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Reviews
Heaven's War (2018)
Action Movie With A Message
In Heaven's War (also known as Beyond The Darkness) there are a lot of fantastic, wondrous, incredible happenings. Angels spring out of the air to snatch people into an unearthly realm. Demons lurk everywhere, taking the shape of character's parents to tempt them with false versions of Christianity. The angels and the demons battle each other with flaming swords and black smoky hammers of Thor. Those are the fantastic things. The incredible is what our hero, surprisingly youthful senator Jonah Thomas, is doing that imperils his soul. Although he is an elected representative in the highest legislative body in the land, his wife expects him to take off in the middle of a work day to attend his daughter's tennis match.
Senator Jonah (Jason Gerhardt) finds himself alive but comatose after what appears to be a terrorist bombing. In the living world he is surrounded by FBI agents whose mission is to keep him alive. In the spirit world he is guided by the angel Gabriel (Danny Boaz) no less. Meanwhile, back in the hospital where mama is dying of cancer (a disease that concerns us many different ways in the plot) the senator's wife and child pray to the almighty for his safety.
The story kept my attention, despite being predictable. The senator hangs on the precipice of either death or damnation or both multiple times. Will the angels save him from his skeptical mind? Along the way we run into a healthy supply of Christian movie tropes: the prophetic dream, the atheist talked out of it, the conspicuous American flag, vaccinations as an evil plot, and lots of scenes at deathbeds. Most notably, the senator engages Gabriel in the standard Q&A about why there is suffering and evil in the world. If he only had answers, he would surely believe. This despite having been whisked into a bright golden landscape, made able to walk on water, and witnessing dozens of heavenly and hellish foot soldiers engaging in savage hand to hand combat on his personal behalf. Me, I would have renounced all skepticism within seconds of seeing the shining yellow sea and the falling comets turning into warriors.
The movie obviously had a budget, and the money appears on the screen. But when all the video game level special effects are done, it is the message which matters. It is a disturbing message. Gabriel at one point shows the senator some colleagues who did not survive the terrorist blast; they are falling into the fiery pits of hell. If I was the senator I would have one question for Gabriel: why were there no angels fighting for their salvation? Why didn't they get the second, third, and fourth chance he was being given?
All the King's Horses (1977)
Poor Advice for Battered Women
All The King's Horses is a profoundly disturbing movie, not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. It shows a support system of family and clergy that fails miserably at protecting a battered woman. Because this is a Christian movie, this makes them the good guys.
Husband Jack (Grant Goodeve) is a creep. Pure and simple. He doesn't give a hoot about his wife or sons. We have no clue why he even wanted to marry the girl Sandy; his first action is to contemptuously flatten her car tire. Their courtship montage has no chemistry. Flash forward eight years (judging by the apparent age of their oldest son). Jack has become a decent breadwinner yet hasn't matured past an adolescent fixation on motocross. He starts beating up Sandy in front of the kids for being late with dinner.
Sandy is played by Dee Wallace-Stone (the mother in E.T.). Her portrayal of a disillusioned, abused wife who cannot find anyone sympathetic to her plight is touching. Too bad her character is driven not by plausible motivations but by the unbending needs of the plot formula. Her opening voice-over yearns foremost for a good Christian husband. Jack displays not even a pretense of this. How does she overlook this painfully obvious flaw? Because he is fun to play with in a barn full of straw and mud. Sandy is viscerally believable when she and Jack fight, but inexplicable when she must to pretend she loves and cares about him.
The filmmakers do a good job of showing the abuse. Punches and slaps connect. Sandy's black eyes not only look genuine but even fade realistically as days go by. Beatings escalate. Sandy turns to her parents and pastor for help. They urge her to stop being selfish and give Jack another chance. What God has joined man shall not put asunder.
This mindset (which I admittedly don't understand) seems to follow the same logic as the Divine Right of Kings: we obey monarchs because God (not strategic marriages, land grabs, or skill/luck of battlefield generals) put them into power. Similarly, if two people manage to get married, God must have sanctioned it. Whatever happens subsequently has a purpose. Never mind that fallible (sometimes deceptive) men and women are their own matchmakers.
Sandy's existence becomes more nightmarish, Jack never showing the slightest indication he will change. Even Sandy's divorce lawyer stands in her way. We begin to doubt this could end well. But it's a Christian movie, so it somehow must. Will Sandy exact retribution on Jack, thereby becoming the villain? Will Jack kill Sandy, and will she find herself at the Pearly Gates rewarded for never divorcing the bum? Will Jack die on his motorcycle and eliminate such hard choices? Or maybe, just maybe, could Jack undergo a total personality U-turn and accept Jesus? One thing is certain: Sandy cannot correct her mistake, get a divorce and raise her sons happily ever after. Not an option.
The Sobbing Stone (2005)
Sanctimony meets painfully obvious mystery.
The Christian movie tropes in The Sobbing Stone are more or less par for the course in this cinematic genre: scientists who know nothing of the scientific method; atheists who don't really disbelieve but are only angry at God because of something that happened to them as children; music with zero subtlety; location scouting with dubious results (does the slope of Golgotha really have lush trees and mown grass?); and so on. Sample words put in the mouth of atheists: "Science has proven that no god exists." (Wrong: atheists maintain that there is no reliable evidence, not that there is proof.) Sample words put in mouth of scientists: "There's no explanation for it; not even a theory." (In science a theory IS an explanation, one with firm evidentiary support). Sample scientific method: When a group of psychic researchers (I'm not sure the writer realized that is what you would label the Ghostbusters) are given the task for figuring out why the title stone is making noises, their first decision is "the professor says the sounds come randomly, so no sense recording times when sounds are observed." Right: deliberately avoid gathering data. Sample line: "Have you ever murdered someone?" Only in a Christian movie would the hearer of that line do anything but back away slowly, then turn and bolt.
The story, though conceptually a little clever, is particularly unsavory. It drives home the thesis that human beings are worthless, and that nobody, however well intentioned they may be, would have supported the saviour in his time of trial.
As a movie, it fails most fundamentally because its mystery's solution is detectable within minutes of the film's opening. Much of the acting is silly at best when it is not just embarrassing. The music seems to have been composed in whole notes entirely on the bottom octave of a synthesizer. The characters are utterly unlikeable (which I supposed matches the basic premise). And the camera work is just plain ugly to behold. There were numerous laugh-out-loud moments (like when one researcher speculates from the sounds of echoes around footsteps that it must have happened at night??) but most of the film is painful to watch due to its gross misrepresentation of, well, the quality of humanity. Not recommended to those who would watch it ironically; it will probably be eaten up by its target audience, if their cinematic expectations take an extreme backseat to their theological views.
Black Cat (2017)
Compelling Black Comic Thriller
This film showed up at the Chagrin (Ohio) Documentary Film Festival. It wasn't a documentary, but was programmed along with five short subject mockumentaries, with which it shared a common thread - it is about making a documentary.
What it is really about is a ne'er-do-well man-child, Duke, who has squandered what little success he achieved in the LA film world, and now extracts five-figure checks from his mother to finance the latest in a series of uncompleted projects. He assembles the necessary crew members and begins stumbling through a seemingly pointless film, opening up a five-year-old case involving a fatal traffic accident that involved a former acting colleague of his, Tyler. Duke finds a disgraced former police detective, Volek, who combines the worst of Ahab and Javert in his vendetta quest to prove that Tyler's version of the facts was a cover up (Tyler was officially cleared of wrongdoing).
Duke comes across as a self-absorbed journalist on a fishing expedition, and Volek behaves like any intrepid conspiracy theorist fighting an uphill battle against the truth. Tyler does not appear to have the necessary guile to have done any of the things Volek suspects. Having nothing better to do between film roles, he willingly participates in Duke's documentary work, which showcases the detective's paranoia and the filmmaker's own aimless impotence. These early scenes are quite funny, in a This Is Spinal Tap way.
Two women become increasingly involved; Diane, who is Duke's hapless co-producer, and Kelsey, who romantically worms her way into Tyler's life. Duke imagines slick filmed recreations of the accident. Early on, these highlight his pathetic grasping at straws trying to find substance to base his documentary upon. As the movie continues, they are repeated, getting more sinister as Kelsey begins falling in love with Tyler and Diane begins to do the detective work Duke is utterly incapable of. From this point on, I cannot reveal any more plot -- the twists to both narrative and mood come at accelerating pace.
Writer-director Peter Pardini has made an excellent black comic thriller. Almost nothing is as it seems. Most of the principals are independently employing multi level subterfuges. The above-board participants (not the ones you'd expect) realize it too late.
Creed of Gold (2014)
Scooby Doo Teens Battle the Illuminati!
If Creed of Gold had one ounce of subtlety, style, or credibility, it would qualify as evil propaganda. Fortunately, it is merely wretched.
A cabal finances the Bolshevik Revolution with gold bars. A Russian reporter finds out, stashing the secret in a library stack before being gunned down by a young man in a Spy vs. Spy outfit (all the henchmen look like members of an intramural diving team). The paper (curiously in Latin not Cyrillic alphabet) is found decades later. Though the consortium could not know anything had been found, assassins materialize instantly to silence the finder dressed in trench coat and fedora two sizes too large. He leaves a wife and son who flee to America. Wife speak perfect English except articles pronouns pass paper to son seconds before takes train to college. The sprawling bucolic campus, whose name sounds like a Hogwarts house, manages to be around the corner from addresses in downtown Manhattan. We know this from the same establishing shot repeated four times.
The son, cleverly named Adam Smith, takes over with his amoral lab partner Kirsten and super-programmer sidekick Cody. These very white college freshmen grew up in inner city gang culture, which will come in handy. Black-garbed goons lurk behind every tree, plus stairs of any house they might be needed. Within a few days the scrappy kids break through impenetrable security firewalls, wander past guards at the Federal Reserve and FBI (both riddled with the consortium's agents), perform feats of forensic accounting unimagined by any CPA, engage in car chases passing the same 42nd street corner over and over, and (spoiler alert!) get the bad guys arrested on the tarmac, bypassing probable cause laws and the years it would take to build a case against a scam that makes Bernie Madoff look like Harold Hill.
The screenplay makes it crushingly obvious the writers know nothing about business, finance, accounting, law enforcement, data processing, computer software, college, geography (to name but a few) and therefore simply invent facts out of whole cloth to support the conspiracy theory their plot advances. Refuting the scores of howlingly baseless facts, which come so fast my pause button is worn out, would require a documentary longer than the movie itself.
To call the film's ethnic theories idiotic would be flattery. While the film never comes right out and says the Jews are the "group" that controls the world, those who advance that theory in the real world certainly do. It takes malevolent delusion to convince one's self of these things, along with the kind of willful ignorance that supposes inner city gangs contain handsome whites or Slavic immigrants talk like Tarzan. For two extremely brief moments, the film self-identifies as a Christian movie. I would hope to see some disavowal from actual Christians.
Holy Ghost (2014)
The Holy Spirit Directed Me to This Movie
My wife and I had planned all week to go to our favorite karaoke bar. But God had other plans.
It started with an unexpected obstacle: a Hollywood thriller was shooting in the downtown area, and as a result my bus was trapped. My wife was working and could not get out of it. Should I wait 90 minutes and risk spoiling the schedule, or take the train and hope I could somehow get home from the station four miles from our house?
The Lord provided. My daughter happened to be in town, and like magic, she was actually free and able to come pick me up at the station. So I extended an invitation: would she come with us tonight? Due to a family problem, she didn't know whether she would be able to come to the karaoke. At home, while my daughter was drinking a smoothie, I thought to check the bar's Facebook page. Rats! Karaoke was cancelled and replaced by a band.
God was looking out for my daughter, who now did not have to disappoint us by rejecting the invitation. But He was also looking out for me and my wife. We had been listening to a podcast that discusses Christian movies in a less than flattering way. My wife was searching Netflix and, like it was pre-ordained, we found this movie! He is indeed a God that hides from us (Isaiah 45:15) but those who seek shall find (Matt 7:7).
Not only did we have a ton of laughs and a great conversation about arrogance, narcissism, con artistry and squandering Kickstarter money, we also have a movie to recommend to the podcasters. Instead of being disappointed that our night out was pre-empted, we got something so much more meaningful!