respects the rest of the team and keeps his head down and his mouth shut while they do their thing. The whole movie is about basketball, so they play lots of games, and as such... there are many scenes involving prayer and preaching and it all feels totally natural. WHY DON'T THEY JUST MAKE FILMS LIKE THIS!? The movie was totally clean, I think they maybe said 'damn' once, and it felt very natural. I guess I'm just getting tired of these over-the-top gushy scenes full of 'Christianese' in 90% of Christian films. Yes, I get it, you're making a Christian movie. STOP STOPPING THE FLOW OF THE FILM.

'The Ultimate Gift' did a good job in this department. It felt natural.

I think, for the most part, we can all agree that most Christian films are created as a ministry tool/outreach opportunity right? They promote many films with a 'bring a friend' mentality and often try to disguise films as 'normal' films (ie. Thr3e) in the box office... well, when they have some out of place, weird, awkward scene that has nothing to do with anything but to make a 'God mention' quota, it doesn't work! It's like making a 'Porkys' sequel and constantly having the higher ups demand more leg when they see the dailies.

I'm done.

- Don



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