FAQ

Hey, why are you’re giving away the end of a movie?

Most people seeking a review of a new theatrical or DVD release have not seen the movie.  Conversely, most people looking for an older movie review have seen the movie.  Frankly, we’re more interested in analysis, which means discussing what the last acts of a movie mean.  The general rule is that if we’re reviewing an older movie (pre-2007), we’re likely to talk about its ending. You are now sufficiently warned.

So what makes this a “Christian” movie review site?

Every movie critic has a set of standards for watching movies.  Those standards determine what they think is good and bad.  Critics rarely show their hand, so to speak, in talking about their standards, but standards exist for them nonetheless.

We’re Christians, and we believe in the essential dogmas of the faith, as spelled out in the well-known early church creeds.  So, by putting the generic label “Christian” on our website, we are trying to give our readers a quick and dirty idea of what our standards are.

But doesn’t “Christian” mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people?

Yes.  So you know, we think the Ten Commandments are good, basic standards for the depiction of morality and ethics in film.  The Bible itself, God’s storybook, is a fine measure for acceptable portrayals of sex and violence.  It also, inescapably, provides the correct, basic framework for the aesthetic representation of reality (natural and supernatural) in film.

Why discuss movies?  Aren’t they all awful these days?

Pretty much, in both a moral sense and an aesthetic one.  So we’re highly selective about what we watch, which might be why you can’t find what you’re looking for here.

Still, everyone we know watches a lot of them. Movies are the dominate, popular, entertainment artform of our lifetime.  They were going back to the early twentieth century.  So to watch and analyze movies is, in part, to understand the everchanging presuppositions of our national (and world) culture. We’ve found that while many people know how to be entertained by movies, few know how to watch them.  We’re here to help.

Well, how can you help?

If anything, we try to point out the meaning of characters and structure.  All stories have a beginning and an end, and most have heroes and villains.  Who are the heroes and why are they heroes?  Now ask the same question about villains.  And why does the movie end the way it does, and what does that tell us about God, reality, government, family, etc.?  Every culture answers these kinds of questions in its art.  Since we live in an age of false religions and lies freely praised throughout mass media, it’s best to be on guard about these things.

Movies and TV are mediums that make their audiences passive.  You can sit and watch a two-hour movie without every thinking about what it’s telling you.  To ask the basic questions in the above paragraph is to break out of that passivity.  We think that Christians, presupposing the truths contained in God’s Word, are to be active, engaged participants in art.

Of course, our interpretation of a movie is not the final or ultimate one.  We invite you to disagree with us in the comments sections.

Why don’t you talk about my favorite actor’s performance?

Why should we?  An actor’s job is to be charismatic and compelling, and lead actors are the main marketing tools for their movies.  But very rarely is a movie worth watching for a performance.  (An exception is the song-and-dance movies of the ’30s, ‘40, and ‘50, which were designed to be watched just for the performances.)  The plot, the characters, and the messages are far more important.  Besides, actors are given far too much credit for doing much that’s out of their control.  The director, cinematographer, costume designer, makeup artist, and the editors determine much of an actor’s performance.  There might be ten takes for a scene, for instance, but the editors have to choose just one of those takes.  The actor better hope he looks good in it.  So a good editor can make or break an acting performance.  Why don’t we discuss the great movie editors?

But we do like Robert DuVall.

What about the Oscars?

A glitz-and-glamour fest on the surface.  A big marketing tool for the movie studios underneath it all.  Rarely, if ever, does the best anything win the Oscar it should.  In short, we don’t care.

Aren’t movies far worse than they used to be?

In certain ways, pretty much.  Hollywood drop-kicked the Hays Code in the late 1950s, which led almost immediately to the depiction of rebellion and nudity, among other things.  Over time, with cultural decline, just about anything could be shown in a movie.  And now most things are shown in mainstream movies.

In other ways, they are better.  We prefer the Stanislavsky acting method to the overacting of the first-half of the twentieth century.  Narrative techniques have improved, too, as they did with novels from 1750 to 1850.  These improvements, though, do not necessarily translate into better all-around movies — that’s why The Third Man could’ve been the best movie of the year each year of the last two decades.

In other ways, movies today are no different than yesterday.  Secular humanism and socialism — major movements since the birth of film, both of which are unbiblical — have been promoted in movies during every decade of movie history.

But aren’t I protected by the ratings system?

Not really.  The ratings system doesn’t account for theology or ideology, so a G-rated movie could blatantly break the First Commandment pretty easily.  See, for example, almost anything from Disney since the 1980s.

The ratings system is a kind of game, too.  Studios know that big-budget movies can’t receive G- or R-ratings, because movies with those ratings do not make as much money as PG or PG-13. (The current exception is Pixar.)  They therefore throw in something unnecessary — be it a few curse words or a love scene — in order to get the PG or PG-13 rating they want.

You seem to hate everything! What do you really recommend?

Rarely watch anything.  Spend time with the family.  Read a book out loud; it will occupy several days and everyone will love it.  And you’ll be having good interaction with people you should be having good interaction with.  (This rarely happens when you all gather around a screen and stare at it.)

Short of not watching anything, be very selective.  Almost all movies are here today and gone tomorrow, just as you have never heard of 99.5% of all novels ever published.  There are elaborate marketing systems designed to get you to watch dozens of movies a year, but very few of them deserve to have your money spent on them.  When you spend money on something, that means you are telling them to make more of it.

That wasn’t a recommendation!

Okay, start with these: Tender Mercies, Babette’s Feast, The Third Man, Amadeus, and the two Babe movies. These are mostly to a contemporary taste.

From there, try the best movies from the some of the best directors: John Ford, Frank Capra, Akira Kurosawa, Buster Keaton, David Lean.  There are other great directors to mention, but they are not always reliable in terms of content.

Also, try to reconfigure your tastes to appreciate movies from the 1920s to the 1950s.