The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

NY Times Article on Faith in Movies

May 27th, 2006

Hey, y’all: check out today’s article on a subject near and dear to my heart, “God and Man on Screen.” It’s an interesting analysis, stating that most post-Passion films use religion as a hook to draw audiences in, but they don’t end up really exploring any deep questions, instead reverting to the trite (including trite criticisms of organized religion as opposed to vague, decontextualized “spirituality”).

I haven’t seen The Omen or The King, but I agree with the article’s analysis of Saved and The Da Vinci Code. I thought Saved was cute and funny, but I thought it actually would have benefitted from issuing a sharper critique of evangelical culture, rather than resorting to “let’s all accept each other” at the end. Perhaps such a critique needs to come from within evangelicalism–prophets reform from within–since it was clear that the filmmakers weren’t quite as familiar with the evangelical subculture as they should have been (no evangelical high school would ever put on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar).

I do have to say, though, that I disagree with the paragraph about The Passion of the Christ’s appeal. Caryn James writes, “Presenting the story without question, that film either spoke to an audience or not, based on each viewer’s belief in Jesus’ suffering.” Porpoise and I, though Christians who believe in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus, were unimpressed with The Passion (as were some other Christians that I know). This has more to do with our personalities and tastes than with our faith. It may be a valuable film–though I do also have problems with the perhaps unintentionally anti-Semitic portrayal of the Jewish leaders–but that’s not to say that all Christians will love it, simply because the story accords with what we believe. We also care about how the story is presented.

Do read the article, though. It’s interesting.

Entry Filed under: Movies