Focus on Film

Focus on Film

Films, like books, are as diverse as the people who create them. Many portray rare and beautiful stories of dignity, courage and compassion. Others depict characters and situations so disturbing, it can take a few days to "shake them off."

The films below cover the gamut. Some would probably not be classified as "spiritual." These are the ones that need to be wrestled with bravely. They need to have their ideological underpinnings exposed and evaluated again, in the light of faith.

Our job is to take our faith to the movies and stay alert. Spiritual messages may be overt and readily apparent, or they may be discerned only in our reactions to the scenes and stories we see on the screen. Sometimes the best message we can come away with is to follow an alternate way, God's way.

In focusing on film as a spiritual resource, explorefaith hopes to acknowledge the present reality of our popular culture from a position of faith. That doesn't mean that we agree with, or approve of a film under scrutiny—only that, rather than letting movies dictate a position to us, we go to the theater mindful of God within us, and intentionally create a space into which God can speak. 

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PAN'S LABYRINTH
Pan's Labyrinth runs under the tagline “Innocence has a power evil cannot imagine,” but happily Mr. del Toro labors at that truth with love, teasing it out slowly, so that finally we are compelled to do some pretty heavy lifting if we want what this piece is offering us

RAY
If you are like me and all you know about Ray Charles going in is that he was blind and smiled a lot when he played the piano, I strongly urge you to see this film.

SAVED!
When Hilary Faye (played by Mandy Moore), the most perfect and self-righteous teenage Christian prom queen, gets her comeuppance in Saved!, you don’t know whether to applaud or feel a twinge of concern.

SEABISCUIT
Every now and then a big production movie comes along whose impact outpaces all the pre-release hype that puts it prancing in the starting gate. The movie startles and carries you for a ride worth remembering, if not taking over and again. Seabiscuit is such a movie.

SHADOWLANDS
Shadowlands  is a touching, intelligent film about Narnia’s creator, C. S. Lewis, and his brief but tragic love affair with Joy Davidman Gresham.

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
Something's Gotta Give, a lighthearted, humorous depiction of the dilemmas faced by two characters growing old in a youth-oriented culture, is good entertainment. And more.

THE CONSTANT GARDENER
In terms of decoding what is at first glance a rather unusual title, one of the most poignant scenes in this film is a brief homemade video during which Tessa films her sleeping husband Justin—a British diplomat stationed in Kenya— while joking about how he is probably dreaming of a "world without weeds."

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
As Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt portrays someone who lives his life backward, from old man to infant. The curious thing is what he learns along the way.

THE DA VINCI CODE
It’s a summer action flick—a slow-moving and garrulous one, to be sure, but no more inherently plausible than when aliens attacked America ten summers ago in Independence Day.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS
With all the pre-emptive warnings that church groups circulated about The Golden Compass—advising religious folk to stay away from Christopher Weitz’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s first installment in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy—you’d think the film would be more…relevant.

THE HUMAN(IZING) CHRIST OF FILM
Jesus' humanness has been portrayed in numerous ways in movies.  Here Torey Lightcap takes a look at some of the more intriguing examples.

THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
If you were a beaver and four humans showed up on your doorstep wearing fur coats, would you let them in? I certainly would have second thoughts. Funny how that idea never occurred to me before, even though I’ve read about the Pevensie children’s first encounter with the talking beavers of Narnia countless times.

THE MATRIX
My students often accuse me of madness, but they find nothing particularly controversial in my observation that The Matrix powerfully names and describes the forms of captivity into which we're born and within which we live and move and, by all appearances, have our being.

THE MATRIX RELOADED
As Jada Pinkett Smith describes the Wachowski Brothers, "They know how to balance eye candy with deep thoughts."

THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS
The Matrix Revolutions makes you want to go back to the good old days of 1999, when the first of these movies, The Matrix, delivered so much and promised so much more.

THE PIANIST
Many films explore the power of art to redeem human depravity, but none with any more force than The Pianist.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
Can Homer, Bart and the rest of the animated cast really teach us anything about faith?

VIOLENT DUDS
We find these days that people don’t understand what it takes to present violence on film in ways that actually make us think or turn us to the good, and we’re left with the continuation of a grossly disturbing trend.

WORTH WATCHING: THE TRAIN
Its roots are in the conventions of the classic genre of the action film, but The Train is also a war movie and an ethical think-piece. And it’s this last element— the moral universe it inhabits —that can make this film so enticing to anyone on a spiritual journey.

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