Calvary

     For quite a few months now, I have read reviews in Catholic magazines and on Catholic websites about the Irish production called Calvary. Quite a few friends urged me to watch it as well, and denoted it to be a Catholic classic. To be honest, it wasn't exactly on my top 10 list. Well, perhaps it was, but it was my top 10 worst list! Perhaps it is partially because of my old-fashioned sensibilities, but I found it to be terribly crass and graphic, with a meandering pace, a hard-to-follow story-line, and a fall-off-a-cliff ending. It has always been my firm belief that true art depends upon good taste, and this film, in my opinion, lacked it considerably.  

    I found it hard to understand the motives and behavior of the priest, and don't feel that what he did by staying in his parish and allowing himself to be shot was so heroic. Actually, I thought it was rather dumb, and he really should have gone for the police or gone on a little trip out of the county a long time ago! We are Catholics, not Quakers. We can claim the right to defend ourselves.  

     In Calvary, everyone in the village is depicted as being sinister and morally warped to a disturbing extent, which is a bit over the top and unrealistic. This is no doubt used to heighten the tension, but in the end, it comes off as being a movie-maker's ploy.  

    I mean, I can appreciate dark themes and characters, such as in The Hunger Games, but I personally felt this went over-the-top and was wanted a layered mood and diversity of characters. So...yeah. I thought it had a good premise, but fell a long, long way short of I Confess.

 

Heaven Is For Real

Year:  2014

Filming:  Color

Length: 155 minutes

Genre:  Christian/Drama/Inspirational

Maturity:  PG (for intense thematic elements)

Cast:  Greg Kinnear (Todd Burpo), Kelly Reilly (Sonja Burpo), Connor Corum (Colton Burpo), Lane Styles (Cassie Burpo), Margo Martindale (Nancy Rawling), Jacob Vargas (Michael), Nancy Sorel (Dr. Charlotte Slater), Julia Arkos (Newspaper Reporter), Ursula Clark (Painting Girl), Mike Mohrhardt (Jesus)

Director:  Randall Wallace

Personal Rating:  2 Stars

***

   

    Christian films these days have a very unfortunate habit of not living up the billboard images and radio commercials. For that matter, they often don’t even live up to the subject  matter selected, which the individual plot lines often tweak in given ways that make preachy and unconvincing. Heaven Is for Real was not as bad as some I’ve seen, in either acting (such as Fireproof) or message presentation (such as God’s Not Dead). Still, it had some serious flaws based on the presumption that Christians will believe any miracle story they hear…not to mention some horrendous special effects which turned Heaven into a movie gourmet’s Purgatory!

    Greg Kinnear stars as Todd Burpo, the pastor of a small church in rural America who is experiencing personal health challenges and a financial crisis while trying to keep his small congregation together. He is comforted by his faith in God and his loving family, including his supportive wife Sonja, played by Kelly Reilly, his feisty daughter Cassie, played by Lane Styles, and his exuberant young son Colton, played by Connor Corum. But things almost take a tragic turn when Colton comes down with a life-threatening illness and has to be rushed to the hospital for extensive surgery.

    When Colton finally returns to consciousness and begins his recovery process, he tells his parents an incredible story of how he saw himself being operated on, and then ascended into Heaven and met with Jesus. At first, his parents dismiss it as just an imaginative flight-of-fancy, but Todd Burpo begins to consider that perhaps his son really did have an encounter with the divine, and continues to question him about his experiences. Soon, the news gets out about the encounter, and the Burpo Family is swarmed with press agents seeking the latest human interest story.

     Todd Burpo makes an announcement to his church members explaining the story, and saying that he believes his son’s account to be authentic. There are mixed emotions among the congregation of Todd’s church, with some people embracing the experience enthusiastically, and others viewing it as a sensationalist stunt that will attract all sorts of unwanted attentions from ghost-chasers and miracle-makers. The leader of the latter group is Nancy Rowling, a stalwart member of the church committee who lost a son in the military.

     As Colton reveals more about his supposed Heavenly visit, Todd becomes more astonished by his son’s ability to tell him things he does not believe he could not possibly know. But the pressure begins to mount for Todd as his congregation considers getting a new pastor, and even his wife begins to think he is becoming too obsessed with Colton’s NDE. Nevertheless, he forges ahead with his insistence that it is their duty to embrace it as a miraculous gift to them that they should be unafraid to share the story with the world. Hence, he decides to confront his congregation again, and make another effort to bring them around to his way of thinking.

   I’m sorry to say this, but Heaven Is for Real didn’t really feel for real. Like most small-budget Christian films, in its effort to get a message across, it let realism go to the window. I will admit that some of the acting towards the beginning was decent enough, and I did feel a heart tug when the little boy almost died and his parents were crying out to God to spare him. The whole thing was so human. But the way the father was so quick to believe that a miracle had occurred made me suspicious. This just seemed rather convenient to me. His church was in dire straits and he needed publicity badly to give it a boost. He is the one who is the main spokesman for the whole Heaven-tourism debut, with his son seemingly following along by rote.

      The special effects were terrible, with lots of cyber-glitter, laser-light angels, and a Christmas pageant-style Jesus. I never understood why so much focus was being placed on a private event among the whole congregation. It seems as if the pastor himself didn’t really believe that Heaven was for real until after the experience his son claimed to have. There was no solid case built about why this kid should be believed. As in God’s Not Dead, Atheists are purposely made to look bad, and it seem the reverend doesn’t go to the psychiatrist to weigh out the pros and cons of a scientific explanation, but rather to debunk even an attempt at such an explanation. 

    The Catholic Church is very careful about approving miracles, and always looks at natural possibilities first. But in independent congregational churches, there is no magisterium and no such procedure. If the preacher of an individual congregation want to make a claimed miracle into a big event, he can do just that. I personally find NDEs quite fascination, and some of them certainly seem to defy (or should I say transcend) the laws of nature.

   The subject of miracles, visions, and NDE’s is a complex one. As a Catholic, and an observer of life and historical accounts, I have no doubt that miracles happen. That having been said, a realistic view also indicates that at least 80% of claimed miracles are either of natural causes, thought up by frauds, or imagined by mentally unstable people. In that mix, there is also the possibility of demonic possession. I love the way the Catholic Church takes a pragmatic view of claimed miracles, and tests them vigorously before proclaiming them worthy of belief. Even then, she leaves it up to personal discretion whether or not to believe in them as authentic.

    Reading some accounts of NDEs, documented by those who experienced them and backed up by non-biased secular science journals, I have no doubt that some of these experiences truly defy (or should I say transcend) the laws of nature. However, others I would be less likely to believe, including the one used as the subject in Heaven Is for Real. Also, I disliked the way that the woman in the church who opposes making a big deal out of Colton’s NDE at church in portrayed as being warped by anger because her own son died in war. Personally, I thought her objections were perfectly reasonable, and should not have been attributed to some inner antagonism.

    That having been said, there were some interesting parts. Colton says that he recognizes his grandfather from a photo of him when he was in his 30’s, and that all the people in heaven are young. He also says that he saw his sister in heaven who “died in mommy’s tummy,” a fact which he had never been told about. He also can describe where his parents were in the hospital, and saw himself on the operating table. He is unafraid of things he feared before, such as spiders and death, and goes out of his way to comfort other dying children and promise them that everything will be alright. Whether or not the Burpo story is true, these are common signs of those who have experienced similar phenomena, and do make a fascinating study.

     There is a genuinely funny scene when different preachers come to fill in for Burpo, including a petrified preacher from the prison ministry (one of the men in the pews comments dryly, “He’s used to having a captive audience”) and an over-the-top, hand-waving seminary student (a woman comments blandly, “If Burpo doesn’t get back here soon, I’m gonna kill somebody”). Burpo recounts an interesting fairy tale about a lion and his companions who are trapped by their enemies. The trappers offer them life if they will merely hand over the lion, but they say that if they could have chosen any death, this would have been the one they would have chosen. This would have made a great motif for another film, although it didn’t really tie in well here.

   Interestingly, at the beginning of the film, a news reel is run about a girl from Lithuania had an NDE and began to paint strange and beautiful paintings describing her experiences. At the end of the film, Colton is shown as recognizing her painting of Jesus when his father pulls it up online. Naturally, the painting has been spread around all over the internet and beyond now, and although I first found it hard to relate to, I am now appreciating the depth of expression in the face and eyes. I don’t know if that’s what Jesus looked like or not, but it’s an interesting depiction nevertheless.

    Heaven Is For Real has an interesting enough topic, although perhaps the sensationalism around it is one of its greatest flaws. Todd Burpo is portrayed as hinging his faith on his son’s supposed experience. And yet are we not told “blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believed”? I’m not saying I don’t like miracle stories as much as the next person, nor that I disbelieve them just because they work outside the box of the usual. But that doesn’t mean that we are supposed to be swept up in the hype of “Heaven-tourism” which may or may not be the real deal. Our faith is supposed to be deeper than that, “a confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see.” That is the real lesson that should be extracted from this well-meaning but perhaps misleading movie.

Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear) shows his son Colton (Connor Corum) a photo of his grandfather

Son of God

   

Year:  2014

 

Filming:  Color

Length:  138 minutes

Genre:  Christian/Drama/Inspirational

Maturity:  PG-13 (for intense thematic elements)

Cast:  Diogo Morgado (Jesus), Roma Downey (Mary), Amber Rose Revah (Mary Magdalene) Darwin Shaw (Peter), Sebastian Knapp (John), Greg Hicks (Pontius Pilate), Louise Delamere (Claudia), Adrian Schiller (Caiaphas), Matthew Gravelle (Thomas), Joe Wredden (Judas)

         

Director:  Christopher Spencer

Personal Rating:  3 Stars

***

   

     I had my reservations when I first saw the cover picture for Son of God. The guy playing Jesus looked much too hip, and too, well…some goo-goo-eyed girls would say “sexy.” I am not among that group, but the queer smirk, greasy hair, and furrowed brow is quite stereotypical of the type said to be so. Anyway, I figured it was only a matter of time before I would have to watch it and give my review of it, so I finally did. While I certainly endorse the spirit of the production and applaud some of its efforts to bring an original portrayal of The Greatest Story Ever Told to modern audiences, the feel is sometimes down-right cartoonish and incongruent with the image of Jesus and his ministry as portrayed in the Gospels.

    The story opens with St. John the Evangelist reflecting on the story of Salvation and his own time spent with Jesus Christ. We get to see some flash-backs of memorable moments in the Old Testament, including Adam being formed out of the earth (he’s plastered in dirt, as a matter of fact…kind of icky…), Eve taking a bite out of the forbidden plum (yes, plum…or date…or something!), Noah in the ark weathering the storm (CGI to the max), Moses parting the Red Sea (looks like the compu-water from Noah’s flood), and Samson swinging around a donkey jaw (gosh…wouldn’t want to mess with him in a contract squabble!).

    Then we finally get to the heart of the story: the Birth of Christ. After a brief stop with the Wise Men at the stable-cave (I though they showed up two years later, when they were in a house?), we take a major leap forward in time, and meet a certain fisherman named Simon…who happens to be Cockney. A now fully-grown Jesus, played by Diogo Morgado, wades out to meet him in his fishing boat, and performs the miracle of filling his fishing nets. Inspired by this stranger’s charisma and ability to control nature, he agrees to answer his call to “change the world”.

     Picking up more followers along the way, including John and Mary Magdalene, Christ travels across Judea, preaching about the Kingdom of God, healing the sick, performing various other miracles, and angering the Jewish Sanhedrin by calling them out on their hypocrisies. At the same time, he disappoints those zealots who want to rise up and cast out the Romans from Israel, preaching that they should instead “turn the other cheek.” Among those disillusioned is one of the twelve apostles, Judas Iscariot, who finds himself trapped in an inner battle about how best to proceed.

     Ultimately, the Jewish authorities convince Judas that he would be doing everyone a service if Christ was brought before them, ostensibly “just to talk.” It’s supposed to be a quiet, undercover affair. As it turns out, things don’t quite work out that way, and when the guards come to arrest Christ after Judas identifies him with a traitorous kiss, a melee breaks out (no seriously…St. Peter becomes the Avenger, with super-powers to knock out five guards and hack off that guys ear with super-sword…yes, over-the-top…). Then he is dragged away to be tried in the dead of night by the Sanhedrin for blasphemy. The next day, he is brought before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and the most vital events in World History unfold.

     First, I will say on a positive note that Son of God, which is a portion of The Bible TV Series, has reached an amazing spectrum of viewers who previously knew next to nothing about The Bible and the Story of Christ. It ran of British Public TV, moreover, which a veritable anomaly in a country that is becoming more and more hostile to public displays of Christian belief. The results have been quite extraordinary, and have shown that these stories have not lost any of their power over the generations, but continue to resonate strongly as a quintessential synthesis of the human experience. It is a story that even the hardest skeptics once or twice in their lives wished were true.

    As the producer pointed out, there is something about his retelling that has struck a chord with modern audiences. By updating the retelling to focus on a charismatic teacher who set out to change the world, it took many by surprise and helped them approach the story in a new way. But unfortunately, as I assumed, trying to modernize the story also sapped it of much of its historical realism. The attitude of the characters are far too 21^st century, and their accents were just a tad too British! Now, I have loads of respect for some British actors, especially old-time ones like Richard Burton, Jean Simmons, Laurence Oliver, James Mason, etc. But they used a traditional Shakespearian approach that lent itself to period pieces without seeming awkward or out-of-place.

    I could never completely reconcile myself with the portrayal of Jesus. Diogo Morgado seemed to be too much of a hipster, too full of himself, and occasionally struck me as an out-and-out punk. The scene where he meets Simon Peter and wades out to his boat, basically forcing him to take him on board, just seemed sort of annoying. Also, Scriptural dialogue is altered and modernized at will, so when Simon asks what Christ’s mission is, He says (in a rather cheesy manner), “To change the world!” Of course, Christ did change the world, but it just seemed so generic, like something you’d see on one of those Dollar General inspirational posters.

    In their effort to make Jesus more accessible, the producers also tended to water-down the dramatic effect of his words and statements and mesh them with other sequences that don’t fit right together. One particularly anti-climatic adjustment is when Jesus makes the prophecy about the destruction of the Temple...while playfully poking a little girl in the belly! We know “Jesus loves the little children”, but instead of giving that reality its own scene, they tried to blend with a totally different and deeply serious topic, which seemed totally out of place. Also, when Christ turns over the tables in the temple, he seems to be only mildly ticked off, not filled with the zeal for His Father’s House that gives way to Righteous Anger.

    There is a concentrated effort to boost the roles of women in the story of Christ, particularly Mary Magdalene, portrayed by Amber Rose Revah. Unfortunately, this often comes off as a clumsy push of the feminist agenda, as she is ever-present with the apostles, at every miracle, in every fishing boat, almost as “one-of-the-guys”. I wouldn’t have minded a little bit of “extra presence” for Mary…but she was popping up everywhere, and it was getting rather annoying! This is only coupled by the excessive CGI employed to make the miracles seem more miraculous…or in my opinion, more fake! I have always believed that an encounter with the Divine, with the truly miraculous, would be “realer than real”, not cheaply sensational. It’s just the same as saints being the most realistic sort of people.

    

    This Bible movie feels the need to repeat the rather tired “evil Roman” mantra, using villain music every time a red-cloaked soldier or imperial eagle comes into view. Now, I’m sure being conquered by the Romans was no picnic, but they actually did a lot of really beneficial things for the world, and their conquered provinces, too! Furthermore, I will add that the Israelites themselves were no strangers to conquering land by force of arms themselves…in fact, they had a history of wiping people out as opposed to merely subjecting them! Whether or not God told them to do so is still a major debate among theological scholars; but coming from a Natural Law perspective, I personally believe otherwise.

    Pontius Pilate is depicted very darkly in this version, as opposed to the traditional, fairly sympathetic portrayals of other films. Granted, he was a soldier’s soldier, and could be quite brutal in the interests of maintaining Pax Romana, but he also seemed to be a man of at least some degree of sincerity did not want to have the blood of an innocent man on his hands. In this film, they seemed hesitant to give the guy any slack at all. In fact, they put him into the literary villain position several times.

   

     For example, Pontius Pilate and his entourage are shown traveling down the road, they come across an Israelite who’s blocking the road with his broken cart. Some Roman soldiers come and push it out of the way, but the owner of the cart protests that “it isn’t fixed yet”, and get into a struggle with them. Evidently there’s this kid sitting in the back of the cart that fails to get off, and when the soldiers thrust the cart into a ditch, he gets crunched.  My first thought was did the guy with the broken cart literally think the Imperial Governor to wait for him to get this thing fixed? Second, why didn’t the kid climb off the cart when the soldiers and his father started struggling? The thing is that this seemed to me to be a re-run of the sequence in A Tale of Two Cities when the aristocrat runs over the kid in the streets of Paris to prove how rotten he is.

      I will admit there are a few interesting elaborations made, such as Christ picking up a stone and hovering it overhead before offering it to the crowd when the woman was brought before him accused on adultery. It was a dramatic expression of the fact that really only Christ was the one without sin, who had the right to pick up the stone, but he refrained from throwing it. There were also some unique cuts and overlays done in this production. For example, at the same time Christ is shown praying at Gethsemane, the scribes are shown offering up incense in a pre-Paschal ceremony and Pilate and Claudia are shown praying to their ancestors. Just one slight problem…isn’t praying to one’s ancestors a practice of the Shintoism of China, not the polytheism of Rome?

      The best section of the movie was definitely between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. For a little while, I managed to forget the previous hour of pain and found myself engrossed by the Passion narrative. Part of this was because the actor playing Christ spoke less and let the story itself undergird his acting style. The other part is just that the story itself is so powerful it stands alone as impactful. I find it interesting how Christ is shown as embracing Peter when he said he would never deny him, temporarily believing it, but then experienced the revelation into the future, and says very painfully that he would indeed, three times.

    The torturous scourging and crucifixion are portrayed with a sense of brutal reality, but not undue gore. I thought it was interesting how the Pharisees were shown to block out the supporters of Jesus from intermingling with the crowd who called for Barabbas. The Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John all cry out in favor of Christ, but behind locked gates. Roma Downey gives a very moving portrayal of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who meets her Son as he falls beneath his cross, and tries to help him lift it up. Later, she cradles his dead body in her arms. She has such a deeply anguished expression, and she became for me the most sympathetic figure in the film.

   

    Son of God is certainly not on my top-ten list of Biblical dramas (I’m a strident oldie fan-girl, as you all must know by now!), but if it can reach a given audience and inspire them to delve more deeply into the real story of Jesus Christ, more power to it. Let’s just hope it doesn’t confuse a whole generation with regards to a time-sensitive-perception of a hipster Rabbi as opposed to the Timeless Son of God in the fusion of His Divinity and Humanity. There are doubtless mixed responses and reactions from all quarters. Still, Christopher Spencer definitely deserves a capital E for Effort.

Jesus (Diogo Morgado) takes part in the Last Supper before His Passioin