Zeke365 wrote:Let me ask you guys what the heck are you looking for in a christian movie please explain in detail what you want? You want everything to be perfect not gonna happen not everyone I truly do not understand it seems like the slightest change to anything in movie or based on a book it get ridiculed like crazy.
The best explicitly Christian movie I've seen has been To Save a Life. It didn't try to sugarcoat or dumb down the issues for a wider audience, the characters' faiths moved and acted in realistic ways, and in general, there was an air of verisimilitude and intensity that most others lack. There were characters in the church who had their own crises of faith and wrestled with actual doubts and mistakes, lapses in judgments, imperfections and matters with actual consequence. There were things at stake, the things that people outside of Christianity would consider actual issues, like teen suicide, domestic abuse, drugs, etc., versus the typical route of "merely" saving souls. As important as that is to you or me, to someone on the outs with Christianity, it's not a satisfying conflict. Making the things that drive the movie something that outsiders can relate to is essential when you present Christianity as a path to a solution - not an immediate fix, mind you, not as some sort of "Jesus magic," but as the start to something bigger.
Was it melodramatic? Absolutely. Looking back, it took turns in to straight-up after school special territory, but then again, I was a couple years older than its target audience who probably appreciated it more for what it was, than my view about what it was trying to be. But when it comes to what it was attempting, I think it did a good job.
The best Christian movie, explicitly so or not, that I've seen is the 1998 version of Les Miserables. I consider the source material one of the best Christian novels out there, and easily one of the best novels, period. Obviously, being from a major studio, they had star power and budget, quality writers, and many other advantages that the studios putting out Christian movies do not. While by necessity they had to cut out Victor Hugo's extended ruminations on the role of the Christian in the world (and many other things), they modified the plot somewhat, resulting in a powerful allegory. It gets cut down to something more streamlined, focusing almost completely on Jean Valjean, the reformed thief who hides the fact that he's broken parole as he becomes a successful, Godly businessman, and his conflict with Javert, an implacable detective who discovers Valjean's secret and seeks to bring him to justice simply for the fact that the law has been broken and the punishment must be brought about. While not complete one-to-one, it becomes a struggle between the forgiven Christian and grace, and the law that still seeks to prosecute them, brought to the fore in a way that even the book did not.
Zeke365 wrote:plus are you listening to secular options or user options on these movies. Just be cause it says it bad means you wont watch it? How many you have actually watch the movies described? and the top question still applies I really want to know.
I want a Christian movie that stands on its own merits, one that people outside the Christian circle can look at and say, "Wow, that was a good movie!". "Good for a Christian movie" is not good enough; why aren't we simply making good movies, period? It wasn't always like this - considering the coercive religious climate of most of the time, it might not be a fair comparison, but the best artists in Europe were using their talents in the service of God: Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo, J. S. Bach, Hildegard of Bingen, and all manner of artists and thinkers. But today, most of what I've seen from the Christian movie industry pales in comparison to the "secular" movie industry in many ways. Budget shouldn't be an issue (see Primer. No, really, go see Primer), but even the ones without that constraint don't seem to do well; for example, the Left Behind movies. I can throw all the money and all the talent I want at a movie, but if the writing isn't any good, the plot doesn't have a basis in what is real, or the dialogue is too busy trying to shoehorn as much message as it can without regard for the other elements of the film, it's not going to be a good movie.
What Christian movies often lack is an efficiency of purpose, pointing and saying, "This is the plot! I am moving in this direction, and everything has to move with it." An ironclad rule of any sort of writing or drama is that everything must serve the plot in some way - setting, characters, conversations, message, you name it - whether your intent is to change people's minds about Christianity or to make a billion at the box office. Fail at that, and you have a boring movie. We focus too much on the message and the real-world implications of the movie, make them head-poundingly unsubtle that they often have little grounding in the real world that we exit the theater and return to. Doing that over and over again acts as a disservice to Christianity's appearance as a whole.
And along with that, what's wrong with finding the divine where it wasn't supposed to be? Not that I'm encouraging works that are outright blasphemous or offensive, but I believe it's possible to find redemptive parts within the "secular," finding value in what was considered to be worthless. After all, isn't that what God has done with us? At the very least, we use these works to discuss elements of the world we live in, seeing as every work out there is expressing the author's perspective on the world. We can point at those and say, "Here's where I think they're right/wrong, and this is what I believe about it."
