Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Christian movies among those not screened for critics

Can you spot Bob the Tomato in that picture? I think he's lurking in the back, but as usual, he is notably absent from recent VeggieTales productions. I remember when he was all over them, talking about God and the Bible and such all the time.

It is usually a bad sign when movies don't screen for critics. Typically it means that the studio believes that reviews could only hurt a film, so they just skip the whole process.

Unfortunately, Universal has decided to go that route with the latest VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, as the Orlando Sentinel reports.

Now, this might mean that Universal is enlightened enough to be looking ahead to a time when preview screenings aren't given to an elitist group of critics who then filter out what people actually watch(sarcasm intended), but given the other movies that other movies not screened include the latest Uwe Boll videogame epic, the latest spoof from the creators of the awful Epic Movie, the latest in a long line of awful American remakes of mediocre Japanese horror films and the latest of Sylvester Stallone's 20 Years After-style sequels.

Come to think of it, I actually really want to see Stallone's latest Rambo film. It features him rescuing Christian missionaries, so maybe we could squeeze it in somehow. You think Christianity Today will do a cover story on it to legitimize it for Christian audiences?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't screen my movies for critics once it has been reviewed by the right people and completed for public distribution. The movie was not made for them but for the intended movie audience. Why kill the success of the film by critics who see film from their finite view/perspective and base it on films of a different era that they enjoy but not the audience of today. Film-makers with a built-in audience following who they make the films for, do not owe it to the critics to see the movies and rate it because it may not be communicated to their level of understanding. I think this is the way movies will be going very soon. Yes the critics are free to review it but on their own terms. The confidence of the movies made should not be based on the critics review in the first place but the approval of the audiences it was made for.