By Peter T. Chattaway

THE SUMMER is over – and if any one lesson was learned during the past four months, it was that you can never underestimate the box office potential of a raunchy, low budget Judd Apatow comedy. Knocked Up and Superbad both cost under $30 million to produce, and each film made more than that in its first weekend alone.

Incidentally, both films co-starred Jonah Hill, a young, overweight guy who also had a small part in Evan Almighty. The latter film had a budget about four times as big as the budgets for Knocked Up and Superbad combined . . . yet it is, so far, the only major sequel released this summer which has failed to gross $100 million.

Not only have the R-rated comedies made more money, they have also stimulated more meaningful conversation.

Knocked Up got people asking why the female protagonist did not get an abortion, and whether it was ever a good thing to try to make a relationship work simply for the sake of an unplanned child.

Even Superbad , which I have not yet seen, has people discussing whether regular straight guys might be more open to showing their affection for each other.

In contrast, if anyone talked about Evan Almighty, it was usually to discuss whether major Hollywood movies that target the church market could still strike gold. Nobody discussed its environmental theme, its random-acts-of-kindness theme, or what prophecy might look like today. They simply asked whether it was worth pandering to the religious audience. And, well, based on the box-office returns, it wasn’t.

Make of all that what you will. I would certainly never say that people should go out of their way to see movies laced with profanity and sexual content. But there are larger cultural conversations going on out there, and treating the church as a niche market which is separate from all of that clearly isn’t serving anybody’s interests.

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Looking ahead, the Vancouver International Film Festival runs September 27 to October 12. I will have more to say about that next month; but for now, I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at a few of the upcoming films.

The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun (Denmark) is easily my favorite of the bunch so far. The film is a documentary about a cranky Danish octogenarian who sort-of donates his rundown castle to some Russian Orthodox nuns – but then butts heads with their leader when it comes to simple, basic matters such as the repairs, and whether the nuns should have a voice on the board which oversees the facility.

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Mr. Vig tells director Pernille Rose Grønkjær that he has never known love, and has never gotten along with people – but he wants to create something that will “endure.”  And through the help and witness of Sister Ambrosija and her colleagues, he grudgingly – despite himself – accomplishes just that. There is a definite sense of “treasure in jars of clay” about this film: you’ve got a dilapidated building and some bickering people, but somehow through it all you get a sense of the holy and the beautiful.

In Memory of Myself (Italy) takes a more critical look at the monastic life. A dramatic film, it stars Christo Jivkov – who played the apostle John in The Passion of the Christ, and the martyr Stephen in The Final Inquiry  – as a man who enters a Catholic monastery hoping to become “a person.” There, he finds silence, frustration – and the tempting lure of the city, visible through arched windows at the end of the hall.

Also interesting is One Hundred Nails (Italy), which concerns a professor who grows so fed up with the inability of scholarship to improve the world that he commits an act of violence against a church-owned library – against the books, that is, not the people – and then drops out of society, hiding in a small community by a river.

Some of the professor’s anger is directed at not only the Church but at God himself; however, he becomes a sort of Christ-figure to his new friends, reciting parables and changing hearts. The film is directed by Ermanno Olmi (Tree of the Wooden Clogs), whose films have often been noted for their Christian-humanist overtones.

Showtimes and tickets for these films will be up at viff.org in mid-September.

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A couple of local boys are tackling Darwinian science in a documentary that will be released on Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday – February 12, 2008.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed features Ben Stein – the former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, who became famous as the droning high school teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  – as a ‘rebel’ who tackles ‘Big Science,’ and its efforts to stifle discussion around so-called Intelligent Design theory.

The film is co-produced and co-written by local software developer Walt Ruloff, and co-written by occasional BC Christian News contributor Kevin Miller. The film’s website, expelledthemovie.com, went live as this issue went to press.

– filmchatblog.blogspot.com

September 2007