~Following Him!!!~

This is a copy of my review as posted on the Youth Specialties website.

Have you ever longed for a movie to be made by a Christian that depicted life in a much more realistic way? Where people who began a relationship with Christ didn’t suddenly have it all together, score the winning touchdown, get the girl, have their parents relationship suddenly get better and then find themselves tiptoeing through the tulips in a pain free life? If this describes you then the movie “To Save a Life” is just what you have been looking for.

I had the opportunity to go to a special screening of this movie for youth workers and I must say that I went into it very skeptical. I expected it to be just like almost every other movie that has been made by Christians. As the first swear word that was uttered I had a feeling that this could possibly be that type of a movie I have been waiting for.

The movie starts off in a cemetery where a young man, Roger, is being buried and you see another young man named, Jake, is standing a little ways off. Roger’s mom approaches Jake and asks him if he knew this was going to happen and when was the last time that Jake had talked to Roger. Jake freezes and we see flashbacks in his head of when he and Roger were younger. Then just as the mom walks off he utters, “Not since our freshman year”.

From there we learn more about Jake’s life and how he is the star athlete, has the girl and will soon be graduating from high school and heading off to play basketball at a major university. However, as we see there is something that just isn’t right with his life and we see the turmoil throughout that he seems oblivious to.

One day, he finds himself on a curbside with no one to turn to or call except for this youth pastor, Chris, he bumped into earlier that handed him his business card. Chris comes and picks up Jake from this party and starts a relationship with him that will eventually change both of their lives.

Chris never has all the answers for Jake but what he does have is time and love, so he gives as much of it as he can to him. Jake eventually starts becoming a regular member of Chris’ youth group and helps revolutionize the group from one that is going to church, to one that is becoming the church. You even see Acts 2 being acted out in one particular scene on the school grounds during lunch.

I would recommend this movie for every youth worker out there to take their group to, because it depicts not only the life of teens in a very real way; but because it will hopefully help your group to see their greater role on this planet and it will hopefully also helped you reach some teens who are not Christ-followers yet. And, yes, there is some swearing, drinking and a “sex scene” (where nothing is shown but you know what happened) in this movie so be warned. However, nothing is gratuitous even though it did get a PG-13 rating.

I also recommend this movie if you are looking for a good movie to go to that is well written, acted and produced. I was very impressed with the quality of this film. But don’t go see it if you would rather not be stirred to action and change your world.

I saw this from a friend’s Tweet and I had to do it myself. I am really looking forward to the next Star Trek movie.

HT to Len.

If you haven’t seen this video then you are missing out, because it is funny.

Over the Christmas holiday we took our kids to go see Bedtime Stories, which is the latest movie with Adam Sandler. It didn’t get very good ratings from reviewers but we wanted to see it for ourselves and thought it would be a good family movie anyway. I also had several Twitter friends, who went to see it before me, and they all said it was good.

Besides everyone knows that most reviewers are not very good at picking movies in the first place. After all, they are the one’s who said Home Alone was a bad movie and then changed their reviews a few weeks later after movie-goers made it a big movie.

Our family loved the movie. We all laughed and thought it was a very good movie. Adam Sandler may have done some fairly risque movies in the past, but he did a great job of making a very clean and family friendly movie with this one. It had good elements of comedy, romance and drama. There was even a good moral to the whole story.

I know I might be slightly juvenile, but I laughed every time that Bugsy the guinea pig came on screen. So all in all I would definitely recommend this movie to anyone with kids or anyone who wants to see a movie and get a good laugh.

With all of the recent movies from old TV shows or video games like Transformers, X-Men, and even the upcoming Wolverine movie, it is neat to see some other ones getting the same treatment.

Like Zelda….

And Pacman

I don’t know about you, but I am excited to see these movies. Of course, if you believe that they are real I am some property to sell you.

This is the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the top 100 American movies; I’ve put the ones I’ve seen in bold. I have seen 34 of the 100. There are even a couple on there that I want to see that I just never got around to seeing. How many of them have you seen?

1. Citizen Kane, 1941.
2. The Godfather, 1972.
3. Casablanca, 1942.
4. Raging Bull, 1980.
5. Singin’ in the Rain, 1952.
6. Gone With the Wind, 1939.
7. Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.
8. Schindler’s List, 1993.
9. Vertigo, 1958.
10. The Wizard of Oz, 1939.
11. City Lights, 1931.
12. The Searchers, 1956.
13. Star Wars, 1977.
14. Psycho, 1960.
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.
16. Sunset Blvd., 1950.
17. The Graduate, 1967.
18. The General, 1927.
19. On the Waterfront, 1954.
20. It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946.
21. Chinatown, 1974.
22. Some Like It Hot, 1959.
23. The Grapes of Wrath, 1940.
24. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982.
25. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962.
26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939.
27. High Noon, 1952.
28. All About Eve, 1950.
29. Double Indemnity, 1944.
30. Apocalypse Now, 1979.
31. The Maltese Falcon, 1941.
32. The Godfather Part II, 1974.
33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975.
34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937.
35. Annie Hall, 1977.
36. The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957.
37. The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.
38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948.
39. Dr. Strangelove, 1964.
40. The Sound of Music, 1965.
41. King Kong, 1933.
42. Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.
43. Midnight Cowboy, 1969.
44. The Philadelphia Story, 1940.
45. Shane, 1953.
46. It Happened One Night, 1934.
47. A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951.
48. Rear Window, 1954.
49. Intolerance, 1916.
50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001.
51. West Side Story, 1961.
52. Taxi Driver, 1976.
53. The Deer Hunter, 1978.
54. M-A-S-H, 1970.
55. North by Northwest, 1959.
56. Jaws, 1975.
57. Rocky, 1976.
58. The Gold Rush, 1925.
59. Nashville, 1975.
60. Duck Soup, 1933.
61. Sullivan’s Travels, 1941.
62. American Graffiti, 1973.
63. Cabaret, 1972.
64. Network, 1976.
65. The African Queen, 1951.
66. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981.
67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966.
68. Unforgiven, 1992.
69. Tootsie, 1982.
70. A Clockwork Orange, 1971.
71. Saving Private Ryan, 1998.
72. The Shawshank Redemption, 1994.
73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969.
74. The Silence of the Lambs, 1991.
75. In the Heat of the Night, 1967.
76. Forrest Gump, 1994.
77. All the President’s Men, 1976.
78. Modern Times, 1936.
79. The Wild Bunch, 1969.
80. The Apartment, 1960.
81. Spartacus, 1960.
82. Sunrise, 1927.
83. Titanic, 1997.
84. Easy Rider, 1969.
85. A Night at the Opera, 1935.
86. Platoon, 1986.
87. 12 Angry Men, 1957.
88. Bringing Up Baby, 1938.
89. The Sixth Sense, 1999.
90. Swing Time, 1936.
91. Sophie’s Choice, 1982.
92. Goodfellas, 1990.
93. The French Connection, 1971.
94. Pulp Fiction, 1994.
95. The Last Picture Show, 1971.
96. Do the Right Thing, 1989.
97. Blade Runner, 1982.
98. Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942.
99. Toy Story, 1995.
100. Ben-Hur, 1959

HT to Matthew.

The website that I am a part of called Youth Ministry Exchange has put together a resource for people to be able to discuss “The Golden Compass”. You can find the resource as part of the YMX weekly free download by clicking here.

Big kudos to Patti and her son for putting this together.

There has been much controversy over the movie “The Golden Compass”, which comes from book written by Philip Pullman, which I had not read. There was even talks amongst Christians of boycotting the movie. Just do a search on FaceBook or MySpace and you will find several groups devoted to boycotting it. So I decided I wanted to go see what all the protesting was all about.

I should warn you that if you want to see the movies and have not read the books, that there are spoilers below.

I had heard that Pullman was a self-avowed atheist and that the series of books, of which “The Golden Compass” is the first, were basically his call for “killing God”. Which when you think about it, to kill God there has to have been a God in the first place and atheist don’t believe in God. But I digress….

The theater I saw the movie in was the first all digital theater in my area and this being my first time in it, I was immediately drawn into how visually stunning it was because the image was so precise. I thought that this would be a great asset to a film in the fantasy genre, so Pullman’s movie had an advantage at this point in my mind. And I was indeed correct, because it was really good and immediately drew you in.
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Hopefully, you have read my blog post titled Boycott Hell, but if not I will summarize it here, I am not boycotting it but will instead go and see it so I can engage in discussions with people regarding it. That is a VERY short summary, so I hope you will read it.

But I want to address a couple of things here that I had mentioned in that post. The first one being in regards to whether or not it will even be a good quality movie. Everything I have read so far from movie reviewers, I have yet to read one positive thing about it. Most people are saying it is not that good anyway. Adam Graham of the Detroit News reviewed it and gave it a D. In conclusion he said….

Quite simply, it’s not good enough to protest.

Which was something I pointed out with some other movies that Christians have boycotted. The boycotts only served to encourage people to go and give them free advertising. So let’s take Adam’s advice and not bother. If it isn’t that good, then it will bomb and no one will end up seeing another, because Hollywood is all about money and less about controversy.

The other thing I would like to point out was that I had mentioned that I felt that Philip Pullman’s beef was more with the image of God portrayed by the Church and less with God Himself. It seems that I may be right about that according to Telegraph. I will quote some of it here….

Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, caused controversy by praising the National Theatre’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials – a work that has been interpreted by some as anti-Christian. The two men met at the theatre on Monday to discuss the meaning of religion in art and literature -and its enduring relevance to the education of our children.

Dr Rowan Williams: I suppose one of the questions I would like to hear more about from Philip is what has happened to Jesus in the church in this world [of His Dark Materials], because one of the interesting things for me in the model of the church in the plays and the books, is it’s a church, as it were, without redemption.

Philip Pullman: Well, to answer the question about Jesus first, no, he doesn’t figure in the teaching of the church, as I described the church in the story. I think he’s mentioned once, in the context of this notion of wisdom that works secretly and quietly, not in the great courts and palaces of the earth, but among ordinary people and so on. And there are some teachers who have embodied this quality, but whose teaching has perhaps been perverted or twisted or turned, and been used in a fashion that they themselves didn’t either desire or expect or could see happening.

So it appears that Philip Pullman believes that the Church has strayed from much of the teachings of Jesus and I would have to agree with him. I have blogged about that before, but I believe that the Church needs a wake up call like this to realize that we are lacking in many things. And some of them are acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. Jesus showed compassion and love to those that are considered lost and reserved His harshest criticisms for the religious leaders. But somehow now we have turned that around and we criticize the world harshly. That is a problem.

No, I am not talking about the Newsboys song. I am talking about all the boycotting that Christians feel that they need to do. There was a time when I used to agree with boycotting everything and anything that a Christian leader feels I need to boycott. I have received emails telling me not to go see certain movies, read certain books, etc. And honestly in some ways it makes me want to see them/read them all the more. I want to personally know why it may or may not be bad, not just take someone’s word for it.

Before you go any further, I really want to encourage you take your time and read this. Stop and pray to calm yourself if necessary. I know that as I typed this I did that, because I didn’t want any of it to come out angry or spiteful. Thanks.

There are some things that I obviously do not need to discover for myself that is clearly bad. Like pornography. I know it is bad and I have heard countless testimonies from people who were in the industry and people who were addicted to porn. You can check out some of these testimonies yourself over at xxxchurch.com, they have several because that is their ministry.
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