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.

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True stories: Pastor Ted Goossen’s behind the scenes contributions to the long-running Nickel Belt News’ ‘Spiritual Thoughts’ column

Ted and Mary Goossen, U-Haul truck packed, decamped from Thompson, Manitoba yesterday to begin their new and richly-deserved retirement in Saskatoon closer to their children and grandchildren.

Fortuitously, their home on Riverside Drive, after many months on the market, sold over their last weekend here, with the realtor informing them just before Ted arrived at Christian Centre Fellowship Sunday morning to preach his last sermon as pastor there for the last decade.

Ted’s younger brother, Gareth Goossen, who is also a pastor and lives in Breslau in southwestern Ontario, aptly observed in a Facebook posting: “Awesome! Praise the Lord! I continually am amazed at how Jesus answers our prayers at the last possible moment!!!”

I first got to know Ted in 2008, a few months after I arrived in Thompson to edit the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News. We were kicking around the idea of adding some fresh columns and columnists and one of the ideas that was floated during the summer of 2008 was to have some sort of religion column.

Some of the initial discussion I had, mainly via e-mail, was with Rev. Leslie-Elizabeth King, who retired in May 2014 as minister of the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson on Caribou Drive, but at the time was pastor of St. John’s United Church, before the neighbouring congregations of Advent Lutheran and St. John’s United formally joined together in 2013, after starting a dialogue about their respective futures in 2008.

The old Advent Lutheran Church building was demolished last fall and is the future site of what will be the second Thompson Gas Bar Co-operative store in town.

King had also pastored St. Simon’s Anglican Church in Lynn Lake, a shared ecumenical ministry of the United and Anglican churches, having travelled to St. Simon six times a year since 1998 to administer the sacraments, so she had some broad and candid insights into how religion was done in Northern Manitoba.

Bea Shantz was also originally involved in some of those preliminary discussions I had in the summer and fall of 2008. Shantz was a member of Thompson United Mennonite Church until it closed in July 2006. One of the first churches in Thompson, the Thompson United Mennonite Church formed in 1961. The congregation called its first pastor, John Harder, and built its house of worship at 365 Thompson Dr. in 1963. The Thompson Boys and Girls Club eventually bought the former church.

After it closed, Shantz went to St. John’s United Church and the Lutheran-United Church of Thompson, with the merger of the two churches.

Shantz, originally from southwestern Ontario, lived in Thompson for more than 30 years before she, and her husband, Dale, moved to Winnipeg in June. Shantz was well-known for being an active volunteer in numerous areas, but especially in more recent years with Thompson’s Communities in Bloom committee, as well as the annual Ten Thousand Villages sale of fair trade products from developing countries held every November. She received the 2013 Volunteer of the Year award from the City of Thompson and  YWCA of Thompson Women of Distinction award last April.

But in December 2008, it would be Pastor Ted Goossen, who was still pretty much unknown to me, whose name would surface as the co-ordinator of what was to be a new “Spiritual Thoughts” column, which with the exception of one hiatus of a few months after running for several years, has run and continues to run in the Nickel Belt News for going on seven years now.

While the column belongs to the paper, the co-ordination of getting authors to write for it on an almost weekly basis, was delegated from the beginning, under my tenure anyway, to the Thompson Christian Council, and from 2008 until at least my departure in 2014, and from what I’ve been told, beyond, to Pastor Ted Goossen, whose Christian Centre Fellowship is a member of the council.

While most of the columnists in the rotation have overwhelmingly been local clergy who are members of the council over the years, not all have. Pastors whose churches are not members of the Thompson Christian Council, lay people, and on occasion non-Christian perspectives and writers, have also appeared in the column space from time-to-time, a plurality of views I insisted on. For their part, in my experience the Thompson Christian Council always graciously respected the fact while the “Spiritual Thoughts” column was a useful vehicle for evangelizing, at the end of the day it was not theirs, and in some cases not reflective of their views collectively or individually.

More than once, as Ted tried to put together six-month writing rosters for the “Spiritual Thoughts” column in those early days, I would quip to him, often in an e-mail, that organizing such a roster must be something like “herding cats.” While Sunday (or Saturday for Seventh-day Adventists) preaching may the most visible part of what most pastors do, there’s also plenty to do on the other days of the week, such as visiting the sick and burying the dead, and comforting those left behind, or marriage preparation or marriage counseling. Lots to do in other words beside a writing a free column for a newspaper, as heretical as that notion may seem in some journalism circles.

It was about three months after the “Spiritual Thoughts” column started that I had my first social invitation from Ted and Mary to visit Christian Centre Fellowship for an event. Every February or March, the church holds a family enrichment weekend that usually kicks off with a banquet and featured speaker on the Friday night (occasionally the banquet has been on Saturday) and wraps up with a movie night Sunday evening. In February 2009, Jeanette and me found ourselves seated at a table with Tricia Kell, the featured speaker for the weekend, Majors Grayling and Jacqueline Crites from the Thompson Corps of the Salvation Army, a couple that I knew about as well as Ted at that time, and Ted and Mary (when Mary wasn’t working in back in the kitchen.)

Kell is the author of two books, one of which is Chain of Miracles, the 2004 story of how she said the “power and love of God can change a chain of tragedies into a chain of miraculous victories.”

The book described how “God walked her through the abusive relationship and tragic death of her first husband to the accidents that left two of her children both physically and mentally challenged – to another horrifying incident that nearly killed her current husband.”

Kell was born in Halifax and raised as a Roman Catholic. A self-described “air force brat,” she lived in both Europe and Canada growing up. Later, she said, she “developed, owned and managed a successful clothing design company along with other companies.”

She described in Chain of Miracles how her first husband, Jeffrey, with a gun in the vehicle and their three-month-old son, J.J., threw them from a car into a ditch between Ponton and Thompson.
Kell, and her current husband, Gord, live in Winnipeg with their three adult children.

Her second book, Attitude Determines Altitude, was a humorous book, she said, “still based on my everyday life but tells how I beat my fear of flying.” It was published in 2008.

The following year we received a return invitation to share dinner with Paul Boge, the Winnipeg engineer-author-filmmaker.

Boge is an award-winning author who has written The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story; Father to the Fatherless: The Charles Mulli Story; Hope for the Hopeless: The Charles Mulli Mission; and most recently, The Biggest Family in the World, chronicling the life of Charles Mulli in an illustrated children’s book published last December.

He has also written two novels in a potential trilogy, The Chicago Healer in 2004, and The Cities of Fortune in 2006.

In 2010, Boge talked about his then recently published book, The Urban Saint: The Harry Lehotsky Story, which explored the life of old west end Winnipeg inner city pastor Harry Lehotsky, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 49.

Boge won Word Guild’s best new Canadian author award in 2003 for his first book, The Chicago Healer, published the following year.

In addition to being an author, Boge, is a consulting mining engineer and capital project manager with the family firm Boge & Boge Consulting Engineers in Winnipeg, and no stranger to Thompson. He lived and worked here for nine months in 2003, five months in 2005 and for another 10 months in 2007, while working on three separate surface projects for Vale, and doing much of his writing in his apartment at night.

Boge is also behind FireGate Films, an independent Winnipeg company that made the 2006 feature-length movie Among Thieves, with Boge writing, directing and producing the film, which explores the possibility the end is in sight for the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency, as Gulf Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar have contemplated ending dollar dealings for oil and moving to a basket of currencies including the euro and Chinese yuan or renminbi. The last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990.

Boge is also the co-ordinator for the annual Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival at North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren Church in mid-February. He is a member of the church.

Five years later, Boge returned as the keynote speaker again this year for the  Feb. 27 to March 1 weekend, sharing about his work and how he integrates his faith into his work environment. We’ve kept in touch by e-mail here and there over the last five years and we saw him briefly in Winnipeg in February 2012 at the Real to Reel Film Festival.

Paul’s a great guy and fun to hang around with. So this year, in a bit of a break from tradition, where we had only attended the kick-off banquet or sometimes the Sunday chili dinner and movie night, Jeanette and me ventured out to Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road for some Saturday afternoon five-pin bowling. We wound up on a team with Paul. Never let it  be said Christians can’t be competitive.

Besides the annual family enrichment weekend, over the last seven years, I’ve dropped by the odd Sunday morning to check out a worship service, usually with Jeanette, but sometimes on my own when she’s been away at International Music Camp in  Dunedin, North Dakota. And over this past year I attended every other Saturday at 9 a.m. for their men’s fellowship breakfast, which wrapped up for the season June 13.

How I wound up going to the breakfasts was through a typical Ted invitation. Last Oct. 17, at 7:41 p.m. on a Friday evening I received an e­-mail Ted:  “We’re having men’s breakfast tomorrow 9 am @ Christian centre.

“You’re welcome to join us.

“Ted.”

Truth be told, the invitation was Mary’s idea. For these mainly, but not exclusively, Mennonite Brethren to invite a third-­degree member of Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 from St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church parish here to break bread with them struck me somewhat irreverently perhaps as in keeping with Jesus telling Zacchaeus the tax collector he was coming over for dinner. It also struck me as the kind of invitation my current supreme pontiff, Pope Francis, wouldn’t hesitate to accept. Before I moved to Manitoba in 2007, I knew next to nothing about Mennonites. What little I knew living and working mainly in Southern Ontario was shaped by images of the Old Order Mennonites of St. Jacobs, Ontario. Or was that the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania? Who knew? While I may not have sorted it all out or ever will, I’m pretty sure the Mennonite Brethren I had breakfast with were not Old Order, although I have encountered Old Order-­like Mennonites here in Thompson (I once asked a group caroling at Christmas when I was editor of the Thompson Citizen if they would mind me taking their photograph in one of those “duh­-what­-was­-I­-thinking” moments. Their leader graciously told me while his salvation wasn’t going to depend on whether or not I took his picture, out of deference to their religious beliefs, he’d rather I didn’t.)

Now Protestant evangelicals are sola scriptura or the “People of the Book,” while Catholic theology relies on the rule of faith-based scripture, plus apostolic tradition, as manifested in the teaching authority of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. Catholics, outside of the seminary or Catholic scholarship, at the rank-­and-­file lay level in the pews, are generally not catechesized to know the Bible as well as Protestants do. That’s a plain and simple fact. So I appreciated the indulgence of my Protestant brothers during biblical discussions. I still chuckle when I recall the Saturday morning I was attempting to illustrate some point by referring to the Apostle Paul before the Areopagus, where some of the assembled said, “We shall hear you again concerning this,” but I could not quite place where it was in the Bible, and pilot Reg Willems, since decamped to Flin Flon, sitting beside me at the table, said gently, “That would be in Acts, John.”

I learned a lot through those discussions with Ted and Reg, Lloyd Penner, Jason Winship, Dustin Winker, Trevor Giesbrecht, Barry Little, Keith Hyde, Gord Unger, Ken Giesbrecht, Keith Derksen, Claude Pratte, Cohle Bergen, Peter Gosnell, Bill Lennox, Jim Cohan, Wei Wei, Adam Morin and Nick Yoner  (with Keith, Gord and Dustin usually doing the cooking). Thanks, guys.

I also learned something about accountability in friendship through Ted these past seven years, as he wouldn’t hesitate to call you on something, if need be.

Two examples from our “Spiritual Thoughts” column collaborative efforts come to mind. The first occurred near the beginning of our work together in 2009, the other near the end in 2014.

In the first case, Jordan McLellan, who was the assistant pastor at the Thompson Pentecostal Assembly, focusing on youth ministry from mid-2007 until he left for Saskatoon to take a position at Lawson Heights Pentecostal Assembly in early 2010, had missed a couple of his submissions for the column without explanation.

I recall fuming to Ted in a telephone call that if McLellan missed a third contribution in such a manner, I was going to “irrevocably” drop him from the column rotation. Perhaps it was the word irrevocably that did it, but Ted didn’t miss a beat with his response, replying that he was glad then that I wasn’t the “good Lord.” Point taken. And never forgotten.

Just over a year ago, young Richard Sheppard, group leader of the Thompson Seventh-day Adventist Congregation, asked to join the “Spiritual Thoughts” rotation. At the time, the local Seventh-day Adventists weren’t part of the Thompson Christian Council (they were admitted by a unanimous vote this past spring) but that wasn’t in itself a bar to Sheppard writing, nor was Seventh-Day Adventist theology. By virtue of their valid baptism, and their belief in Christ’s divinity and in the doctrine of the Trinity, Seventh-day Adventists are both ontologically and theologically Christians. The real problem was perceived to be Sheppard himself, who is off this fall to a Seventh-day Adventist post-secondary school in Lacombe, Alberta.

Richard is a controversialist, by design or evolution, I’m not sure which. He’s zealous. He’s in-your-face. In short, he’s everything management of the Nickel Belt News did not want to see in the pages of the paper in what had been a pretty safe and non-controversial column space.

Management was adamant. That is until Ted outflanked us from the left – for probably the first and only time in his life.

When I sent Ted an e-mail relaying the news that Sheppard wouldn’t be joining the roster, he replied with his own hard-hitting e-mail pointing out that several years earlier when we had briefly run a columnist in that space whose views were anathema to most of the clergy on the council, they had swallowed hard and realized newspapers are supposed to be about free speech.

What happened to that notion, Ted wondered?

Essentially, he accused of us pre-publication censorship and betraying our free speech principles.

What Richard needed was a good editor to work with him and perhaps tone him down a bit in places, not to spike the column entirely, Ted argued.

I shared Ted’s response with my boss, and observed how professionally embarrassing it was to be lectured on free speech and the role of a newspaper by an evangelical pastor who at that moment had truth very much on his side, and was making us look like moral cowards and far more conservative than any views he held.

Ted’s argument prevailed, and Richard Sheppard’s first “Spiritual Thoughts” column, critiquing the popular Christian movie Heaven is for Real, which in Richard’s words was “a spellbinding tale about a young toddler in a clerical family who ostensibly dies on an operating table, visits heaven and comes back with mystifying facts from ‘beyond the grave’ that his own father finds hard not to accept,” ran on June 20, 2014 in the Nickel Belt News, albeit toned down a tad from the original submission, where (and I’m paraphrasing only slightly here, I believe, from memory) Richard suggested the movie was an exercise in necromancy, not a word we saw in a lot of column submissions, and which was excised from what appeared in print – but the entire column did not need to be axed, which was part of Ted’s point.

To my knowledge the particular column generated no complaints. And last I counted, Richard had gone onto write at least five more “Spiritual Thoughts” columns for the paper.

I ran into Richard in person in early April and told him he had Ted to thank for making it into the column rotation. He seemed pleasantly surprised. Nice kid, really.

Safe travels, Ted. Manitoba’s loss is Saskatchewan’s gain.

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The Devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his pop culture due on Fox Television as Lucifer Morningstar, recently retired as Lord of Hell and running a piano bar in Los Angeles, the City of Angels

Some movie film buffs are attracted to 1940’s and 1950’s Hollywood film noir, the stylish but low-key black-and-white German expressionist influenced flicks that emphasize cynicism and sex as motivations for murder and other deadly sins (not necessarily in that order). Think Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep in 1946, with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, based on Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel of the same name. Or perhaps the 1950 classic, D.O.A., starring Edmond O’Brien and Pamela Britton.

Both are fine films, as are many others of the genre. But I wouldn’t say I am quite an aficionado of film noir. Rather, I appreciate it on its artistic merits.

The same is true for TV series science fiction or sci-fi. While I am a sucker for a good story with elements of time travel or parallel universes (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” the second to last episode of the first season of Star Trek, first broadcast on Thursday, April 6, 1967, which was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, remains in a league of its own in my mind), I’m not  quite a diehard Trekkie, although I think the original series, which ran on NBC Television for three seasons from 1966 to 1969 is superb, albeit cheesy. But 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 as the black-and-white a double-bill of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, also known as The Head That Wouldn’t Die, a 1959 science-fiction-horror film, directed by Joseph Green (made for $62,000 but not released until 1962), and Plan 9 from Outer Space, the 1959 American science-fiction thriller film, written and directed by Ed Wood on a $60,000 budget, and dubbed by some critics as the worst movie ever made.

While it took me a while to warm up to it, I also came to like Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994. I’ve also seen most, although probably not all, of the movies from the seemingly endless Star Trek-spawned movie franchise.

Three additional Star Trek spin-offs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise; well, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand how many episodes of the combined series I’ve ever watched, although knowing Star Trek: Enterprise, which aired originally between 2001 and 2005 and was titled simply as Enterprise for its first two seasons, features Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame as Capt. Jonathan Archer, and there is a recurring plot device based on the Temporal Cold War, in which a mysterious entity from the 27th century uses the Cabal, a group of genetically upgraded Suliban, to manipulate the timeline and change past events, I probably will have to give in and start watching its 98 episodes at some point.

Then there is the Christian movie genre. We discover things where we discover them. While I had seen The Rapture, a rather odd but interesting movie starring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, later of The X-Files and Californication fame, on VHS videotape cassette in Durham, North Carolina shortly after it was released in 1991, for me, my first real introduction into what I would call the Christian movie genre took place a decade later in Yellowknife, of all places (when I lived in Yellowknife a standard observation was that there were more bars than churches, although that’s hardly unique to Yk).

I remember seeing A Walk to Remember, an American coming-of-age teen romantic drama, when it was released in 2002 downtown at the Capitol Theatre on 52 Street, starring Shane West and Mandy Moore as Landon Carter and Jamie Sullivan, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by the Catholic romance fiction writer Nicholas Sparks. That would be the Nicholas Sparks whose earlier 1996 book, The Notebook, was released as a movie of the same name in 2004, two years after A Walk to Remember came to film screens. I can’t recall exactly how I came to find myself in the Capitol Theatre to watch A Walk to Remember. I don’t recall any of my colleagues going with me, although more than one expressed incredulity the next day when they asked me and I said I enjoyed the movie. I saw it again a couple of years ago for the first time on DVD, and I still enjoyed it.

I won’t spoil the plot for you; the summary is on the Internet and easy enough to find and the ideas, to be honest, are not exactly original. Cheesy? You bet. Pass the Cheetos®. But I’m happy to say the movie was made for about $11 million and has taken in about $47.5 million at the box office. Not a particularly big budget film and far from record box office, but OK.

I wrote a piece here in soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) last Sept. 15 headlined, “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” where I mentioned just a few of last year’s Christian movie offerings, including The Giver, starring three-time Academy award winner Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges, which is set in a fictional post-war 2048 where the community has decided to get rid of colors and, as a consequence, different races and feelings. All citizens have had the memories from before erased from their minds.

I also talked a bit about 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, which 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; and When the Game Stands Tall, starring 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.

As well, I mentioned Tim Chey’s movie, Final: The Rapture, released in 2013 in theatres, but on DVD just last 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 Caucasian 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.

Just in passing, I wrote about God’s Not Dead with Kevin Sorbo; Noah with Russell Crowe; Son of God, produced by evangelical Mark Burnett from Survivor, and his Catholic wife, Roma Downey (whose A.D.: The Bible Continues miniseries based on the early church, as described in the first 10 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles is airing on NBC currently); and 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, released in North American theatres last October.

The interesting thing is if I was to revisit the genre today nine months later for a comprehensive update, I’d be saying the Christian movie genre is not just hot, it is on fire, churning out television miniseries and movies at a pace that would be better suited to a book than a blog post.

Mind you, the devil, Prince of this World, is not surprisingly about to get his due as well. Such is the nature of the supernatural and spiritual warfare.

A new DC Comics-based Fox TV high-concept genre series Lucifer where Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux” is set to air on Fox next year.

It gives new meaning to the dangers of glamorizing evil, something we Catholics get a refresher course in every Easter through the renewal of our baptismal promises where the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”

The production of Lucifer is incredibly slick and well done. That said, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Dancer (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”

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