Football Classics: A pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life

If the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, with apologies to Dr. King for context, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats should dispatch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at McMahon Stadium in Calgary tomorrow. Kick-off is at 5 p.m. here in the central time zone.

The stage is set for the CFL’s 107th Grey Cup, which Hamilton last won in 1999 and Winnipeg in 1990.

With their franchise-best 15-3 record, the Ticats topped the CFL’s regular-season standing. The Ticats were also 2-0 this season against the Bombers. The Ticats are currently 3½-point favorites to win the Grey Cup.

Although the Bombers finished third in the West Division, they posted an 11-7 record before registering road playoff wins over the defending-champion Calgary Stampeders and Saskatchewan Roughriders.

I’ve lived in Manitoba for the last 12½ years. During that time, I can’t say I have been a big follower of either the CFL or NFL. But I did grow up in Oshawa, Ontario and remember Grade 9 tryouts for Tom Chase’s Oshawa Catholic High School (O.C.H.S. ) Saints well enough. 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. Think of football as a pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life.

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 in the U.S. south 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 American high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Given the unsurprising, I suppose, apparent dearth of Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans here in Manitoba, I’m told I’ll be treated to my own special “chair” at friends’ tomorrow watching the game on TV. Mind you, geography and just plain contrariness are also factors when it comes to me cheering on the Ticats tomorrow. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of hometown “homers” and their boosterism. Unless, of course, the concept was applied to me growing up in Oshawa, Ontario and cheering for the adjacent Toronto Argonauts, not the Steeltown Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Angelo Mosca-era in CFL football and pro wrestling, or the Toronto Maple Leafs in NHL hockey. That was different. And BTW. Angelo is now 82 and lives in nearby St. Catharines. As for cheering for the Leafs, well, there’s been no harm in that since 1967.

No word yet on if I’ll be sharing my signature homemade cream cheese and crabmeat cracker dip, or consuming that solo, like my seating.

It takes a while to figure out CFL  football loyalties in Manitoba. Who knew there was such a thing as the “Banjo Bowl” annual rematch game after the Sunday before “Labour Day Classic” in Regina between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Saskatchewan Roughriders and then back in Winnipeg the following weekend? Not me. At least not until I moved here in 2007, and learned you either supported the blue-and-gold or green-and-white in the CFL. A bit more latitude seemed possible in terms of NFL fan support choices, but it still struck me there were a lot … a lot … of Green Bay Packers fans up here in Northern Manitoba. While I’m not really a cheesehead myself (being more partial to the Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns), I get their appeal. Based in Green Bay, 140 kilometres northeast of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I get it here in Thompson, Manitoba.

The Green Bay Packers are the third-oldest franchise in the NFL, dating back to 1919, and is the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team based in the United States. In 1923, four years after the team was founded, the fledgling Packers found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, so they sold shares to the community to keep the lights on. Home games have been played at Lambeau Field since 1957.

The Packers are the last of the “small town teams,” which were common in the NFL during the league’s early days of the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1919 by Earl “Curly” Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, the franchise traces its lineage to other semi-professional teams in Green Bay dating back to 1896. Between 1919 and 1920, the Packers competed against other semi-pro clubs from around Wisconsin and the Midwest, before joining the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the forerunner of today’s NFL, in 1921. Although Green Bay is by far the smallest major league professional sports market in North America, Forbes magazine ranked the Packers as the world’s 26th most valuable sports franchise in 2016, with a value of $2.35 billion.

But speaking of the Bears … the Bears. They are at Ford Field in Detroit this coming Thursday for a U.S. Thanksgiving Day match-up with the hometown Detroit Lions. Kick-off is at 11:30 a.m. here in the central time zone.

The franchises first met in 1930 when the Lions were known as the Portsmouth Spartans and based in Portsmouth, Ohio. They moved to Detroit for the 1934 season. The Bears and Lions have been division rivals since 1933 and have usually met twice a season since the Lions franchise began. The two teams play in the two largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Chicago and Detroit’s home stadiums, Soldier Field and Ford Field, are 450 kilometres apart and both are easily accessible from I-94.

This rivalry is the longest-running annual series in the NFL as both teams have met at least once a season since 1930.

Since its inception in 1920, the National Football League has played games on Thanksgiving Day, patterned upon the historic playing of college football games on and around the Thanksgiving holiday, a tradition that dates back to 1876, shortly after the game had been invented, as it was a day that most people had off from work.

The football-on-Thanksgiving Thursday game tradition is firmly established in Detroit. With the exception of a six-season gap from 1939 to 1944, the Thanksgiving Day game has been played with no interruptions.

The Detroit Lions Thanksgiving Day heritage gained national attention with the very first game in 1934. Knowing the publicity potential of radio, NBC Radio, set up a 94-station network to broadcast the Lions-Bears showdown. The famous announcing team of Graham McNamee and Don Wilson described the action. The Chicago Bears took that one in a 19-16 victory over the Detroit Lions on Nov. 29, 1934.

In 1876, the college football teams at Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day. The University of Michigan also made it a tradition to play annual Thanksgiving games, holding 19 such games from 1885 to 1905. The Thanksgiving Day games between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s have been cited as “The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football.” In some areas, most commonly in New England, high-school teams play on Thanksgiving, usually to wrap-up the regular-season.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

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

 

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

The Red Velvet Cake War: Thompson Playhouse returns with Southern fare and flare in its third Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten production in four years

Comedy of a certain south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line type plays very well here North of 55 in Thompson, Manitoba. By way of parallel, it would be like community theatre audiences in Georgia or Texas falling in love with the Trailer Park Boys from fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, if it was a play, although the Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten fare on offer here is a tad less ribald, if only because it would be hard to match Ricky’s four-letter word vocabulary even in a NC-17 production, much less PG-13, if Jones, Hope and Wooten were writing movie scripts rather than plays, which they’re not. I’ve lived in Nova Scotia. And I’ve lived in the United States south of the Mason Dixon Line, so I think I get some of this. A more detailed explanation of why Northern Manitobans like Southern comedy is an interesting question for another day perhaps. But not today. For now, let’s just say it has something to do with universal appeal and mass audiences.

Give the Thompson Playhouse credit for having found a tried-and-true winning formula when it comes to selecting comedy.  Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope and Jamie Wooten are three of America’s most prolific and popular playwrights and this weekend at R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre, on both Friday, Nov. 21 and Saturday, Nov. 22, at 7 p.m. sharp both nights, Thompson Playhouse is mounting a production of The Red Velvet Cake War, which had its debut in October 2010 with  Johnson City Community Theater in Johnson City, Tennessee. Tickets are $10 each. The producer is Wally Itson, recently retired principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate and now back to work general manager of  Thompson Gas Bar Co-op Ltd. at Cree Road and Thompson Drive, while Donna Wilson,  former general manager of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, who is now the general manager of Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites on Moak Crescent, directs. By happy coincidence you can pick up your tickets for The Red Velvet Cake War at … Thompson Gas Bar Co-op Ltd or Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites. Tickets are also available at Don Johnson Jewellers in City Centre Mall and from some cast members.

Last November, Wilson, who is also president of Thompson Playhouse, directed a Jones, Hope and Wooten production of  Dashing Through the Snow, set four days before Christmas in the tiny fictional town of Tinsel, Texas where a colourful parade of eccentric guests arrive at the Snowflake Inn.

Wilson made her directorial debut three years ago in November 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, also a Jones, Hope and Wooten production set on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The playwriting trio of Jones, Hope and Wooten have more than 2,500 productions to their credit and counting and are among most produced playwrights in America.

In November 2012, Thompson Playhouse changed the script slightly and offered a production of Chicago playwright Jack Sharkey’s (aka Rick Abbot’s) 1980 comedy Play On!, which Wilson co-produced with Itson.

While there are always some new faces, look for some familiar ones in The Red Velvet Cake War this weekend. Coral Bennett, who has acted in previous plays and made her directorial debut alongside Sue Colli, who has since retired to  Cape Forchu, Nova Scotia, near Yarmouth, with Dixie Swim Club, is back on stage.  As is local lawyer Serena Puranen; Kevin Hopton, a technology and trades instructor at the University College of the North here; teacher Ryan Barker, husband of Churchill riding NDP MP Niki Ashton; Delsie Jack;  teacher Robyn Foley; and the real-life husband-and-wife team of writer Angela Wolfe and Anthony Wake.

In The Red Velvet Cake War, the three Verdeen cousins – Gaynelle, Peaches and Jimmie Wyvette – decide to throw a family reunion in the fictional small town of Sweetgum, Texas. Having “accidentally” crashed her minivan through the bedroom wall of her husband’s girlfriend’s double-wide trailer, Gaynelle is close to … well, a meltdown. Peaches, the top mortuarial cosmetologist in a three-county area, is struggling to decide if it’s time to have her long-absent trucker husband declared dead. And Jimmie Wyvette, the store manager of Whatley’s Western Wear, is resorting to extreme measures to outmaneuver a “priss-pot” neighbor for the affections of Sweetgum’s newest widower, as the eccentric Verdeens gather on the hottest day of July, smack-dab in the middle of Texas tornado season.

You can listen to a brief 32-second audio promo clip for this weekend’s production of The Red Velvet Cake by Thompson Playhouse right here: http://www.driveplayer.com/#fileIds=0ByoS9i0FECzWek4yQ0FlejFNcXRaa25sY1hob3I4WTROcXJV&userId=101189087505862053096

The most recent outing for Thompson Playhouse was May 31 when they presented Murder at the Tonylou Awards, an audience participation murder mystery – and play on their names  –  written by Tony Schwartz and Marylou Ambrose of the Lakeside Players in Tafton, Pennsylvania in 2002, as a fundraiser for the Juniper Centre, which brought in more than $7,000, Wilson said at the time.

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