![]() ![]() “God’s Not Dead,” a hatefully angry, bitter and laughably loaded “debate” movie, seems right up your alley. ![]() The angriest responses I get to reviews are from arch right wing folks who think Ayn Rand walks on water, fans of video games who don’t realize that good movies never are adapted from video games, and conservative Christians who are the angriest of all. ![]() You’re the person who lets something get under her/his skin. No, people who see a movie with people just like them, which has sold, what, 5 million tickets (in a nation of 300 million), who assume that because a film is “Christian” it is therefor worthy and righteous and a real Oscar contender, who do not know how to spell and who flip out, EVERY time a Christian movie comes out and gets mostly bad reviews (the good ones on Rotten Tomatoes? Pandering), are annoying. StallingsĬredits: Directed by Alex Kendrick, script by Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick. MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements throughoutĬast: Priscilla C. They’ve taken their homilies to Hollywood, But will the choir be impressed with “entertainment” this insipid, a sermon this lightweight? “War Room” throws into sharp relief the ways they don’t measure up, and captive audience of not, they’re not getting better at storytelling for the screen. But as they do, they lose their amateur standing, and they invite comparison to everybody else making filmed entertainment. The Kendricks can say they’ve merely exchanged ministries in diving whole-hog into movies. What works for horror and sci-fi fanboys can work for the faithful. And there’s nothing wrong with these movies “preaching to the choir.” “Know your audience” is just cinematic common sense. The steady stream of Christian films making it into theaters has been a smart move by studios, serving an underserved audience. What’s it say when you look back on Kirk Cameron (“Fireproof”) as the gold standard for acting in your Christian films? I’m leaving the child actors’ names out of this, because whatever Momma’s been spending on acting lessons hasn’t paid off. They can’t wrench any emotion out of this material, either. The actors cannot land the attempted laugh-lines that the Kendricks shove into the script. She fends off a knife-wielding mugger “In the name of Jesus!” Sounds like a white screenwriter’s idea of how a skinny drug-free Madea would talk. “Men don’t like it when womens’ always tryin’ to fix them!” The long-widowed Clara is full of advice. “Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy” lives and marriages, she counsels. ![]() Miss Clara preaches the need for a “War Room,” a place (a closet) where a woman can go develop a strategy for keeping Satan out of her house and her marriage, a place to pray. You’ve got to submit to a lot of pushy, proselytizing nonsense to land a client. Hey, that Charlotte real estate market is tough. This is after Miss Clara has impertinently grilled Liz on her church going habits, and made a joke out of her “lukewarm” commitment to Jesus by serving her lukewarm coffee. Her new client, the elderly widow Miss Clara (Karen Abercrombie) has the answer. “It is hard to submit to a man like that,” she confesses to her Christian realtor colleagues. Stallings).īut Tony has tuned out this marriage, and Elizabeth is upset. Shirer) is a successful Charlotte real estate agent, raising a daughter who’s deep into Double Dutch and sharing a McMansion with her star pharmacy rep husband Tony (T.C. There’s no heart, and very little humor to this tale of a marriage going wrong and the God-fearing cliché who hectors a troubled wife into sitting in her closet and praying the temptations away.Įlizabeth (Priscilla C. It’s just a clumsily written, flatly-acted sermon built on some of the same stereotypes that made Tyler Perry rich. I’d say they “sold out,” but to the best of my knowledge, there are no leaked Sony memos to them with “Do you think you could go a little easy on the whole ‘Jesus thing’ here?” The Kendrick Brothers, those Southern Baptist preachers-turned-filmmakers, go Hollywood and take a step or two backward with “War Room,” their first film since abandoning the pulpit.īecause “What I REALLY wanna do is direct.” ![]()
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