How To Pick A Movie

My wife and daughter wanted to see the Disney/Pixar movie, "Up." I went reluctantly, imagining I would have a hard time staying awake.

Those of you who have already seen it know that I need not have worried: "Up" is absolutely delightful: a beautiful story, beautifully told. In one early scene, animators tell the life story of the elderly protagonist in just a few minutes time, and do so in a very moving, poignant way. If you were touched by that song in "Toy Story" about how the little girl grows up and has no time for her dollies, watch out for this scene in "Up." Bring Kleenex.

A very imaginative - if predictable- story, beautifully-drawn art, and a hilarious dog named "Doug" make this movie a winner. Although, recommending movies is really dangerous business so let me just say that if "Up" offends or disappoints you, I didn’t care for it either.

Anyway, it’s summertime, so there will be lots of moviegoing goin’ on. Christians might ask, "Will I see whatever is marketed to me and my family?" Whether you take the moralistic or the critical approach to watching movies, now is a good time to be discerning, as in:

"I will set no vile thing before my eyes..." Ps. 101:3

"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things.

Our family has found two websites helpful in selecting movies. Screenit (www.screenit.com) is free (though they also offer a paid subscription service) and will give you a CPA-like accounting of all the objectionable content.

Plugged In (www.pluggedinonline.com) is a ministry of Focus on the Family and so gives fewer details but more of a world-view critique from a Christian perspective. We don’t always agree with the conclusions, but we cut the reviewers a lot of slack: imagine being a movie reviewer for Focus on the Family. That’s a big responsibility, and you’re always going to disappoint someone. But mostly we are grateful that someone is out there checking stuff out so that we waste less time and money on movies that don’t encourage our own Christian values. Whatever their decision about moviegoing, Christian adults, teens and children will want to watch movies critically, and Plugged In helps get the conversation going.

Here are snippets from their reviews of three currently popular movies. See if you can guess which movies they are describing follow the links at the end for the answers):

SNIPPET #1 "But let’s not get too carried away. The rest of the movie, which is to say the other 95% or so, climbs into a convertible Packard and leaves family-friendly funny in the dust with its thumb out. In this misguided attempt to update the time-tested screwball comedy formula, Fletcher and her team have taken their contrived but potentially charming premise and tarted it up with layers of "contemporary" comedy rouge. That means bare bodies. A bizarre Mother Earth ritual. A wince-inducing bachelorette party striptease. The latter scene was so embarrassingly repugnant that it was one of the few times in my PG-13 movie-going experience I’ve found myself hoping someone would leap up and yell, "Fire!" or maybe, "I’ve gone blind!" just for an excuse to clear the theater. I feared my retinas might be permanently scarred. Despite the directors’ aspirations, then, the end result is tired, offensive and wholly disappointing. In fact, if Hepburn and Grant had seen this, they surely would have wagged their heads in disgust. Or at least turned their backs and sauntered arm-in-arm to the latest Pixar flick."

SNIPPET #2 "A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves," wrote Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri. "Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger." [This movie] is exactly the kind of thing Okri was talking about. It transcends cartoon. It transcends film. It is a story, and a story in the word’s best, most mythical sense—a narrative that educates and entertains, a fairy tale that can make your heart larger. It makes me wonder, again, why more people aren’t making films like this. And I’m beginning to think they simply don’t know how. Pixar, though, has been making worthwhile movies for nearly 15 years now, and the stories keep getting stronger. Up’s sense of literature and symbol could be studied on many a college campus, and its themes would not be out of place in a church service. While it doesn’t deal in theology or spirituality, its morals are from time-tested biblical bedrock: Keep your promises. Treasure people, not things. Spend time with your kids. Honor your elders. Respect. Trust. Love. And it’s a gut-busting hoot to boot."

SNIPPET #3 "[This movie] comes with no pretensions of greatness. It’s not written to make you think, not crafted to make you cry. Its sole intent is to get moviegoers to fork over their 10 bucks and sit still for two-and-a-half hours. ...I was surprised at how cold this movie left me. The film’s emotional moments felt forced, and its themes of sacrifice insincere. While some films use CGI to set up a story, [this movie] reverses the process: It uses a half-hearted story as an excuse to string together some cool special effects. But a much bigger issue than the film’s cinematic failure, for our purposes, is its level of crassness and sexual content. This is a movie based on children’s’ playthings, for Pete’s sake. I can’t imagine that many in the audience really came to see robot +++++ or small-dog erotica. And then there’s Megan Fox’s ongoing parade in her barely there outfits, not to mention a sexed-up co-ed who turns out to be, bizarrely, something else entirely.... Film critic Marshall Fine put it this way: "This is what we’ve come to: movies based on cartoons that were marketing tools for toys." He also noted, "It’s hard to exaggerate what a depressing mess of a film this misbegotten monstrosity is. More depressing still, it will attract lemming-like multitudes to multiplexes this weekend, further convincing [director Michael] Bay of his own genius." Yeah, that feels about right."

http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0004692.cfm http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0004674.cfm http://www.pluggedinonline.com/movies/movies/a0004696.cfm