That’s probably 90% of the problem with Christian media in general. It’s main (and usually sole) selling point is that it’s “Christian”, not that it’s well written, acted, painted, played, etc… It’s a sort of shorthand for a certain sort of overtly religious and saccharine version of whatever media or art form is in question.
There’s a significant chunk of the Christian population that seems to overlap with the more conservative denominations (S. Baptist, Evangelical, etc…) that tends to eat that kind of thing up, regardless of quality, because of the perceived message and an expected level of “wholesomeness”. And they tend to foist this stuff off on their children, whether they want it or not.
So what you get is a bunch of sub-standard bands, movies, TV shows, and novels which sell relatively well due to the sole fact that they’re Christian, not that they’re actually good. That’s not to say that there aren’t some decent acts in that crowd- there are, but they usually end up going mainstream and getting shunned. Amy Grant and Jessica Simpson are two good examples of this.
Contrast all this with artists who set out to be good first, and put their message second. U2 and C.S. Lewis are a couple of artists who come to mind as extremely Christian, but who aren’t making it their main selling point.
Absolutely. Jesus of Montreal would, I think, be similarly un-appealing to fundies.
In my opinion, though, “movies made specifically to appeal to fundies” is a different category from “Christian movies”.
To my mind, at least, “Christian movies” = movies with an explicitly Christian theme - ones that explore Christianity, and especially, grapple with the very notion of what Christianity is ‘all about’.
Many of those will, of course, be deeply offensive to fundies. Some of them will be pretty good as movies, though.
“Movies that appeal to fundies” as a category is likely to contain movies that are universally bad.
Another historical drama that is ‘all about’ what it means to be Christian (and in particular, the nature of redemption in Christian terms, and a Christian’s proper response to violence and oppression) is The Mission. It’s truly excellent - in fact, one of my favorite movies of all time. Interestingly, it doesn’t pose any particular answers.
An important difference between the silent and sound version of the film is that in the former, Ben-Hur goes through a genuine spiritual conversion at the end. In the latter (the more famous one, with Chuck Heston), it’s sort of implied but never explicitly depicted.
Just coincidentally, I say literally yesterday a reference to the original silent version in a totally different context!
Apparently, the sea battle they depicted in it was insanely violent - it was touted as an example of how violence has always been a major part of the movies, in a minidocumentary I saw concerning the Dirty Harry series.
Of all the totally obscure things to arise … and I still haven’t actually seen the silent version. Now, I’m kinda curious.
I think what the OP had in mind as “Christian” movies (note the quotation marks) are movies that market themselves as Christian movies, are released by Christian studios, are marketed toward Christian (and, more specifically, Evangelical Christian) audiences, and are sold in “Christian bookstores.” While I’m not familiar with the “genre” myself, I imagine these are the sorts of movies that are meant.
Er, what? Going to disagree with you on Lewis. He was a fine writer, but Christian apologetics was the focus of pretty much all his non-academic work. The Narnia books are explicit Christian allegories - in the last one, Aslan shows up as the Lamb of God, and tells the Pevensies that they must seek him under a different name in their world. The space trilogy is about angels trying to redeem the Earth.
This is why Tolkien didn’t care for Lewis’ fiction - he hated allegory. Even though The Lord of the Rings is suffused with Tolkien’s Catholic values (a critic once described it as an extended essay on the metaphor “God is light”), he wrote simply to tell a story. IMO, that’s why it’s better than Narnia or the space trilogy.
Fair enough; if that is what is meant, it isn’t surprising that there are few examples that are truly “great” (or even “reasonably good”).
To my mind, it isn’t so much that the budgets are small, or that the genre has a niche market - what matters is that there can be no real challenges. The movies are simply spoon-feeding the audience what they want to hear.
A great movie is generally one that challeges the viewer in some way.
Most likely. In many evangelical circles, specifically the independent baptist segment it is strongly encouraged that members not go to the movies. Schools like Bob Jones and others associated with the movement have it in their code of conduct that students not go to secular movies and they do take disciplinary action if you do. So the only ones they end up watching are the very specifically “Christian” ones that have a message.
Let’s see how they do it in the remake coming out next year. Jesus is going to be a bigger character in that one than he was in the 1959 Heston version.
I’m not disagreeing, but I’m saying that Lewis wasn’t writing for an insular market of believers, so he wrote good books, or rather his books were good enough to be successful in spite of their religious themes.
Contrast this with say… Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins who have written hundreds of books (literally!) aimed at this insular market. I haven’t read any, but the fact that only one series has seen the light of secular day, I have to conclude that they’re some unholy combination of glurge and bad writing.
That’s what I was getting at- the market pressure for excellence isn’t there because of this insular “Christian” market, whether it’s literature, music, art, or whatever other substandard crap you slap a cross on and call “Christian” and sell to that market.
I’d add my pet theory that mainstream Christianity in the 50s-90s maintained a staunch “Rock n’ Roll is the devil’s music” position, a position you still see in a lot of churches to this day. Churches having publicly and repeatedly cut themselves off from what would become the dominant musical force of the coming decades, Christian rock music has struggled to break back in - all the innovation already happened without them.
Same here. But I’ve saw one Hallmark Christmas movie that was pretty good, at least for the niche it was trying to fit into. A charismatic lead and a nice story. The ending was way too perfect, but I enjoyed it overall.
The “Christian” movies discussed in this thread seem almost offensive at times. The one with Kevin Sorbo seemed incredibly bad. I did however have a teacher in college that tried to convince the class there was no God, focusing on one student in particular.
