“Are Christians defenseless against unbelievers who claim the Bible is X-rated and compare it to pornography? May it never be! Having laid down a rationale for the depiction of depravity, let us now qualify that rationale with context, context, context. And context makes all the difference between moral exhortation and immoral exploitation of sin” (Brian …
When Being Above It All Is Actually Under A Pile
“Statements like, ‘The sex and violence don’t bother me’ are not necessarily expressions of maturity. If a movie is exploitative with vice, it ought to bother the viewer, and if it doesn’t, then that viewer is being deadened in his or her spirituality and humanity” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, pp. 178).
Chocolat
“Neopaganism can be seen as the driving force behind the Oscar-nominated Chocolat (2001), written by Robert Nelson Jacobs from Joanne Harris’s novel. In this clever version of neopagan redemption, an entire French town is oppressed by the moral scruples of a patriarchal Roman Catholic mayor. The town is then scandalized by the arrival of a …
Time and Gump Happen to Them All
“Forrest Gump (1994) and its predecessor Being There (1979) are both popular movies that communicate the idea of a chance world in which events occur without purpose. The use of mentally challenged men in both films is a metaphor for chance itself. They have no ‘intelligent design’ to their lives and yet both of them …
Subversiveness Is Bad?
“When a kid watches the animated movie Shrek, he probably doesn’t know about Carl Jung’s theories of psychological types and the collective unconscious, but he is ingesting them nonetheless through those characters and that story adapted after the Jungian model . . . The screenwriters admit Shrek’s Jungian ideas: ‘The book is very clever, because …
Stories As Preachers
“Movies are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, only about story. And those stories are finally, centrally, crucially, primarily, mostly about redemption.” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 54).
There Are Slugs On the Bottom of the Salad Too
“Two of the most frustrating replies to hear when asking people what they thought of a movie are ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it,’ accompanied by an inability to explain why . . . We have already established that stories do not exist in a vacuum of meaninglessness. Movies communicate prevailing myths and …
No Neutrality On the Screen
“Every story is informed by a worldview. And so every movie, being a dramatic story, is also informed by a worldview. There is no such thing as a neutral story in which events and characters are presented objectively apart from interpretation” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 25).
Why Ad Rates for Super Bowl Halftime Should Be Inexpensive
[Michael Medved] “points out the hypocrisy of those in the dream business who proclaim that movies don’t influence belief or behavior while charging millions of dollars for advertising and product placements in movies and receiving awards and prestige for promoting trendy social agendas.” (Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews, p. 17).
The Magical Comeback
“The American church has a relatively short history of assuming that true Christianity disappeared when the last apostle died and did not reappear until the camp meetings on the Kentucky frontier in 1799. Some, more moderate in their views, do not think the church disappeared until the third or fourth century, but it always seems …