Movies

[dan f]

A nice list of movies, whose plots resemble the assembly, has been added as shown in the link: 

http://www.geftakysassembly.com/Reflections/Movies.htm

I guess any other movie about con artists could be added to the list.  Maybe also Jaws and Alien for similar plots with crude reflections.

[aguyoutthere]

wow. its been a while. i can't believe people are still posting on here...

[Oscar]

wow. its been a while. i can't believe people are still posting on here...

Well, aren't you?   

Thomas Maddux

[summer007]

Any thoughts on the up-coming movie The Da-Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks opening May 19th in a theater near you. Seems very sacraligious, blasphemous and absolute heresy. I know it's a novel, but it does seem like it will stumble the weak in the faith as a large percentage of Christians from what I understand do not know their bibles and will easily believe some of the things in the book and the movie. Also channel 2 and the show The Amazing race are doing some things with the dvc are any of you thinking of boycotting it, or are you planning on seeing the movie and /or reading the book?

[outdeep]

Well, since you asked, here is my newspaper column on the subject.  Of course, I didn't see the movie as it is not out but I read the book.

-Dave



In Search for the Historical Jesus

By Dave Sable

I read Dan Brown’s bestselling book The Da Vinci Code only after I overheard a community college student gushing over the book to a friend over the story’s historical veracity.  Like most of us, weak in art history, she probably didn’t realize that Da Vinci’s Last Supper was a deteriorated fresco, not a painting.  Thus, the various “signs” central to the novel suggested by copies would have been indiscernible in the original had Da Vinci actually included them. This, I believe, was Brown’s signal (or clue, if you will) to his readers that he was moving from fact to fiction.

And page-turning fiction it was.  It revolves around Robert Langdon who, along with his friend Sir Leigh Teabing are caught up in an intriguing tale of murder, cover-up, and cryptic clues.  Along the way, they tutor an astonishingly uncritical criminologist named Sophie who sponges up yet another speculative theory about the historical Jesus.  To Langdon, Jesus is simply “religious allegory” that has “become a part of the fabric of reality” in order to “help millions of people cope and be better people”.  Therefore, one allegory is as good as another.

You’ve probably already heard the juicy details of this alternative allegory.  Mary Magdalene was the sacred feminine who married Jesus, and propagated a royal line living in France.  This event was suppressed by the sinister and power-hungry Catholic Church who had stacked the deck in order to “elect” Jesus as Son of God and Messiah at the Council of Nicaea.  In order to suppress the supremacy of pagan goddess-worship, Constantine rewrote the Bible that we now have today.

I could go on, but what would be the benefit?   Entertaining conspiracy theories can certainly make for a fun evening’s read.   Nevertheless, it was disappointing that Brown’s alternative allegory which disparages the major religions of Western Civilization did not ultimately produce anything more inspiring that communing with God through climatic sex rites and worshiping the bones of Mary.

More impressive is the spiritual journey of Anne Rice.  This author of vampire novels had recently written a novel of the early childhood of Jesus called Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt.  Ms Rice had walked away from the Catholic Church at an early age, was a secular liberal and married a committed atheist. 

In 2002, she felt called back to her church again.  To learn of Jesus, she naturally went to where she was comfortable pouring herself into the liberal scholarship at the University.  She expected to find compelling arguments separating the Jesus of faith from the Jesus of history but was astonished “to discover in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’ve ever read.”  Further, unlike any field of history, she found scholars who “devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship” yet “despised Jesus, pitied him as a hopeless failure, sneered at him, and felt outright contempt.”

It was this surprise that compelled Ms. Rice to consider the scholarship of N.T. Wright and others who argue compellingly for the historicity of the gospel accounts.  As a result, she based her book upon the world of Jesus as those who knew him revealed his life, not how scholars speculated about his life two millennia later.

Says Rice, “anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel.  The ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ had become a joke because of all the many definitions it had ascribed to Jesus.

“The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming even more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell – to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside him and imagine what he felt.”

It is much more difficult to reckon with the Jesus of space and time whom his contemporaries “seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched” (1 John 1:1).  Seeking the historical Jesus of one’s conjecture is much more appealing in today’s culture, but it really provides no assistance for the spiritual issues of the soul.

Dave Sable is a freelance writer in Deep Gap, NC.   He may be contacted at outdeep@yahoo.com.

[summer007]

Thanks Dave. I found the book excerpt on the dvc site and read up to chapter 6 it's very gripping from the start I'm definetly intrigued and think I'll probibly read the  book for myself, and possibly see the movie too.

[outdeep]

Thanks Dave. I found the book excerpt on the dvc site and read up to chapter 6 it's very gripping from the start I'm definetly intrigued and think I'll probibly read the  book for myself, and possibly see the movie too.

Yes DVC is indeed a gripping page-turner and keeps your interest in the story (though one odd quirk that I found annoying is that the the bad guy reveils himself for no apparent reason).  While it is indeed an entertaining book in that regard, I was always curious why it did so disproportionately well because there is no end to well-written page-turning mysteries on the market.  The only thing that I can figure out is that "blasphamy as well-educated intelligencia" angle seems to have a real hook.

[summer007]

Well yes and with Silas from the Opus dei using the cilice for over 2 hours and then the discipline and all the other religious references and corporal mortification then he purges himself of the days sins- murder, and he's albino to boot, and this just the first chapters.

[summer007]

I saw Flight 93 friday night. Intence movie I do recommend it as it shows what were fighting in the war on terror. It starts out showing the hi-jackers in prayer in theirs rooms and then saying its time, then it flashes to the airport towers and after a while the controllers notice a flight drop altitude,and after contact one of them says I thought I heard a foreighn language and from there it's one plane after another and you know how it ends.

[Margaret]

We haven't seen the movie "Fireproof" yet, but Christianity Today,  Plugged In Online, and even the New York Times give it decent reviews. Resources on marriage are needed on ga.com (and a picture is worth a thousand words), so we want to know - anyone seen it? anyone want to comment?

Margaret

[Oscar]

Margaret,

I saw "Fireproof" recently.  It stars a Christian actor named Kirk Cameron...he starred in "Left Behind".

The movie follows a young couple through a very trying time in thier marriage. They have no children and are a two career family. Cameron is the captain of a fire station. Their selfishness and immaturity plus thier hidden expectations of one another have them on the road to divorce.  A Christian fireman as well as Cameron's Christian parents offer some help in ways that eventually bring them to Christ and restores their love for one another.

A pretty good movie put out by the same church that produced "Flywheel" and "Facing the Giants".  It has played for several weeks at the local Edwards theater.

Good, but definitely a Chick Flick.

Tom Maddux

[outdeep]

I haven't seen it yet (sounds like a good Netflix selection).  Here is link to a good blog discussion.  What I am hearing is that the movie is "good" in that it gets a good message across that we Christians appreciate but "so-so" in terms of the craft of movie making.  Folks will probably enjoy it but don't expect any big awards.

http://online.worldmag.com/2008/10/07/fireproof-shouldnt-be-critic-proof/

I do appreciate that church's attempt to engage culture.  As cheesy as Facing The Giants was (it's everything-works-out-when-you-come-to-Christ ending made Mighty Duckslook like a thoughtful analysis of culture), it was a good second try and they are only going to learn and do better where one day they may have a movie that is truly well done in both the Christian and the craft sense.  As an agent said to Neil Simon about Barefoot in the Park (I think) "you are going to write a great play.  But this isn't it."

[outdeep]

I just put Fireproof in my Netflex queue.  It came up with suggestions of movies that are "most like Fireproof".  One of the movie suggestions was Sex and the City.

[Margaret]

Thanks everyone for your input. We've added "Fireproof" to the ga.com Movies page. Seems like it's not stellar, but has some good stuff that may nudge a few folks on their mariage problems. Dave, let us know what you think after you've seen it.