Because a boo-boo index is easier than an actual review..

Quite a few well-meaning folk have set up ministries, large and small, aimed at reviewing film and television with an eye to how appropriate the content is for Christian and family audiences. In roundly criticizing them, as I am about to do, I am aware that I run the risk of being called petulant — of having, even, a public temper tantrum.  “Why aren’t you reviewing my movie?” the upstart screams, banging on the glass door, as, inside the building, the Christian reviewer admires the new life-sized Ashton Kutcher cutout Paramount has set up for him in the lobby. How dare you ask for the same attention the studios get?  That sort of thing.

So be it.  Courage, New Hampshire is great drama and would be a welcome addition to, and a superior selection over, most of what you see on television.   If that sounds arrogant, fine.  It’s just a statement of fact.  It is certainly far superior to the vast majority of filmic “Christian” pep-talks, masquerading as story these days.

But even if you remove our project from this discussion, for those of you who care about family and about Christianity, as I do, there is an important discussion that needs to take place.    Simply put, these ministries crush new work;  they thwart good ideas;  they actually achieve the opposite of what they intend.   In practice, all they really do is legitimize the soul-scarring agenda a lot of Hollywood films embody, and they tend to blemish those Hollywood films that would actually be good for the soul, even if they weren’t produced by Christians.

Why?   Ultimately, it’s because they don’t know their own faith, their own Bible. They have been reading the Cliff Notes, pop-jamboree version of their faith for so long they don’t know that story, like scripture, should be dramatic — full of huge conflict, credible evil, bruising insults, a little blood, lots of tears, and — scandalous to the ears of Neo-Victorians — beautiful, tempting women. Redemption cannot be experienced without sin and story cannot be told without real human conflict, but their ideal story is a suburban Christian dad who hasn’t made his wife’s life a non-stop Hallmark special, complete with daily affirmations and the sacrifice of his ski boat for her women’s retreat.  God tells a brutal story with redemption and hope. A story doesn’t need to engage in gratuitous sex or purposely disturbing gore, but a “bad” story is “bad” not because of a low score on the wholesomeness index. It is “bad” because it pitches nihilism or lack of hope. That is far more damaging to the body of Christ and to the family than the ruffian who lights up a cigarette in contradiction to Nazarene conventions of propriety.

..And that is precisely what these ministries do.  They spread twelve hundred pixel color photographs of big studio projects across their sites, (thus making them “relevant”) and then they give you an index of the flatulence-count, or the number of times someone smoked a cigarette or said “damn.”    (They put it “D-.”)  They are actually very proud of this inventory system of boo-boos, and some of them wring their hands, asking for prayer, as they go into the lion’s den and count the number of “S” words. I hope I don’t need to point this out, but this sort of thing, from a literary perspective, makes Christians look like abject idiots.  There is nothing wrong with a profanity index, or a graphic sex warning, or a violence indicator, but all of that has to be put in a broader context.  The Passion of the Christ was brutal, but does that mean the story doesn’t need to be told? Can you really review that story by mopping your brow and congratulating yourself for measuring the amount of blood on the screen? If I were their professor, I would say, “Skippy, I need to talk to you after class, see if I can help you understand the broader strokes here.”

But that’s not the worst of it.  There is a kind of spiritual and economic fraud going on here, when non profit ministries take the money of working families, on the pretext of attempting to improve, by measuring, cinema.   What these ministries have effectively become is a marketing arm of the established studios.   What are they doing but giving page after page of free publicity to a market Hollywood must penetrate to survive — the family, Christian market?   Oh yes, there’s a lot of reverent-sounding tsk-tsk objection, but, as one actress wrote me on the subject, “of course they are going to review all the dirty stuff;  95% of professing ‘Christians’ go to those movies anyway.”

I have a little advice for these ministries.  They won’t take it, I know, because they want to be hip, they desperately want to be hip, so they can wrap with their homies about all the pop culture out there, even if they, um, really don’t like it and know it’s not good for them.

Here’s the advice: find great stories and tell people about them.

It’s revolutionary!   It’s also hard work.  I know.  I spend about 30 minutes BEFORE my elliptical workout trying to find something reasonably intelligent to watch. The Christian film community doesn’t help much, I know, because they produce a lot of boring stuff, but you have already proven you ignore them pretty much anyway.  You might try, however, at least to look at the independent and vintage and classic stuff, the stuff without a marketing budget, and give them a boost.    Maybe you could do, like, three smart independent features to every twenty stupid Ashton Kutcher movies?   Would that be a suitable ratio?

It might go something like this:

Positive side:  “heah we dug an old one out of the files.  It’s on Netflix and it’s called “Dam Busters.”  The special effects are really dated, but the story is genuinely intriguing, about a very novel attempt to destroy German dams in 1943 World War II.    The story is so novel Peter Jackson is going to do a remake.”   (You wouldn’t even have to do a “D-” word count on that one, because we’re talking about hydro-power.)

Negative side: The latest Twilight flick.  “Yawn.   Mindless, poorly written.  If you girls like the romance, fine, but we think you could do better. Have we mentioned our discussion boards on the various Pride & Prejudice remakes?”  Whatever you do, don’t make a bad film look “spiritually iffy but very hip.”  That’s a sure-fire way of getting your teenagers to go see it.   Make it look stupid, or out of fashion, and you will really change the way Hollywood works.

That is what you want to do, isn’t it?

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Postscript, February 13, 2012: One of our fans, the host of a film festival on the east coast, asked PluggedIn.com (the media arm of Focus on the Family), why they had not yet reviewed “Courage, New Hampshire.”

I just have to memorialize this response:

“.. we’d love to review everything out there! But one of the baselines for making decisions about which shows we review is the Nielsen ratings. When a series or special falls below a certain point, we simply don’t have the manpower to address it. So sorry we haven’t been able to tackle this particular one.”

In other words, “We shine the light of Christ so long as the Nielsen ratings allow it.”