-alan

BTW, it’s not true that he excoriates more films than he praises: each list has 20 films. He lights candles and curses the darkness with equal aplomb.
Why, then, do you suppose Baehr’s “nice” awards have their own Web site and their own event at a swanky hotel, while the “nasty” awards are nothing more than a press release on Dan Wooding’s site?

I’m glad “Amazing Grace” is getting some props. I found it engrossing, moving, thoroughly enjoyable. But let’s not kid ourselves: its worldwide box office receipts were only $31.7 million, less than any of the best-picture Oscar nominees. Sometimes it’s true that positive, uplifting films with Christian values do well at the box office … and sometimes it isn’t.

“Ratatouille,” BTW, has got to be the all-time perfect movie: $620.6 million worldwide gross, scores in the mid-90s on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and won award from Baehr, the Dove Foundation, AND the Motion Picture Academy. All this despite scenes of intense gun violence, people getting tied up, a major character who was born out of wedlock, passionate kissing, self-reliance in place of acknowledging one’s need for God, communicating with ghosts, fraud and deception, a penis joke, a negative portrayal of critics, and worst of all, being set in France.

Check out this latest post, in which they go to great lengths to condemn several of the things that offended them most in 2007:

http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2008/s08020191.htm

These condemnations appear to outnumber the awards they distributed for excellence (or at least their own idea of excellence).

They get so many things wrong here, I don’t know where to start.

How about with attacking Eli Sunday in “There Will Be Blood” as a negative Christian stereotype?

It’s clear in the film (and even moreso in the book) that Sunday is a cult leader. He insists that this is the church of the “Third Revelation,” and his sermons are not much involved with the gospel. It’s a new religion, a perversion of the Christian church. Sunday is all about his own particular vision, and the strange “spirit” that possesses him and gives him healing powers. He’s a hysterical cult leader. He’s a charlatan. And the film vividly illustrates the wages of sin for people who distort the truth, deceive the vulnerable, and behave in greed and arrogance.

Sometimes, we’re so quick to take offense that we don’t recognize the truth.

And what if Sunday *had* been portrayed as a wicked Christian? The Bible itself includes stories about men who, while claiming the name of Christ, deceive others. These charlatans and evildoers even cast out demons and perform wonders. Malevolent religious leaders are as real today as they ever were, and artists should be free to tell stories about the wages of such sins. Such portrayals remind us of the great responsibility that is assumed by a pastor or a priest. Sometimes, we learn about what *should* be by examining distortions and failures.