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By Peter T. Chattaway
THE FILM festival ended October 16, but its effects linger on, as films that
premiered there trickle down to the regular theatres.
Some films may take months, or even a year, to return to Vancouver. But a few
are coming back for seconds, even as you read this.
One such film is Amreeka (opens October 30), which concerns a divorced Palestinian woman who happens to
move to the United States with her teenaged son right around the time of the
2003 invasion of Iraq.
On one level, the woman and her son find a land of plenty; but on another, they
find a land of obstacles and prejudice, as the mother has difficulty finding
work and the boy is mocked by his ‘patriotic’ classmates.
The film makes some interesting points about the differences between cultures,
and the ways in which people can be torn between assimilation and rejecting the
dominant culture.
But much of the script feels predictable and formulaic, in a PC kind of way. The
one truly unexpected detail is that the woman and her family are not Muslim,
but Christian – though even this is used to chastise Americans who can’t tell different kinds of Arabs apart.
Also returning to local theatres in the near future is Prom Night in Mississippi (opens November 20), a documentary about a small town in the Deep South that
held its first-ever racially integrated prom just one year ago, in 2008. And
even then, they only did it because Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, who
lives in that town, offered to pay for it.
Freeman figured that if the prom was integrated just once, the students would
never want to be segregated again. And so the film follows the students as they
put his ideas into practice; a handful of white students, possibly under orders
from their parents, insist on having a private prom just for them, but the
majority agree to put this division behind them.
The film has its flaws, such as an over-reliance on talking heads, but it sheds
light on an important subject, and offers hope that further progress can be
made.
Finally, as I suspected, one of the more accessible films this year, from a
Christian point of view, was Letters to Father Jacob, by Finnish director Klaus Härö. I do not know whether this gentle, modest but effective little film – about a tough female ex-con who reluctantly agrees to help a blind
scripture-quoting pastor answer his correspondence – will come back to local theatres, or go straight to video, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for.
• • •
Bruce Marchiano has played Jesus a few times by now: first in the Visual Bible’s adaptations of Matthew and Acts, both of which came out in the mid-1990s; and most recently in the upcoming
animated film The Lion of Judah. Now he wants to do it again, in a word-for-word adaptation of the Gospel of John called Jesus . . . No Greater Love.
Three years ago, he said he hoped to raise a budget of $25 million by persuading
250,000 people to donate $100 each to the project.
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Now he’s hoping to raise even more money by getting 4.5 million people to donate $10
each. He hopes to have the money by March 2010, and to finish the film by May
2011. See NewJesusMovie.com for details.
And yes, the Visual Bible did produce its own word-for-word version of The Gospel of John in 2003, with a different actor (Henry Ian Cusick, of the TV show Lost).
But that movie used the Good News Bible for its script; Marchiano plans to use
the New International Version.
• • •
The story of Moses has been told repeatedly over the last few decades, in cartoons like The Prince of Egypt and in TV movies like Moses the Lawgiver.
But you’d probably have to go all the way back to the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston, to find the last major live-action Moses movie that
had been made for the big screen.
Not for long, though, perhaps.
Variety reports that 20th Century Fox is developing a new movie about Moses – and, like every other ancient epic being made these days, the studio plans to
pattern this film after the stylish and ultra-violent likes of Braveheart and 300.
That might sound kind of odd, since most versions of this story have focused on
the miracles that God worked through Moses, and have never had much use for
hand-to-hand combat.
But the Bible does depict Moses and the Israelites getting into skirmishes with
the Amalekites, and with Og the gigantic king of Bashan, et cetera. The studio
plans to use some of the later traditions about Moses as well; so there is
certainly material to work with.
– filmchatblog.blogspot.com
November 2009
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