On the episode entitled God & Hollywood, posted June 17, host Dick Staub gathered a group of movie critics to talk about the trend of "Christian" movies produced by Hollywood. The discussion of Hollywood produced Christian movies was good, and called to my mind our conversation with Bill Ewing of Everytribe Entertainment, who said that the success of The Passion was "a fluke."
However, when the discussion turned to independent Christian movies, the critics revealed their ignorance. Host Staub mentioned One Night With the King, but none of them had seen it, although that didn't stop them from dismissing it as having no "big-name stars." I would have thought a group of movie critics would consider Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif and John Rhys-Davies "big-name stars." They continued by bad-mouthing Facing the Giants, admittedly not my favorite film, but one with many redeeming qualities. They even made the claim, that I'd not heard anywhere else, that Facing the Giants was polished by Sony when they picked it up. If that is so, which I doubt, the Kendrick bros. didn't mention it on their director's commentary.
They do have a good discussion on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but they don't give the film enough credit for its marketing. If you put in "expelled" on google, the entire first page of links are all related to the movie. That's pretty good marketing if you ask me. Try putting in "Get Smart," a huge movie that opened this past weekend, and had a highly successful and still popular TV-show in the 60s. Only a couple links down on the first page of google you'll find a link un-related to the movie or the tv-show, a link to some sort of banking service.
I guess I should be glad that they got so much wrong about Christian movies. Otherwise, we might be out of a job, and I'd have to get filthy rich doing something else.
(The Kindlings Muse - God & Hollwood)
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(The Kindlings Muse - God & Hollwood)
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1 comment:
I started a thread on the christianfilmmakers website here in response to the first half of the podcast. I found it very informative and enjoyed their discussion. Thanks for sharing about this. Here it is:
http://www.christianfilmmakers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1780
Here's some of what I wrote:
Also of interest -- the struggles for Chrsitian filmmakers or artists struggling to raise money for their art unless their art is evangelistic. Choosing between spending money in the church for missions, feeding the poor or millions to make a movie. If it's not evangelistic, churches may not want to have anything to do with it.
But does that make it less relevant? Sure... but find your money somewhere else, folks might say. Not every Christian is an evangelist. Some are called to teach, others to encourage.
Another thing they discussed of interest was Hollywood as a superficial culture but also the Christian community being superficial as well in America and so they pointed out that they are actually perfect for each other. They said the culture is one that does not really care about craft.
They also discussed the aspect of what art really is and that many Christian homes don't talk about what the purpose of art is or the importance of it.
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