The Chosen: Christian entertainment sans cheese/plus a Jesus with a sense of humour

Bad scripts and worse acting are frequently heard criticisms when it comes to the Christian entertainment genre. The “big knock” against the Christian movie, television and streaming genre for more secular audiences – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad plots, 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 or television on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for Sodom or Gomorrah in the vocabulary of many Christians, is seldom on the side of the angels, unless commercial potential can stand in for faith in salvation if need be.

The Chosen TV series debuted on Dec. 24, 2017. Two seasons have aired. Season 3 is expected to air later this year. Seven seasons are planned.

Angel Studios, the streaming platform behind the Christian series The Chosen, announced in early January that it had raised $47 million in funding from venture capitalists. The financing was led by VC firm Gigafund and Bain-backed Uncorrelated Venture. Original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund also participated.

In addition to VC money, $5 million was crowdsourced directly from fans, and The Chosen is the most crowdfunded media project in history.  It has received 9.6 out of 10 on IMDb. John Jurgensen, a reporter who covers music, television and digital entertainment for The Wall Street Journal, wrote last November: “The success of the series is a powerful reminder to Hollywood that faith-focused projects can sometimes become breakthrough hits.” Chris DeVille, a journalist based in Ohio, writing for The Atlantic magazine last June, observed: “Take it from a critic and a Christian with an aversion to Christian entertainment: The show is good.”

I concur. It is the first Biblical series I’ve seen that consistently portrays Jesus as both “fully human” and “fully God.” Usually, I find the former left out. But Dallas Jenkins’ Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) has a very keen sense of humour when the occasion calls for it. Who would have imagined? Jesus with a sense of humour. Indeed, these Apostles (my favourite, I think, is young Matthew [Paras Patel], the tax collector, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder), Pharisees (shout out to Erick Avari as Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin), Sadducees, and assorted residents of the Red Quarter of Jerusalem, located near the Gate of the Moors and Coponius Gate, in the southwestern part of the Western Wall, all appear as flesh-and-blood real people might well have in the 1st century Anno Domini (AD).

For background expertise and script consulting, the creators of the show have been conferring with Father David Guffee, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, based at St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica, California, and national director at Family Theater Productions; Rabbi Jason Sobel of Fusion Ministries in Hollywood, and Professor Doug Huffman, associate dean and professor of New Testament, overseeing the undergraduate division of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California. Last weekend, Jeanette and I watched Dallas Jenkins, creator, director and co-writer of The Chosen, do a “deep dive” into the first season’s eight episode on the show’s free mobile app with the three Biblical consultants, Father Guffee, Rabbi Sobel, and Professor, and Jenkins kicking off the 40-minute or so deep dive roundtable discussion with the timeless, “A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and an evangelical scholar walk into ….” This sounds like the beginning of a joke with reference to a drinking establishment, but 1st century Jerusalem Anno Domini (AD) and theology is what’s on tap here.

I first got to know the work of Dallas Jenkins back in 2011 with Jeanette at the Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival, as he had just directed What If … the previous year.

What If, a film about a businessman who is shown by an angel what his life could have become if he had followed God’s calling for his life, starred Kevin Sorbo, Kristy Swanson, Debby Ryan, and John Ratzenberger, who portrayed mail carrier Cliff Clavin on the comedy series Cheers, for which he earned two Primetime Emmy nominations. As “Mike the Angel,” Ratzenberger throws what I consider to be the best guardian angel punch in cinematic history to date at Ben Walker (Kevin Sorbo).

Dallas Jenkins dad, Jerry B. Jenkins, did most of the actual writing of the Left Behind novels, while Tim LaHaye was primarily the idea man. Left Behind started out as a series of 16 best-selling novels, 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.

I’ve read the 16 novels – 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.

Left Behind isn’t great literature,” wrote Alissa Wilkinson, critic-at-large at Christianity Today in the Washington Post in 2016, “but it’s highly engaging reading for a mass market, fast-moving fiction with elements drawn from sci-fi, romance, disaster porn, and political and spy novels. Left Behind has the code-cracking conspiracy feel of a Dan Brown novel, but also the appeal of a familiar story – one that inscribes the reader’s own world, with its televisions and airplanes and phones and computers, into biblical events.

“This is the genius of the Left Behind books: They work on two levels.”

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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?

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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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Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’

The 10-day Toronto Film Festival (TIFF) from Sept. 4 through Sept. 14 just wrapped up yesterday. In the cinema world, TIFF is a big deal. An important arts event eagerly anticipated every September.

But flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar there is a whole slew of movies released over the last year or just about to be released, which  might surprise you both in their totality and who stars in them because Hollywood, for a season at least, has rediscovered the Christian movie genre and the religious, spiritual and supernatural themes that are woven into their fabric. In a word, Christian movies are “hot” in 2014. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for  Sodom or Gomorrah  in the vocabulary for many Christians, is this fall on the side of the angels. There is apparently an upside for Hollywood where commercial potential stands in for faith in salvation if need  be.

While the big knock against the Christian movie genre for more secular moviegoers – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir, there hasn’t been, aside from the occasional blockbuster, much for broader audiences to judge such films on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing.

On Aug. 15, The Weinstein Company, founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 2005 after the brothers left the then-Disney-owned Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979, released The Giver,  starring three-time Academy award winner Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges. Set in a fictional post-war 2048, the community has decided to get rid of colours and, as a consequence, different races and feelings. All citizens have had the memories from before erased from their minds.

Raymond Arroyo, who is a classically trained actor himself, interviewed Bridges, and Lois Lowry, author of the 1993 novel by the same name on which the movie is based, on EWTN’s The World Over last month.

Heaven Is for Real, directed by Randall Wallace and written by Christopher Parker, based on Pastor Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s 2010 book of the same name, and starring Greg Kinnear, Kelly Reilly, Jacob Vargas and Nancy Sorel, was released  April 16. It tells the story of  three-year-old Imperial, Nebraska, native Colton Burpo, the son of Pastor Burpo, and what he says he experienced heaven during emergency surgery.

Colton Burpo, now 14, later described to his incredulous family scenes of having looked down to see the doctor operating, his mother calling people to pray in the waiting room, and his father in another room yelling at God and knowledge gleaned from his time in heaven that he could not otherwise have obtained about his great-grandfather and his second sister who died before being born. He goes on to describe Jesus, his physical appearance, and his horse.

When the Game Stands Tall was released Aug. 22. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, now playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle of Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

• God’s Not Dead with Kevin Sorbo was released March 21;
• Noah with Russell Crowe was released March 28;
• Son of God, produced by evangelical Mark Burnett from Survivor, and his Catholic wife, Roma Downey, was released Feb. 21.

The “new” Left Behind movie about the Rapture by Paul Lalonde and Stoney Lake Entertainment, with Nicolas Cage starring as Rayford Steele, and Civil Twilight’s song “Letters from the Sky” being used in the trailer, is being released in North American theatres Oct.3.

The Rapture in Christian eschatology refers to the “being caught up,” as written about by St. Paul in his First Epistle to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, when he says the “dead in Christ” and “we who are alive and remain” will be “caught up in the clouds” to meet “the Lord in the air.” It is a long and complex discussion, but suffice to say Catholics, while they believe in the Second Coming of Christ at the end of the age, do not literally believe in The Rapture as understood by premillennial dispensationalists, which shapes the theology, as it is, in recent years in almost all popular culture books and movies about the Rapture, including the ones discussed here.

The choice of Cage has caused some quiet murmurs in certain evangelical circles, although not particularly loud ones for the most part, as Cage, a bankable box office star, is rumored to be Roman Catholic. Lalonde and his new Stoney Lake Entertainment have really stepped their game up to big-league production values from the first three Left Behind movies he was involved in with Cloud Ten pictures more than a decade ago.

And speaking of the Rapture, Tim Chey’s movie, Final: The Rapture, released a year ago in theatres, will be out in DVD in November, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards. While there have been generally cheesy church-sponsored, Halloween “Hell Houses” videos in the past, Final: The Rapture is an unusual sub-genre of Christian horror movie or Christian disaster movie. The movie’s poster promise, “When the Rapture strikes … all of hell will break loose.”

Chey said his purpose is “to scare the living daylights out of nonbelievers … If it means I have to make a horror film to make it realistic to win people to Christ, then so be it.”

Online Maranatha News of Toronto calls Final: The Rapture “the scariest Christian movie ever.”

Final: The Rapture depicts the apocalyptic chaos that ensues for four nonbelievers – an African-American, an Asian, a Hispanic and a white man living in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and on a South Pacific island, after the Rapture occurs. “In Los Angeles, Colin Nelson desperately attempts to flee to Bora Bora. Keenly aware that he’s in the Tribulation period, his only hope is in a mysterious man. In Tokyo, a journalist, Masashi, tries to unravel the disappearance of millions of people as the government closes in on him. In Buenos Aires, Marie searches for her final relative as time runs out. And on a deserted island in the South Pacific, Tom Wiseman, an avowed atheist, attempts to be rescued after his plane goes down.”

The film was shot in six countries over five months for about $7 million, Final: The Rapture, raised the necessary production money across a spectrum of investors, ranging from faith-based to hedge funds.