Tag: film

Movie Theatre as Prism

Apparently Cineplex is looking to reopen as early as July of this year, if, when, and where it may be allowed to do so. Seems they plan to march on after an apparently failed takeover deal, and have measures planned to make visiting their venues safe, including reserved seating.

I don’t suppose there is anything they will do to prevent there being some person a couple of rows ahead who insists on looking at their phone throughout the movie.

Anyway, there is the simple escapism of it, and if you care for films at all there are some you just need to see on the big screen along with the big sound. Sometimes there is even artistic merit, with something to be gained for the mind and heart.

There is always the chance this mode of expression — even seeing the same content as we would experience on a home theatre system — will awaken us to some human connection, insight or beauty we would not otherwise have apprehended. One might look forward to a return of live theater for the same reasons.

If and when it can be done safely, I just might visit a movie theatre again. Truth is always seeking ways to be revealed. 

The Main Character

The motives may not be evangelical, but many evangelicals understandably have encouraged and applauded the development of some upcoming Hollywood productions featuring Biblical characters. Indeed, this can only be good, even if the producers and directors are seeing in it only the same sort of results they have had from making effects-laden (as the Biblical flicks will be) productions based on Bible stories.

Russell Crowe as Noah, Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah, Christian Bale as Moses, Brad Pitt as Pontius Pilate–what believer would not celebrate this kind of publicity for Biblical stories and chracters?I would not say we should not. But I also am thinking of all the young lives that have been turned from the Bible because of wretched Sunday School curricula that moralized on the lives of Biblical characters–only to be disillusioned later on. \

The films will be an opportunity for pastors to point out to people–who may thankfully have a heightened or new interest in the bible because of the movies–that the same God who worked through these seriously flawed characters works through us in our place and time to bring about his purposes of ddrawingpeople to himself and making them part of his plan.

May we all be drawn to the one Main Character.