Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Surveying the History of Biblical Films in Hollywood

My esteemed film criticism colleague, Peter Chattaway, has done a nice job for Christianity Today
of summarizing the movement in Hollywood recently towards telling Biblical epics again.  Here's my contribution to the piece:

"Biblical material needs to be handled differently," she says. "It's not fodder for the filmmaker's imagination. The filmmaker is fodder for the biblical story. When you pick up a comic book and use that as source material, that's fodder for your imagination as a filmmaker—it serves you. When you make a biblical movie, you serve it."

I admit to a shiver of horror at the comments of Ridley Scott promising that his movie on Moses coming out later this year will feature "an unconventional" view of God.  Why?  Why do they have to do that?!!  Is it too much to ask a committed, liberal atheist to not spit in the eye of the faith-based audience?  Oh, yeah....  Anyway, let's pray for the project just in case there is still time for it to not be toxic crap, or just stupid like Noah.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

What you said makes sense, Barbara. The same industry that's been releasing big-budget movies based on comic books for more than a decade couldn't help treating the biblical source the same way. Sadly, the public, who has patronized such films, seems to have lost any aesthetic sensibility to engross such bad cinematographic versions of biblical stories. This and Christians, in particular, who feel so neglected and put down that they are ready to embrace any bone thrown at them that they don't mind the rot in it.