The
first movie I can remember seeing is Walt Disney’s Bambi. My mother took me to the theater to see it, and I cried when
Bambi’s mother was killed. I was about five.
That
first movie experience contained two themes that affected the rest of my
movie-going life. The first is that I cried; I am a schmuck when it comes to
crying at movies. I have embarrassed myself countless times with dates in high
school and college and my wife for the last 40 years. I cry at movies.
The
second theme is “my mother took me.” From That first experience with Bambi until I was about 12, I was my
mother’s movie partner. She loved movies (she called it “going to the show”);
my father did not. The two movies that had shaped her adolescence and
movie-going life were The Wizard of Oz and Gone
with the Wind. Consequently, they shaped mine as well.
The
last movie I can recall her taking me to was Mary Poppins. I can still sing most of the lyrics from the movie’s
songs. The same is true for the lyrics for The
Sound of Music and Hello Dolly.
By
the time I was in high school, movies were changing. The Sound of Music gave way to The
Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. My
college years brought Easy Rider and Deliverance,
although I did manage to sneak in Man of
La Mancha (Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren) and Cabaret.
Movies
have helped shaped my life, as they have most of us alive today. I still go to
the movies. My wife and I prefer “smaller” art house movies like Babette’s Feast and Chocolat; this past weekend we saw Philomena with Judy Dench and enjoyed it. But we also like the
bigger blockbusters, too, like Chariots
of Fire (perhaps my all-time favorite movie), Slumdog Millionaire (I love the Bollywood ending) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
We’re
both more discerning about movies now than we used to be. We’re more conscious
of propaganda masquerading as art, although I think that’s more common to
commercial television entertainment than to movies. I don’t like movies with
violence, especially violence involving children (although that was certainly a
theme of Slumdog Millionaire). I don’t
generally like war movies, although The
Lord of the Rings movies were filled with it, and I thoroughly enjoyed The Book Thief recently. But I pay
attention to reviews and movie trailers, both of which help the decision-making
process for what movies to see.
I
don’t participate in movie boycotts. If something seems blasphemous or
offensive or disgusting; I simply don’t go to it, no matter what the local and
national critics might say. But I don’t sign petitions and all the rest of that
stuff; they only serve to give publicity to what otherwise will likely sink out
of sight into the pit of mediocrity and bad films.
In Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism
and Liberty, Brett
McCracken truly shines in his three
chapters devoted to movies. He loves the cinema; he’s been a movie critic since
his college days; and the reader can sense his deep, profound engagement with
film. But that doesn’t mean he embraces everything, regardless of content. In
fact, he offers what he calls “five considerations for how far is too far” in
choosing to watch a movie (or a TV program):
· What is your own
weakness, one that may be affected by what you see?
· What are the
weaknesses in your community?
· Is it
beneficial?
· Has the
filmmaker earned the right – does the content serve an aesthetic purpose?
· Have you prayed
about it?
Those
are necessarily easy questions to answer, but they are good questions for
determining what movies to see.
Over
at The High Calling, we’re
discussing Gray Matters. To see what the discussion is this week, and what
others have to say about movies, please visit The High Calling.
