Oscar night
I'm not watching them, though I did briefly find myself catching a glimpse when I flipped by and thought I had found a Wallace & Gromit cartoon to watch. It turns out it was the Academy Awards and I kept watching long enough to see Reese Witherspoon (hubba, hubba) announce that Wallace & Gromit had won.
I don't think I've seen a single one of the Oscar-nominated flicks for "Best Movie," so I've got no interest in knowing whether that gay-sheepherder film wins or not.
However, I did catch this article in today's Washington Post on the Hollywood's "social issues" movies and came away mostly unimpressed. Hollywood filmmakers think Charlize Theron's "North Country" helped get the Violence Against Women Act renewed, but it passed the House 415-4 three weeks before the movie even hit theaters. Not exactly a controversial bill.
And I think that the lone Christian filmmaker quoted is too heavily invested in rose-colored glasses.
"Movies are the storytelling medium of our generation," said Peter Lalonde, whose Christian production company Cloud Ten Pictures made three movies based on the "Left Behind" books. "I believe it's through film that our culture and values are passed along. Who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, what's right, what's wrong. In other generations, that was passed on by family. If you want to go way back, it was done around campfires, and then around the dinner table. Now it's through movies, like it or not."
Almost all filmmakers consciously try to manipulate their audiences, some more successfully than others, Lalonde said. "You paint anyone in the light of a protagonist, put music in the right spot, and you are influencing people. It happens in our movies. To take an extreme event, people decide to change their faith after seeing one of our movies," he said. "Or take 'Jaws.' I still know guys who won't swim in their swimming pool."
None of this year's Oscar nominees strikes Lalonde as especially visionary, but he gives credit to "Brokeback Mountain" for expanding the portrayal of a stereotyped group (though he notes, "I won't see 'Brokeback Mountain.' I'm not opposed to it; that's just my choice"). This puts Lalonde in mind of another group often caricatured: Christians.
"There was a good time in the '70s or '80s when portrayals of Christians were almost always in a negative light," he says. "You had your greasy-haired preacher, your child molester. And I think there was a time when that was true of homosexuality as well. It was so far off the mainstream, it took some time for it to come into the center. Both have moved more to the center now."
For the record, I've not seen any of the "Left Behind" movies -- in fact, I didn't know there were three of them, I'd only heard of one. However, I think that Hollywood is far more accepting in its portrayals of homosexuals than they are of Christians. The only recent mainstream movie that (that is, not including the "Passion of the Christ" or "End of the Spear") that had a Christian portrayed in a positive light was "Raising Helen."
Too often you get Christians portrayed in the most negative light, like television's recent short-lived series "Book of Daniel."
Lalonde may be seeing something that I don't, but I think Hollywood is still largely stuck in the Lalonde's '70s and '80s.
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Hollywood's values are not to be found anywhere else except perhaps San Francisco and Amherst. As for Hollywood's depictions of Christians who really cares? I mean they think lawyers, politicians, and the Islamic terrorists are role models for today's youth.