Are Christian Films Judged By a Double Standard?
Are Christian films judged by a double standard? I am going to go ahead and surprise everyone--myself included--and say "yes."
Category: Essays
-
-
Snowpiercer vs. The Giver
I wouldn't begrudge anyone who thinks the films Snowpiercer and The Giver have as much in common as an elephant and a plum, but I have been thinking about the two in conjunction recently.
-
The Most Neglected Verse in Christian Culture Wars…
I don't think I'm holier than anyone who watches what I don't.
-
Revisiting Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales–Suzanne’s Career
For all of Rohmer's honesty about the emotional cowardice of (young) men, these films stop short of simply man-bashing.
-
Masters of Sex — Three Ways the Showtime Series Surprised Me By Being Good
Showtime's serial adaptation of Thomas Maier's biography, Masters of Sex, launches its second season on July 13. Would it surprise you to hear that the series has supplanted Game of Thrones and The Good Wife as Sunday night's "we'll watch it live and DVR the rest" TV? That it did so certainly surprised me.
-
Five Novels That May Be Unfilmable–and the Artists We Would Like to See Try
There are more movies each year and hence the need for stories has never been greater. Technological advances have helped create special effects that would appear to make our imaginations the only limit to what could appear on screen. It's probably the case that no novel is truly unfilmable, so Hollywood may get to these eventually. I'm just not holding my breath.
-
Troy (Petersen, 2004) — 10 Years Later: Part III
Think for a moment. How interesting is it that the Iliad is one of the most famous and inspiring stories in the history of the world? (As legend has it, Alexander the Great always kept copy of the Iliad under his pillow.) I bet this seems strange to many of us now, living with our modern ideas of morality, with our culture’s sensitivity to individual “natural rights,” with our entertainment’s cardboard cutout characters who are designed to be identified with, sympathized with, copied, emulated, worshipped, cheered for, etc. It is quite true that the Iliad does not possess our modern sensibilities, whether in politics or in entertainment.
-
Troy (Petersen, 2004) — 10 Years Later: Part II
In Part I of this essay, Jeremy Purves looked back at critics’ reviews of Troy and argued that the film was a better adaptation of Homer’s epic poem than is… Continue reading "Troy (Petersen, 2004) — 10 Years Later: Part II"
-
Troy (Petersen, 2004) — 10 Years Later: Part I
It has now been ten years since Wolfgang Petersen’s old-fashionedly classic film on the Trojan War was released. In hindsight, some of the controversy that roiled round the film at the time now seems rather silly. But then much of the criticism the film took was much worse than silly.
-
Noah (Aronofsky, 2014)
Minority opinions are important things, particularly in Christian circles where they are rarely trumpeted or met with as much charity or respect as they ought to be. So it is worth disagreeing publicly if not to persuade, at least to model that it can be done without vitriol or condemnation.