The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.
But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for Sodom or Gomorrah in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need be.
While the big knock against the Christian movie genre for more secular moviegoers – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir, there hasn’t been, aside from the occasional blockbuster, much for broader audiences to judge such films on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing.
On Aug. 15, The Weinstein Company, founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 2005 after the brothers left the then-Disney-owned Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979, released The Giver, starring three-time Academy award winner Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges. Set in a fictional post-war 2048, the community has decided to get rid of colours and, as a consequence, different races and feelings. All citizens have had the memories from before erased from their minds.
Raymond Arroyo, who is a classically trained actor himself, interviewed Bridges, and Lois Lowry, author of the 1993 novel by the same name on which the movie is based, on EWTN’s The World Over last month.
Heaven Is for Real, directed by Randall Wallace and written by Christopher Parker, based on Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s 2010 book of the same name, and starring Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Jacob Vargas and Nancy Sorel, was released April 16. It tells the story of three-year-old Imperial, Nebraska, native Colton Burpo, the son of Pastor Burpo, and what he says he experienced heaven during emergency surgery.
Colton Burpo, now 14, later described to his incredulous family scenes of having looked down to see the doctor operating, his mother calling people to pray in the waiting room, and his father in another room yelling at God and knowledge gleaned from his time in heaven that he could not otherwise have obtained about his great-grandfather and his second sister who died before being born. He goes on to describe Jesus, his physical appearance, and his horse.
When the Game Stands Tall was released Aug. 22. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, now playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle of Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times. The movie was filmed in Louisiana.
- God’s Not Dead with Kevin Sorbo was released March 21;
- Noah with Russell Crowe was released March 28;
- Son of God, produced by evangelical Mark Burnett from Survivor, and his Catholic wife, Roma Downey, was released Feb. 21.
The “new” Left Behind movie about the Rapture by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, and Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer, is being released in North American theatres Oct.3.
The Rapture in Christian eschatology refers to the “being caught up,” as written about by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, when he says the “dead in Christ” and “we who are alive and remain” will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet “the Lord in the air.” It is a long and complex discussion, but suffice to say Catholics, while they believe in the Second Coming of Christ at the end of the age, do not literally believe in The Rapture as understood by premillennial dispensationalists, which shapes the theology, as it is, in recent years in almost all popular culture books and movies about the Rapture, including the ones discussed here.
The choice of Cage has caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic. Lalonde and his new Stoney Lake Entertainment have really stepped their game up to big-league production values from the first three Left Behind movies he was involved in with Cloud Ten pictures more than a decade ago.
And speaking of the Rapture, Tim Chey’s movie, Final: The Rapture, released a year ago in theatres, will be out in DVD in November, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards. While there have been generally cheesy church-sponsored, Halloween “Hell Houses” videos in the past, Final: The Rapture is an unusual sub-genre of Christian horror movie or Christian disaster movie. The movie’s poster promise, “When the Rapture strikes … all of hell will break loose.”
Chey said his purpose is “to scare the living daylights out of nonbelievers … If it means I have to make a horror film to make it realistic to win people to Christ, then so be it.”
Online Maranatha News of Toronto calls Final: The Rapture “the scariest Christian movie ever.”
Final: The Rapture depicts the apocalyptic chaos that ensues for four nonbelievers – an African-American, an Asian, a Hispanic and a white man living in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and on a South Pacific island, after the Rapture occurs. “In Los Angeles, Colin Nelson desperately attempts to flee to Bora Bora. Keenly aware that he’s in the Tribulation period, his only hope is in a mysterious man. In Tokyo, a journalist, Masashi, tries to unravel the disappearance of millions of people as the government closes in on him. In Buenos Aires, Marie searches for her final relative as time runs out. And on a deserted island in the South Pacific, Tom Wiseman, an avowed atheist, attempts to be rescued after his plane goes down.”
The film was shot in six countries over five months for about $7 million, Final: The Rapture, raised the necessary production money across a spectrum of investors, ranging from faith-based to hedge funds.
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