Page 2566 – Christianity Today (2024)

Usually, I’m all about the business side of the Oscars. I could skip the glamour, glitz, and self-congratulation. The endless clips of movies? Keep them. The dancing? Eh. I just want to know the winners so I can either complain about the Academy or feel validated in my opinions.

So, I definitely feel the pain of Newsweek‘s Patrick Enright who asked this week, “Why do we subject ourselves to an experience we detest?” He actually admits to watching the Oscars every year; I often bow out completely.

But this year, for some reason, I’m looking forward to the ceremony. I might just be buying into the hype, but it seems as if the Academy has gotten the hint and will be trying to reinvent itself. That tends to happen when ad revenues are projected to be down 16 percent because last year marked the event’s lowest viewership percentage.

The New York Times reported last week that architect David Rockwell, who designed the Kodak Theatre, is out to “redefine the show’s DNA” with a new, intimate look. (Check out a quick slideshow of the stages over the years.) But the changes don’t stop there.

Producers say they want to bring back the joy and celebration of the awards, return it to being a “communal experience,” and are specifically using the 1969 ceremony as their model. “When I look at the old shows, one of the great things is they’re all giving this party, and we’re lucky to be invited to it,” says ceremony co-producer Bill Condon. “Recently it’s become just a TV show where they promote everything ?We wanted to restore a certain kind of mystery to it.”

Even members of the academy don’t know exactly who is showing up tonight to present or perform. (Anne Hathaway singing?) The Times did report that this year’s Oscars “will have a storyline related to making movies and will lean heavily toward live theater instead of endless film clips, with the award presentations almost Shakespearean plays within a play.”

Hey, “all’s well that ends well” – as long as it ends before 1 a.m.

First it was on, then it was off, and then it was on again – but now it looks like Kingdom Come, the life-of-Jesus movie that was going to be filmed in New Zealand this year, may be off for good.

The Timaru Herald says no official announcements have been made yet, but “moteliers in Twizel have had bookings cancelled and an email received by them this week said the movie was no longer going ahead.”

The production company is believed to have spent several million dollars on the film already, constructing replicas of Capernaum and other first-century settings in Wellington and other New Zealand locations; but the work was put on hold before Christmas so that the filmmakers could focus on securing the movie’s financing and distribution.

The producers have since insisted that they plan to get things rolling again, but some crew members are doubtful about that, and a number of them have already moved on to other jobs.

Despite a casting call for extras that took place last year, there don’t seem to have been any announcements with regard to who would be playing Jesus or any of the other characters, but the film does have a director, namely Dean Wright, who has several years of experience as a visual-effects supervisor on the Narnia and Lord of the Rings films, among others.

In case you missed it, Annie went on record last night predicting that Milk will sweep the Oscars– or at least, that it will take Picture, Director, and Actor. Were I a betting man, I’d still put my money on Slumdog, but I think Milk is the only nominated film that really has a chance of taking it down, largely because the other three films are, um, really boring. But more to the point, I’m almost ready to say that I’m rooting for Milk; while I think that both it and Slumdog are significant achievements in filmmaking, and either one would be a deserving winner, it’s the former that seems to be staying with me a bit more than the latter, at least on an intellectual level.

And yet, there’s another part of me that dreads what seems bound to happen if Milk wins: All of the film’s detractors– be they folks who object to its politics, folks who think it’s simply not that great of a film, or folks who were really gung-ho about Slumdog– will, very probably, accuse the Academy of picking the movie not for its cinematic merits, but simply for its “cause.” Indeed, that’s a charge that has already been leveled by more than a few critics, who think the film is too conventional to warrant the heaps of praise it has received.

I’m certainly not privy to the Academy’s intentions, so if indeed Milk does win, I really won’t be able to say exactly why. I will say, however, that this movie– perhaps more than any other I’ve seen, at least recently– highlights the difference between a political film and a propagandistic one. Certainly, the movie has a political agenda, and, to that end, it’s a bold and fearless piece of filmmaking, one that never shies away from its cause, one that seems determined to stir up trouble and get right up in the face of those who might not share the same ideology. That said, I would also say that the film is inviting a serious conversation. It makes a persuasive argument (and I use that term descriptively, not necessarily evaluatively) for its side, but since when is that such a bad thing? Most Christian films make persuasive arguments of their own, it seems, and Milk never strikes me as demonizing those on the opposing side, nor does it seem uninterested in truly engaging principles and ideas.

In short, it tackles divisive issues with fervor, conviction, humor, compassion, and heart– and it invites (possibly heated) discussion. And I’m certainly not one to condemn a movie for having such grand aspirations, when so many films have such small aspirations. If Milk wins tomorrow, it may very well be because the Academy likes its politics– but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a dynamite movie, as well.

1. It may not have been nominated for Best Picture, but re-releasing The Dark Knight last month has paid off in one small way, at least: the film has finally raked in the last few pennies it needed to gross a billion dollars worldwide. Only three other films – Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) – have passed this milestone. Interestingly, The Dark Knight is the only film in the all-time Top 20 worldwide that has made more money in North America than it has overseas. – Variety, Hollywood Reporter

2. Mickey Rourke recently suggested that he might not be co-starring in Iron Man 2 after all, though the studio apparently still wants him for the film. This follows earlier reports that Emily Blunt might not be able to co-star in the film due to scheduling conflicts with another movie, and that “an economic crisis in the Marvel Comics world” might prevent Samuel L. Jackson from reprising his role as Nick Fury. Of course, Terrence Howard has already been replaced by Don Cheadle in the part of Jim Rhodes. Let’s hope Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow stick around, at least. – New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly

3. Remember that recent rumour about the Wachowski brothers being asked to reboot the Superman series? It’s been debunked. And the same website that debunked it is now reporting that a password-protected page at the Legendary Pictures website indicates the next Superman movie will be a sequel to Superman Returns (2006) called Superman Unleashed. – SlashFilm (x2)

4. There will be not one, not two, but three versions of Watchmen: the 156-minute version coming to theatres in two weeks, a 190-minute “director’s cut” on DVD, and an even longer 205-minute “ultimate edition” on DVD that will include footage from the story-within-the-story Tales of the Black Freighter. Meanwhile, early reviews are trickling in, and they are not mixed so much as they are sharply divided. – Collider.com

5. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who plays the Comedian in Watchmen, is in talks to star in another comic-book movie, The Losers. The story concerns “a special forces team betrayed by their handler and left for dead” who regroup “to conduct covert operations against the CIA and its interests.” – Hollywood Reporter

6. By some strange fluke, a superhero movie called Push came out two weeks ago, right around the same time an urban drama called Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire won the grand jury prize and two other awards at the Sundance film festival. To avoid confusion, Lionsgate, the studio that acquired the distribution rights to the Sundance film, has renamed it Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. – Variety

1. Several new items on the Twilight front: First, director Catherine Hardwicke said last week that she turned down the opportunity to direct the sequels because she would have had to shoot them on a low budget and an extremely tight schedule. Second, the sequel currently in development, once known simply as New Moon, has had its title expanded to The Twilight Saga’s New Moon. Third, the studio has already announced a release date for the next sequel, The Twilight Saga’s Eclipse; it will come out June 30, 2010, which is only seven months after the release date for New Moon, which, in turn, is only one year after the release date for the original Twilight. Finally, Chris Weitz, who is directing New Moon, will not be the director of Eclipse. – Associated Press, MTV Movies Blog, Nikki Finke, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Entertainment Weekly

2. The new version of Friday the 13th was such a big hit last week, it was inevitable that someone would try to reboot the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise too. And the man who has been hired to direct the film is Samuel Bayer, whose experience resides largely in the world of commercials and music videos; he helmed the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, among other things. – Hollywood Reporter

3. Paul Breuls is directing a romantic comedy called Meant to Be, about a guardian angel who falls in love with the woman he is protecting and tries to take her on a trip to Puerto Rico. – Hollywood Reporter

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opened in December 2005 and made a lot of money. Its sequel, Prince Caspian, opened two and a half years later, in May 2008, and made just a little more than half as much money.

Many people blamed the difference between the two films’ box-office grosses on the fact that one film was released during the family-friendly holiday season while the other film was released in a highly competitive summer market, within weeks of Iron Man, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the like.

Meanwhile, Night at the Museum opened in December 2006 and made a lot of money. Its sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, will open two and a half years later, in May 2009, in a highly competitive summer market, within weeks of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Angels & Demons, Terminator Salvation and Pixar’s Up. (Yes, all of those films are opening just in May. And there will be more in June, July, etc.)

If Battle of the Smithsonian is a hit, will that invalidate the theory that some people made in Prince Caspian‘s defense?

Sure, Slumdog took a zillion prizes but last minute upsets do happen. Slumdog peaked early but has picked up a sizable backlash in recent weeks, thanks in part to the controversy surrounding production’s treatment of the adorable urchins playing young Jamal and Salim.

Slumdog‘s main liability is that it’s just not a good movie (though that didn’t stop Crash). Milk, on the other hand, is a phenomenal film on every level. Excellent storytelling, masterful acting, and an important message about living the truth. I’m well aware that many Christians will refuse to see this film because it’s about a gay activist, but the genius of Milk is that director Gus van Sant finds the universal story here. Harvey Milk was a politician but Milk has a lot more going on that just a political agenda. If only all Christians would live as openly and fight as hard for their beliefs as Harvey Milk.

Anyway, I predict that Milk will take Best Picture and Best Director, and Sean Penn Best Actor.

Editor’s note: This post is slightly revised from an earlier version.

If you break down box office statistics in just the right way, you could conclude that American moviegoers care more about supporting communism and its causes than they do about widows and orphans and global poverty.

We could do that if we used a similar approach to the logic employed in this recent op/ed in the Wall Street Journal, written by Movieguide’s Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder, who argue that “what succeeds [at the box office] is capitalism, patriotism, faith and values.”

Baehr and Snyder base this on their analysis of “250 major films from Hollywood studios and independents for their social, political, philosophical, moral and religious content. . . . Once again, family-friendly, uplifting, and inspiring movies drew far more viewers in 2008 than films with themes of despair, or leftist political agendas.”

Consider how statistics don’t tell the whole story.

First, the year’s No. 1 movie – The Dark Knight, grossing well over $500 million domestically and $1 billion worldwide – depicted a city in complete despair until redemption finally wins through in the end. Second, family-friendly movies will obviously sell more tickets because you can take the whole family, and not just the “grown-ups.” (In my family, that means buying four tickets instead of just two.) Third, Movieguide’s “formula” for successful films doesn’t even factor in foreign box office figures, which are often more than the domestic take.

And consider how some categories may be irrelevant to moviegoers’ choices. Movieguide’s WSJ piece praises The Dark Knight and Iron Man because they are “pro-capitalist” movies, simply because their protagonists are very wealthy men who did some good things with their money. There’s no thought that perhaps so many flocked to the film because Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker was so compelling, or because it’s a battle of good vs. evil, or because we just think Batman is one uber-cool superhero. I’ve never heard anyone say they wanted to see The Dark Knight “because I absolutely LOVE pro-capitalist movies!”

The editorial also slams movies like The Visitor for their “anti-American content” (we named it one of the year’s most redeeming films because of the love and sensitivity shown to foreigners in desperate need) and Under the Same Moon (ditto; that movie was about showing compassion to immigrants).

This paragraph leaves us especially puzzled:

“The moneymaking trend was similar for movies with explicit or implicit anticommunist content. That group – including an ‘An American Carol,’ which mocks communism; ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ where Indy reviles communists and their impoverished ideology is exposed; ‘City of Ember,’ where a tyrant steals from the people; and ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ about the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union – averaged $71.8 million at the 2008 box office in America and Canada. By comparison, movies with pro-communist content, such as ‘Che,’ ‘The Children of Huang Shi,’ ‘Gonzo,’ ‘Trumbo’ and ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona,’ averaged a measly $7.9 million in 2008.”

It’s hard to know where to start in response. First, it’s not at all clear that these are “pro-communist” movies. For example, The Children of Huang Shi is a true story about a British journalist, George Hogg, who rescues Chinese orphans from certain death during the nation’s war with Japan in the 1940s. The Chinese remember Hogg as a hero today, and the boys he saved are eternally grateful for his selfless act of mercy and compassion. We don’t see how that’s “pro-communist.”

Second, using the same statistical logic, let’s compare those those “pro-communist” movies – which averaged a “measly” $7.9 million – to the average for movies that depicted Christ’s radical love in action, such Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Call + Response, We Are Together, As We Forgive, War Child, and Sons of Lwala. Box Office Mojo only has stats on Call + Response ($215,000) and Pray the Devil ($73,000), but I’m sure the others were well under $50,000. So, let’s say their average was a “measly” $50,000. Compared to the “pro-communist” movies’ take of nearly $8 million, that means Americans are 160 times more likely to be pro-commie than pro-love. Hey, statistics don’t lie!

Well, that depends on how they’re presented. Stats can be manipulated in any way, just as I manipulated them here to “prove” that Americans are more pro-communist than they are pro-compassion.

As a young journalist just out of college, I was told by an editor to read the book How to Lie With Statistics, first published in 1954. The book’s title is intentionally ironic; it’s not really a primer on how to lie with stats, but how to recognize that stats can indeed be misused so as to be misleading.

And that’s all I’m doing here: Recognizing just that.

2/21 UPDATE: Others voice their frustrations with–and had some strong words in response to–the Baehr/Snyder WSJ piece, including Dan Savage, Glenn Kenny, and Sean Gaffney.

2/22 UPDATE: And now Newsweek/The Washington Post have given Baehr and Snyder a forum for their statistical “analysis”–and the comments in reply are sassy: “No one sells more food than McDonald’s. McDonald’s must therefore be the most wholesome, moral food there is,” says one. “Christians neither invented nor have ownership of love, sacrifice, or heroism. As is clear from Mr. Baehr’s and Mr. Snyder’s article, they are also not free from bigotry, smugness, nor self-serving delusions,” writes another.

Update: Friday, Feb. 20,

Police in College Station, Texas, arrested Tracy Goen (inset photo) last weekend on Feb. 14 and charged him with prescription forgery. The local media reports:

A College Station doctor was in jail Saturday, accused of forging a hydrocodone prescription at an area pharmacy. Officials from the Brazos County Special Investigations Unit arrested Tracy Harrison Goen on Friday after pharmacy employees became suspicious of the prescription he had presented to them. The prescription was written on a prescription pad of another doctor, who told pharmacy workers that he had not prescribed the medicine, authorities said.

Goen, 47, admitted forging the hydrocodone prescription and told an investigator that he was addicted to the painkiller, officials said. During a search of Goen’s vehicle, officers said, they found several vials of urine, additional forged prescriptions and prescription pads from other doctors. Goen was charged with fraudulent possession of a controlled substance, a third-degree felony punishable by up to 10 years behind bars. He was being held in the Brazos County Jail in lieu of $7,000 bail Saturday. Goen is listed as a physician practicing at Brazos Valley Urgent Care in College Station.

But the local press apparently has missed the faith angle on this story. Goen and his physician wife served as medical missionaries in Nigeria for years. In a 2003 Religion New Service report, the couple was featured for their connection to MedSend, which helps new doctors pay down med school debts in exchange for overseas service.

Here’s an excerpt:

MedSend isn’t a sending agency, but rather partners with Christian ministries that send medical professionals. After a ministry pays MedSend a one-time participation fee, MedSend looks at the candidate’s qualifications and financial situation. MedSend assumes the debts for as long as they’re in the field. The average grant is $30,000, but grants for physicians can be more than $100,000. Most donors are Christian doctors.

CT wrote about the Goens in 2005.

Goen is also listed as the founder of HELP West Africa, a Christian ministry. In 2007, Goen spoke before a group involved in medical missions. Here’s the audio.

The latest details on his court case have not emerged yet.

Update (11:50 a.m. Thurs., Feb. 26): CT has posted our take on the controversy here.

CT is looking into the commotion over veteran editor George Kurian’s four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization being allegedly censored for being “too Christian.”

Kurian, the lead editor, has been remarkably pointed in his accusations, while the publisher Wiley-Blackwell has offered plausible yet incomplete defenses. All in all, highly unusual to see such a big academic project unravel at such a late stage in the game.

Inside Higher Ed has the best coverage here. You can find Kurian’s complaint posted here, and Wiley-Blackwell’s first defense here and second defense here. The gist:

1) Kurian says the encyclopedia was pulled because a small group of critics didn’t like the tone of his Christian language, feeling the reference needed to be more critical of Christianity and more positive towards Islam.

2) Wiley insists it pulled the volumes not out of anti-Christian bias but because editorial review procedures were bypassed without its knowledge.

3) Observers say it’s highly unusual for a publisher to pull such a major project so late in the game and wonder how Wiley-Blackwell bumbled its editorial process.

A number of UK papers and Catholic News Agency have covered the controversy, and contributors have discussed in the comments section of this blog. Terry Mattingly at Get Religion is annoyed no mainstream press is covering it.

Much of this follows this National Review blog post done by Edward Feser, a contributor to the book. Feser follows up in this post where he presses Wiley to say whether Kurian is lying or not and Wiley in turn keeps dodging. Feser’s conclusion:

So where does all of this leave us? In three consecutive statements now – their first two public statements, and Susan Spilka’s emailed response to my questions – Wiley-Blackwell has failed directly to address any of Kurian’s specific allegations to the effect that the publisher and/or editorial board demanded that certain changes of content be made so that the Encyclopedia would be less pro-Christian, more friendly toward Islam, and so forth. … One might be tempted to dismiss all this as a case of “he said/they said.” But it seems fair to conclude that while Kurian’s claims have been clear, consistent, and specific, Wiley-Blackwell’s statements have seemed piecemeal, vague, incomplete, and bureaucratic.

CT has a reporter on the story and will let our readers know what we turn up.