Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

 

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise.  Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here 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 what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in 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.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

Woodlawn is a potent mix of Deep South high school football set against a backdrop of racial tension and the early 1970s Jesus movement

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

It’s a pretty impressive list.

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Woodlawn, released last October, is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 97, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review last September after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Dissed by the secular media and New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, Pure Flix Entertainment rocked the box office with opening of God’s Not Dead 2

The April fool’s joke this year apparently was on the secular skeptics, smarmy and oh-so-hip young Catholic religiös from New Catholic Generation’s Catholics Watch, and myriad other naysaying Nellies. God’s Not Dead 2, which opened in the United States Friday, April 1, rocked the pop culture theater box office with a three-day weekend opening of $7.624 million in box office receipts as of Sunday, April 3, according to Box Office Mojo, the leading online box-office reporting service, operated by Seattle-based Internet Movie Database, (IMDb), which is owned by Amazon.com, and widely considered the number one movie website in the world.

That was a good enough showing for God’s Not Dead 2 to finish fourth that weekend behind Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zootopia and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. All in all, not too shabby, and suggesting some crossover appeal into the ranks of the unchurched. The original God’s Not Dead in 2014 went on to gross more than $60 million in the United States.

Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian’s film critic, huffed in his April 28 review: “The almighty may not be dead, but Nietzsche is rolling in his grave. Angry, smug self-pity is becoming the keynote of the God’s Not Dead Christian movie franchise. This new drama is about how Christians are threatened and oppressed in … well, where do you think? Iraq? Syria? Places where millennia of Christian traditions are genuinely being trashed and their believers in real danger? Erm, no – this film is set in the U.S., where Christians are crushed under the jackboot of sneering liberals and pantomime-villain atheists.” The storyline for God’s Not Dead 2 (you can watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxz-Y-c2UUc) has public high school history teacher Grace Wesley (played by Melissa Joan Hart) responding to a student’s question about Jesus’ teachings, as they relate to the non-violent teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. The teacher’s response acknowledges that “the writer of the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as saying, ‘You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” In response to another student’s comment, she adds some additional remarks about those who would die for what they believe.

By the end of the day, the teacher finds herself facing the wrath of the principal, the school board, and her union representative, after a text message from yet another student in the class finds its way to the first student’s parents, who are irate.

Offered the chance to apologize for mentioning Jesus in the classroom, she refuses, asserting that she had done nothing wrong in answering the question. In short order, she is put on leave without pay and a proxy civil action on behalf of the school board by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) follows, as they attempt to have her fired and her teacher’s certificate revoked.

Now, truth be told, I’m a fan of the Guardian. The London-based newspaper is one of the truly serious remaining English-language titles internationally. And Bradshaw’s review is not without merit for pointing out places like Iraq and Syria where Christians are undergoing real persecution today. Point taken. But at the same time it would be naïve to suggest an overt reference to Christianity in American classrooms today is not somehow a potentially high-octane mix that could land a teacher in a major conflagration. So while the point may be overdrawn in God’s Not Dead 2, it, too, has merit and isn’t simply a matter of paranoia on the so-called Christian Right, as some secular liberals would have you believe. The Oberlin Review, established in 1874, and the student newspaper of Oberlin College in Ohio, called God’s Not Dead 2 “a Slice of Trump-Era Propaganda” in a headline for an April 14 review by arts editor Christian Bolles, going on in the piece to call it a “nauseatingly unnecessary follow-up” to the original movie.

In the original God’s Not Dead, released by Pure Flix Entertainment in March 2014 (watch a YouTube trailer here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjo5f9eiX8), Josh Wheaton, an evangelical college student (played by Shane Harper) enrols in a philosophy class taught by Professor Jeffrey Radisson (played by Kevin Sorbo), an atheist, who demands his students sign a declaration that “God is dead” to pass. Josh is the only student who refuses to sign. Radisson requires Josh to debate the topic with him but agrees to let the class members decide the winner.  I admit the cosmology, not to mention the philosophy, is pretty convoluted in places to be fully persuasive as Christian apologetics, but when it comes to evolution versus creationism this is a very old and convoluted debate in America, no matter which side you find yourself on. While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Saturday Night Live (SNL), which was perhaps last truly funny around the time it debuted on NBC in 1975 – about the same time the Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism debate reignited – parodied God’s Not Dead 2 last month, which while fair game, came as a surprise probably to exactly no one. Maybe that’s also why SNL last night, 30 years after its debut, brought back former cast member Dana Carvey to resurrect his “Church Lady” sketch, which he performed as character Enid Strict hosting her talk show Church Chat between 1986 and 1993, to deal now with a satanic Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

New Catholic Generation administrator Renée Shumay, joined by several of her young smirking cohorts, have done at last count at least three Catholics Watch vids on Gods Not Dead 2 since January, two based on trailers, and a more recent one based on the full movie, each being more smarmy than the one before. New Catholic Generation bills itself as a “Catholic teen initiative that uses YouTube to spread the Catholic faith.” God help us. Catholics kids are oh-so-cool don’t you know.  And we wonder why evangelical Protestant Christians sometimes question whether Catholics are really Christians?

Ohio-based vlogger Shumay, who has worked for the last year for Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), is an alumnus of the proud-to-be-orthodox über Catholic Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, I’m embarrassed as a co-religionist to say. If you are in doubt, check them out for yourself at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcY_wn_6g7E and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0cu_NXEXuU

It’s a very Catholic Thing, the whole “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship. Unfortunately.

Maybe someone should get the word out to Shumay and her New Catholic Generation hotshots that Protestant-bashing masquerading as pop culture criticism is not so cool in 2016.

While it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the sex-and-morality hot-button issues of his pontificate, although it does garner some coverage, one of the most interesting facets of Pope Francis in action is to watch is his truly remarkable rapprochement with Protestants, particularly evangelicals of all denominations, including his now famous impromptu iPhone video message two years ago for Kenneth Copeland, and other influential evangelicals, done during a January 2014 three-hour breakfast meeting chat at the Vatican with his close personal friend Bishop Tony Palmer, 48, of the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, a close personal friend of the Pope’s, dating back to their days in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Tragically, Palmer died about six months later on July 20, 2014 in hospital following hours of surgery after a motorcycle accident.

Pope Francis, along with his meetings in 2014  with Palmer, and Copeland, co-host of Believer’s Voice of Victory, also met with James and Betty Robison, co-hosts of the Life Today television program, Rev. Geoff Tunnicliff, chief executive office of the World Evangelical Alliance; well-known Canadian evangelical leader Brian Stiller, Rev. Thomas Schirrmacher, also from the World Evangelical Alliance, and Rev. John Arnott and his wife, Carol, co-founders of Partners for Harvest ministries in Toronto. That meeting lasted almost three hours and included a private luncheon with Pope Francis.

God’s not dead. But Catholic “we’re-the-one-true-Church-and-you’re-not” sort of petty one-upmanship of those working in the evangelical Protestant Christian filmmaking genre should be. If young Catholics’ big knocks against that Christian movie genre are too many heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting or cheesy sets that do little more than preach to the choir, we eagerly await their contributions alongside Pure Flix Entertainment to the movie canon.

Criticize or evangelize?

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Left Behind and the Canadian boys from North Bay, Ontario, brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde

 

Sometimes it’s a “special feature” embedded deep on the DVD off the “main menu” that is the real nugget.  After not finding enough bandwidth to watch a Netflix offering, I dug deep into my DVD collection last night to pull out the first Left Behind movie by North Bay, Ontario brothers Peter and Paul Lalonde, filmed in 2000, and which made its theatrical premiere on Jan. 26, 2001 at a star-studded red carpet event at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) theatre on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The DVD special feature, “Seeing is Believing,” has interviews with some of those on hand for that theatrical premiere, including the redoubtable Tom Selleck.

At the time almost 16 years ago, Left Behind: The Movie was the biggest and most ambitious Christian genre movie ever made, and it was hoped by many in the evangelical community to be the big crossover movie that would appeal also to the general public – read the “unsaved” or “non-believers,” as well as those already preaching in the choir. Left Behind: The Movie was an unusual release  because it went to video first in October 2000, then theatres in January 2001.  It opened in 800 theatres and grossed $4.2 million.  It won “Bestselling Title of the Year from an Independent Studio” and “Sell-through Title of the Year by an Independent Studio” from the Video Software Dealer’s Association.

Alas, Left Behind has never quite realized that early promise and the franchise has been beset by problems of various kinds over the last decade.

For the uninitiated, Left Behind started out as a a series of 16 best-selling novels by Americans Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist End Times view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows.  The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

LaHaye, now 89, is a sometimes controversial evangelical minister, who conceived the Left Behind books, although Jerry B. Jenkins, 66, a  sports-oriented biographical writer, did the actual writing of the books from LaHaye’s notes.

LaHaye was inspired to write the books in part by the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

Jenkins, on the other hand, has said, “I write the best I can. I know I’m never going to be revered as some classic writer. I don’t claim to be C. S. Lewis. The literary-type writers, I admire them. I wish I was smart enough to write a book that’s hard to read, you know?” Having read all 16 books in the series –  from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides;  Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed;  Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The  Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007, I can only say, “true that Jerry.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That is very much an evangelical Protestant rather than Catholic reading of 1 Thessalonians,  as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. Catholics do, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

The Left Behind movie franchise, which is now up to four movies with a fifth possible, is perhaps surprisingly, a Canadian phenomenon, spearheaded by two brothers from North Bay Ontario, Peter and Paul Lalonde, who first came to wide notice on television in 1989 with their weekly half-hour show This Week in Bible Prophecy, before going onto form Cloud Ten Pictures in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1995. Paul Lalonde worked as social worker at various group homes in North Bay before attaining his televised pulpit, while Peter Lalonde was a good enough goalie he might had a shot at playing NHL hockey had he wanted to.

Peter Lalonde has said he became a “Christian as a result of seeing The Prodigal in 1983 in a church.  I went back on Sunday, then again, and several weeks later I became a believer.”

Left Behind: The Movie was quickly followed by Left Behind II: Tribulation Force in 2002 and Left Behind: World at War in 2005, all starring Kirk Cameron, 45, still perhaps best known to the larger public as a  teenage actor for his role as Mike Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains between 1985 and 1992, and Brad Johnson, Gordon Currie,  Janaya Stephens, and Cameron’s real-life wife, Chelsea Noble.

But none of them would be back by the time the fourth movie, simply called  Left Behind, was finally released nine years later in October 2014.

The most recent Left Behind movie was produced by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, a company he formed in 2012, and released through Cloud Ten Pictures, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, Johnson’s former role as an airline pilot, with Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer and movie.

The choice of Cage 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.

Why the long delay? Some nasty litigation is one explanation.  LaHaye, who had sold the film rights for Left Behind to Joe Goodman, Bobby Neutz and Ralph Winter, owners of Namesake Entertainment in April 1997, before the End Times novels became a publishing phenomenon, hated the film. Namesake Entertainment had sold the rights to make the film to Cloud Ten Pictures in 1999. Left Behind: The Movie  was privately financed and cost $17.4 million to make, including production, post-production, publicity, marketing, and distribution costs.Its theological consultants included John Hagee, author of Four Blood Moons: Something is About to Change, published in October 2013, from Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, and Michigan televangelist Jack Van Impe.

Widely known as “The Walking Bible” for spending about 35,000 hours in memorizing 14,000 Bible verses, Van Impe, who at 84 is a bit of a youngster compared to 97-year-old Billy Graham, where Van Impe got his start at the age of 17 playing the accordion before he started preaching, was hospitalized in early April with serious cardiac problems, missing taping almost six months worth of half hour episodes for his long-running TV show Jack Van Impe Presents, an eschatological commentary on the news of the week, which he normally co-hosts with his wife, Rexella Van Impe, while a number of guest co-hosts stepped in during his long convalescence in hospital and at a Michinga nursing home before his return to the airwaves in early October. The Van Impes have been married since 1954.

Sharp-eyed observers in Left Behind: The Movie could get a quick glimpse of Jack Van Impe as one of the passengers caught up in the Rapture mid-transatlantic flight. The Lalondes and Cloud Ten Pictures discovered early on theological consultants, musicians and all kinds of normally behind-the-scenes folk, like most everyone, enjoy the chance to have their 15 seconds of fame on the silver screen, too, which is also good for holding the line on production costs from the filmmakers’ perspective.

LaHaye, however, was not so easily charmed. He sued both Namesake Entertainment and Cloud Ten Pictures in July 1999, claiming the the producers told him that the movie’s production budget would exceed $40 million, although there was no language in the contract to that effect. LaHaye also claimed that he had sold the film rights on the condition that the picture be produced by a major studio with big-name Hollywood box office stars, and released to theaters in late 1999 so as to capitalize on the Y2K phenomenon.

LaHaye’s lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. federal district court in 2003, but by that point Cloud Ten Pictures and Namesake Entertainment had filed a countersuit against LaHaye for breach of contract, among other allegations.

Ultimately, in August 2008, the two sides settled their legal differences out of court, and LaHaye reportedly liked a rough cut he saw of the new Left Behind movie.

Unfortunately for Cloud Ten Pictures, Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, LaHaye, if he did in fact like the finished final cut as well, was pretty much alone in that opinion. To say the film was savaged by critics in both the serious religious and secular press would be a charitable understatement. Two examples, one from the religious press, one from the secular, pretty much illustrate the debacle

Jackson Cuidon, writing in Christianity Today, said, “[t]he Left Behind movie is just a disaster flick injected with the slightest, most infinitesimal amount of Christianity possible. This is, in one way, good – no one needs to be upset, or get angry, or be offended, or question their beliefs, or the beliefs of those around them, or anything, because the film takes no stance on anything. The film is so inept, confused, and involuted that there’s no danger of even accidentally cobbling together something that could necessitate a defense of Christianity.”

That was the mild criticism. Andrew Barker (no relation), senior features writer for Variety, penned this piece published Oct. 2, 2014, the day before the film opened in theaters:  “In what was surely a first in the annals of motion-picture marketing, an early ad for Left Behind featured a quote taken not from a film critic, but rather from Satan himself, who allegedly quipped, ‘Please do not bring unbelievers to this movie,’” Barker wrote.

“This presents a rare scenario in which Christian moviegoers ought to feel perfectly secure heeding the advice of the Devil, as this faith-based thriller is likely to inspire far more dorm-room drinking games than religious conversions. With a Sharknado-inspired visual style and a deeply weary lead performance from Nicolas Cage, Left Behind is cheap-looking, overwrought kitsch of the most unintentionally hilarious order, its eschatological bent representing its only real shot at box office redemption.”

OK, for the record, eh. I’m a big fan of the Sharknado franchise, too, so find your analogical comparisons elsewhere, and for God’s sake, if no other, lighten up namesake Barker! Cheesy is OK. Popular culture is made up of a rich cornucopia of cheesy television and movies that almost require a mandatory bowl of Cheetos® to consume such classics.

I haven’t seen the most recent Left Behind movie yet (although I have seen the first three). Will I? Quite probably should the opportunity present itself. Why?  I’ve been a writer long enough to know critics like to hear the sound of their own voices above all else and if purple prose and hyperbole serve the day’s writing purpose, so be it. Most film critics are about as qualified to write about religion and especially eschatology as I am to perform neurosurgery.

Besides I have something of a soft spot admittedly for the Lalonde brothers, the boys from North Bay. Way back in 1993 and 1994, when I was a first-year graduate student in 2oth century American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and was contemplating what thesis topic I might pursue for my master’s degree, one of my possibilities under consideration was premillennial dispensationalism and the Rapture, which made watching This Week in Bible Prophecy something of a guilty pleasure. But in fairness, much of what I first learned about the “cashless” society and biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning, all of which came true in the years that followed, so much so they’re almost commonplaces today, I first learned more than 20 years ago watching Peter and Paul Lalonde.

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St. Polycarp, a second century bishop of Smyrna, is subject of new movie just released on DVD

St. Polycarp, one of the three chief Apostolic Fathers, who was a second century bishop of Smyrna, one of the new centres for the Christian world after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and located in modern-day Turkey on the Aegean Sea, was martyred at the age of 86 in 155 AD on the orders of Statius Quadratus, proconsul of Asia. Martyred, but not forgotten, Polycarp is the subject of the Henline Productions of Loveland, Ohio movie Polycarp: Destroyer of Gods, which was released on DVD May 5, and is based on a novel authored by Pastor Rick Lambert, a co-pastor of Grace Bible Church in Cincinnati.

Born in 69 AD, the real-life Polycarp was an important historical link to that Sub-Apostolic Age, during which it was possible to learn by word of mouth what the Apostles taught from those who had heard them for themselves.

But sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Polycarp of Smyrna, like so many ancient saints from the Sub-Apostolic Age, is no simple task. Much is simply shrouded in the mists of time and certainties are in short supply. Even the historical fact that Statius Quadratus was the proconsul of Asia at the time who ordered Polycarp’s martyrdom is not beyond dispute, nor is the exact year of Polycarp’s death. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus wrote it was St. John the Apostle himself who made Polycarp a bishop.

The main sources of credible historical information concerning St. Polycarp are the Epistles of St. Ignatius; Polycarp’s own Epistle to the Philippians; sundry passages in St. Irenaaus; and the Letter of the Smyrnwans recounting the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. The Epistle of St. Polycarp was a reply to one from the Philippians, in which they had asked him to address them some words of exhortation.

Four out of the seven genuine epistles of St. Ignatius were written from Smyrna. In two of these – Magnesians and Ephesians – he speaks of Polycarp. The seventh Epistle was addressed to Polycarp.

Just before his martyrdom in 155 AD, Polycarp was urged by Quadratus, or whoever the proconsul was, to curse Christ, leading to Polycarp’s celebrated reply: “Fourscore and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no harm. How then can I curse my King that saved me?”  Polycarp was then burned and stabbed to death.

Henline Productions, formerly J&J Productions, is the brother and sister Protestant evangelical homeschooled filmmaking team of Joe Henline, 20, and Jerica Henline, 22.

In 2010, they entered the five-minute short video No Time in the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and finished as semi-finalists in the competition..

Their next film, The Forgotten Martyr: Lady Jane Grey, shot in 2011 was entered into the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and won them the Best Young Filmmaker award, and was runner-up in the Short Film category. Awards from other independent Christian film festivals included, Best Young Filmmaker at the GloryReelz Christian Film Festival, Golden Crown Award (Best Student Production) at the International Christian Visual Media Festival and Best Young Filmmaker at The Attic Film Festival.

In their script for Polycarp, a 12-year-old slave girl, Anna, is rescued and adopted by Christians in 2nd century Smyrna and befriended by the aged Polycarp. You can watch a brief 1:52 YouTube trailer for it here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjPlffZVy8

In real life, of course, Polycarp was supposedly born into slavery, purchased as a young boy, and raised by a godly woman in Ephesus.

As Anna is taught by Polycarp and her new family, she struggles to reconcile her beliefs with those of the Christians. When the Roman proconsul demands that all citizens worship Caesar to show their allegiance to Rome, Polycarp and the Christians stand for their faith against the growing threat of persecution, and Anna is forced to choose whom she is willing to live – and die – for.

Polycarp was awarded Best Feature Film, Audience Choice Award and Best Original Music Score at the second Christian Worldview Film Festival in March at Castle Hills First Baptist Church, also in San Antonio.

Tulsa native Garry Nation received the award for Best Lead Actor in a Feature Film for his performance as Polycarp.

“This is a moving story of second-century persecution, reminiscent of the persecution many believers face today,” said Alex and Stephen Kendrick, producers of Courageous and Facing the Giants.

The Kendricks, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, got their start in 2003 with their first movie Flywheel. They conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.

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Tim Chey and the Christian cinema ‘cheese’ factor

There was much consternation among Tim Chey and his Christian movie fans recently when all of the major Hollywood  movie studios took a pass on releasing his $50-million epic, David and Goliath, shot last year in Morocco and produced by RiverRain Productions.

The usual suspects, including the secular media, were trotted out for a whipping, and Chey and his supporters decided to go ahead and release the film on their own in 31 cities on Good Friday, April 3, while they tried to raise more money to get the film shown on more screens in more cities through Indiegogo, a San Francisco crowdfunding company. The movie earned about $161,000 at the box office over the Easter weekend. When the Indiegogo campaign closed March 12, they had only managed to crowdfund three per cent of their $777,000 USD goal, with 499 donors contributing $19,653 USD. According to the filmmakers, GodVine reported “The Hollywood studios have rejected David and Goliath for being too Bible-based and religious. One studio executive said, ‘You mention God in almost every scene.'”

Godvine went onto quote Chey as reportedly saying, “We were constantly being ridiculed by the secular media.” Contrast that with the upbeat tone Chey took in a Beverly Hills, California-based Ripple Effect Communications media advisory on April 21, 2014, just weeks before shooting was set to get under way for David and Goliath in Morocco.  “Chey, who just finishing location scouting in Morocco, is jubilant,” according to Carol Edwards’ media advisory for Ripple Effect Communications. “We’re going to have thousands of extras, A-list special effects, and it will exceed the epic-look of ‘Noah,’ Chey was quoted as saying. “The $50 million dollar film comes at a perfect time. Hollywood is embracing faith-based films as of late and the audiences are growing at a record pace according to reports.”

What a difference a year can make.

Martin Stillion, reviewing David and Goliath in Peter T. Chattaway’s “Filmchat” on the religion blog Patheos April 5, wrote that Chey “undertook a mendacious, self-pitying marketing campaign to position the film as the ultimate underdog, “rejected by Hollywood for being too ‘God-centered’ – a claim based on an alleged remark from one of those potential distributors.

“This may seem a little puzzling. Why wouldn’t distributors be interested? After all, David and Goliath comes along at a time when a lot of attention is being paid to both “faith-based” films (God’s Not Dead, Old Fashioned, Do You Believe?) and Bible epics (Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Son of God), and several of those films have done well financially. So Chey’s film, a faith-based Bible epic that retells one of the most archetypal biblical stories, is in the right place at the right time.

“But it forgot to bring the right stuff.

“I could give you a dozen reasons that distributors wouldn’t want to touch this film, and none of them have anything to do with its being ‘God-centered.’ They have to do with its being a very, very bad movie. I know that’s a common criticism of faith-based films, but seriously, this one makes God’s Not Dead look like Blade Runner.”

Chey has directed 10 feature films, including the $20 million Carry Me Home with Cuba Gooding, Jr., Suing the Devil with Malcolm McDowell, Genius Club with Stephen Baldwin and Final: The Rapture, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards, which 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.

Trotting out the secular media – or even other Christians – as a whipping boy is not exactly a new theme for Chey. In an April 25, 2014  Christian Post story by Stoyan Zaimov, headlined  “CP Exclusive: ‘David and Goliath’ Director Assures Big-Budget Movie Will Be ‘Biblically Correct in Every Way,’ Chey is quoted as saying, “We were constantly being ridiculed by the secular media, our films were being sabotaged by online piracy, and fellow jealous Christians were mocking us saying the acting was bad, script was horrible, etc., etc.

“Thousands of people were coming to Christ so why did I let that bother me? I don’t know. The Lord showed me clearly it was a spiritual attack. I repented and began to trust the Lord again. Within two months, we raised millions of dollars and made the $20 million dollar Carry Me Home on the early life of John Newton, writer of Amazing Grace and now David and Goliath.”

Bad scripts and bad acting are hardly new criticisms when it comes to the Christian movie genre. Nor are they ones without merit. As I observed in a blog post last Sept. 15 headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” 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.” You can read the piece here at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

The story of Chey’s conversion from atheist to born-again believer has been oft told in many places, but the shorthand goes something like this. Chey was born and raised in Los Angeles and  “once threw his mother’s Bible in the trash and hectored his Christian friends,” noted Matt Soergel in a generally flattering piece in the Florida Times-Union when Suing the Devil was released in 2011. Chey was educated at Harvard University, University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles and Boston University School of Law. He practiced law for three years, but “realized I just didn’t have a heart for law,” he told interviewer Nathan Jones of The Christ in Prophecy Journal of David Reagan’s Princeton, Texas-based Lamb & Lion Ministries in a Jan. 20, 2014 broadcast interview. “I was an artist, caught up in something that really meant nothing to me,” he told Soergel of the Florida Times-Union.

His first film, which he wrote and directed was, Fakin’ Da Funk, a 1997 comedy starring Pam Grier and Dante Basco about a Chinese son adopted by black parents who relocates to South Central Los Angeles. A second story involves Mai-Ling, an exchange student played by Margaret Cho, who by another twist, gets sent to the wrong ‘hood.'”

The film was nominated for the Golden Starfish Award at the 1997 Hamptons International Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 1997 Urbanworld Film Festival.

In 2001, Chey was in his mid-30s, single, and in the Philippines scouting locations for his next movie. After a busy night boozing at strip clubs,” Soergel wrote in his May 23, 2011 piece for the Florida Times-Union, he picked up the Gideon Bible in his hotel room and began reading: “”I got down on my knees and accepted Jesus Christ right there,” Chey said.

He was back in the Philippines in 2002 in Manila, Pasig City, Bataan, Manila Bay, and Antipolo to direct Gone, his first Christian-themed film, a post-apocalyptic thriller based on his screenplay, starring Dirk Been and Joel Klug star as tenacious lawyers who are sent to Manila to defend a multinational corporation, but instead, meet their fate in the Last Days after the Rapture.

Suing the Devil, released in August 2011, was his fifth Christian-themed movie and set in Australia, where he obtained much of the financing for it. It’s about a young law student who files an $8- trillion dollar civil lawsuit against Satan for all the misery he’s caused humanity. Corbin Bernsen, played divorce lawyer Arnie Becker on TV’s L.A. Law, which ran from for eight seasons on NBC from 1986 to 1994, and is a long-time evangelical Christian, plays a TV news host.

To law student Luke O’Brien’s (played by Bart Bronson) surprise, a loquacious Satan – in the form of Malcolm McDowell, star of the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange – shows up to defend himself.

Describing McDowell to Soergel, Chey said, “He’s a seeker. We had great talks. We talked a lot about God, a lot about life. He’s a spiritual person.”

In a June 2010 interview, about 14 months before Suing the Devil was released, McDowell had this to say about the movie: “From my point of view – I play the Devil – [the film] is about a loser that can’t get his act together or his life together and blames everybody else for his loser-ness. He’s a big loser, and so he, of course, blames the Devil and he goes to court to sue the Devil. And I answer the summons. And so it’s really a comedy in a courtroom.

“You know, I’m not into the religious connotations of what good and evil are. In fact the Devil I played is not really evil. I mean, the Devil really is charming, seductive. I mean, it’s like Nazism … charming, seductive, all these things. It’s just the underbelly of angst … but it was really actually a terrific script and I had a ball.”

How that fits in with Chey’s observations 11 months later in the Florida Times-Union, I leave for you to decide.

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