Hi friend,

A couple of weeks ago I spent the evening with some friends. We ate barbecue, played croquet, and talked about life in general. As I was leaving, their young son Brennen, came out of his room with a book he wanted to read. He followed us outside and lay down on the sidewalk underneath the street lamp so he could read.

Books have the power to transport us to fantastic, imaginary places. They introduce us to the wondrous world of nature, where animals talk and spiders spell. Between the pages of a book, we meet mythical creatures who representing our greatest fears, and they can only be conquered by heroic effort. In other times and places, young children become heroes and examples to adults around them.

When we read a book or watch a movie, what once seemed impossible is suddenly within the realm of possibility. We suspend our disbelief and find the world is a miraculous place, full of wonder, and as far-reaching as our imagination will take us.

Children's books translate beautifully into movies, and this week I've selected five classic adaptations to share with you. See the horse, pig, hound, lion, and their human friends come to life on video.

This week's interview is with film critic and author Jeffrey Overstreet, whose "Film Forum" column for Christianity Today eventually became a central part of their site about popular movies.

From the screening room,

Angela Walker
ChristianMovieNews.com

Children's Book Classics - DVD

5 movie adaptations of classic children's books

This collection brings together 5 wonderful cinematic adaptations of some of the most beloved books ever written for children:

Bridge To Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, first published in 1977

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, first published in 1952

My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara, first published in 1941

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, & The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, first published in 1950

Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, first published in 1961

Patriotic Films & Movies on TV The Cross And The Towers - DVD In the midst of devastation, hope will rise. Pastor Greg Season 2 - DVD Season 2 of the popular Christian sitcom with all 13 episodes Drive Thru History: America - DVD Take a Fast-Paced Tour of American History The Heroes of Flight 93 - DVD Discover how ordinary people became extraordinary heroes. Learn the true meaning of love, sacrifice and faith. Though None Go With Me - DVD Based on the book by Left Behind author, Jerry Jenkins The League Of Grateful Sons - DVD What is the godly legacy of the fathers of World War II? Their story has not been told — until now! A Nation Adrift - DVD Standing at the crossroads of America's destiny Saints & Strangers - DVD Religious influences from the Mayflower to the Great Awakening, from Plymouth Rock to the War of Independence... Warriors of Honor - DVD "Finally, A documentary that is willing to speak plainly about the Christian faith of Jackson and Lee..." George W Bush: Faith in the White House - DVD Examine the extraordinary faith and prayer life of President George W. Bush Gods and Generals - DVD An unforgettable story of the Civil War. Mercy Streets - DVD A story of redemption and forgiveness. Also Available VHS

Industry Interview

Jeffrey Overstreet - Through a Screen Darkly
by Angela Walker

Jeffrey Overstreet is a man of many gifts. To Christian audiences, especially moviegoers, he is best known as a film critic and writer for Christianity Today Movies’ website. To Seattle Pacific University students, faculty and alumni, he is known as an author and editor. To his future audience of readers, he is a writer of fantasy fiction.

I met Jeffrey at the Biola Media Conference after listening to his workshop called “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Confessions of a Christian Film Critic.” He speaks of films, and searching for divine encounters through film, in a way that betrays his love for the medium. He is one of the pioneers of movie critique from a Christian perspective, and to talk with him is to learn new perspectives.

Jeffrey set aside time to talk with us from a conference room at Seattle Pac University.

CC.com: Jeffrey, how long have you been writing film reviews?

Jeffrey: I've been writing film reviews since I was a kid. Some people kept diaries, but I really liked magazines, so I kept magazines about my life from the time I was 11 or 12 years old. I would write my thoughts down about whatever book I was reading or whatever music I was listening to. I even had little reviews of The Muppet Show. It was the way I thought through what I was listening to. It wasn’t necessarily a hobby; it was something I enjoyed doing on my own.

When I came to Seattle Pacific University (SPU), I was drawn to write movie and music reviews for the school newspaper, The Falcon, just for fun. I thoroughly enjoyed classes on literature and creative writing, where we spent all day sitting around talking about the themes and art of great literature. Why did the author choose one particular word over the other? What did a story mean in the particular historical context it was written in? A lot of these classic books we were reading were about very turbulent situations, and the characters behaved miserably. I realized just how much I needed to revise what I had been taught about story technique.

When I graduated from college I missed those in-depth conversations about literature so very much that I found the best place to continue it was in conversations about movies. In my community, we weren’t all reading the same books any more, but we were watching the same movies. So that’s where I could continue talking about the power of art; what it can show us, what it can reveal about our world, no matter where the art comes from.

When I was growing up our community looked upon movies as corrupt, generally evil, and to be avoided.

CC.com: How did you go from conversations about movies in college to writing about them?

Jeffrey: I was not planning on this being a vocation. Writing fiction has always been my main goal, and what I invested the most time in. When the internet opened up around 1995 – 96, people started putting up their own websites all over the place. So I naturally started looking on the internet for conversations about faith and art. What I found there was basically the same kind of Christian movie review I found growing up: a long list of ways in which movies might offend us.

I wanted to offer something else, and that’s why I created my own website: lookingcloser.org. That’s also when I decided I wanted to offer a different perspective on film and encourage the people to think about the movies they watched, discover their themes, consider the choices and consequences of the character, and also start paying more attention to excellence in craftsmanship.

The Christian movie reviews I was reading might go so far as to say “Cate Blanchett gave a good performance," but I wanted to talk about that more. What was a good performance? How do we tell a good one from a bad one? How do we tell good cinema from bad cinema? And does it matter?

I think excellence does matter. We’re drawn to it, whether we know it or not, because excellence reflects the glory of God. It imitates God. So as I started to put those reviews up, what happened next was very interesting. I had no idea it was going to reach a large audience. I started hearing from people all over the country, all over the world. They were saying, “Nobody will talk to me about movies at my church. Nobody is looking at art this way. If I say anything at my church I get in big trouble, so thank you for acknowledging there is something here.”

I started finding conversations here and there about this very subject. And now, a decade later, every day I visit 15-20 websites where Christians are writing very insightful things, and I’m learning a lot from their experience and interpretation. I think that’s a very exciting development.

CC.com: Do you find a large percentage of readers that agree with you versus vehemently opposing your thoughts?

Jeffrey: It started out at about three-to-one. Three would accuse me of selling out, being worldly, luring people into temptation, and being a “stumbling block.” And one would be excited about my review.

Now, it’s about the opposite. I get more negative email, but get much more positive response. The number of Christians who are excited about interpreting movies has ballooned over the last ten years because the conversation has been spreading. I think that a lot of people have been excited about this all along and they’re finally finding that it’s safe to admit that. They’re finding the voice they need to express what they get out of and appreciate about movies.

I think that’s why Christianity Today took a giant step and created their website. They had not run very many movie reviews in the past, and for a few years they invited me to do a weekly column called “Film Forum.” I would also link to what other Christians were saying about movies. That went on for seven years. Eventually, they opened up their own website — christianitytodaymovies.com — in order to provide sort of a central location for Christians to read interpretations of popular films and find discussion questions for further conversations about the movies. They included cautions for parents and things they should be aware of before walking into a movie, but didn't focus on them or make them the central issue. When we focus on the dangers of moviegoing, it can distract us from the purpose and the strengths of storytelling, and from the fact that we are encountering someone else’s perspective on the world.

If we treated people the way we treated movies in the past, we would shy away from them because of some particular aspect of their lifestyle or personality. I think engagement is a much healthier approach. We should avoid imitating bad behavior, but we should be open to engaging with, listening to, and understanding our neighbors through their art.

CC.com: In your seminar, you talked about the film “Closer,” and you said something along the lines that the glory of God is shown more profoundly by the absence of it.

Jeffrey: A lot of films out there – for that matter, a lot of music and writing – reflect back, as with a mirror, the darkest parts of the world. The worst human behavior; the greatest depravity; people who are truly lost. In Christian art, more often than not, those stories are made meaningful by introducing a Christian or an angel, or some obvious good agent into the story to fix things. But that’s not the way the world works very often. A lot of times people who are truly lost find God in another way, or find their way out of trouble through the awakening of their own conscience. Sometimes they are never found at all.

What interests me is that we can still see God at work in these stories. When things are so bad that we can’t see evidence of him, we do see the wages of sin. Think about Dante’s famous Divine Comedy — there’s a book about the glory of Heaven, but there’s also a book about the inferno, where the main character is taken on a tour of hell. He learns just how miserable life without God can be.

I think a lot of these films about darkness like "Closer," which shows people treating each other miserably, and shows what can happen when we abandon God in our lives. What happens when we live selfishly and treat each other like objects to possess rather than like individuals to love. So to me, a movie like “Closer” can be like that smoker’s billboard that shows you the rotten, cancerous lung. The reason they put that picture on the billboard, ugly as it is, is as a warning. “This is what will happen to you if you do this.” While that may not be a picture I want to hang on my wall at home, I’m glad it’s out there because it’s speaking a painful truth to people who need to hear it.

This gets more complicated because there are a lot of movies that celebrate the darkness and make it look appealing, that exploit ugly things just because people want to buy tickets. There are so many horror films like Hostel and Saw and all their sequels that are making money off the fact that people get excited watching other people get tortured. That is not the kind of movie I’m talking about. That’s not warning you about the dangers of smoking; that’s shoving a cigarette into your mouth. That’s polluting the air.

CC.com: When filmmakers create movies that give incredible glimpses of God, and the filmmakers are not necessarily Christians, where does that come from?

Jeffrey: I'm reminded of Amadeus (the film). The pious Pharisees of that world were just horrified that this rowdy, foul-mouthed, womanizing jerk named Wolfgang was able to write such beautiful music. How did this happen? Well, I think it has to do with the fact that the Bible says that “eternity is written in our hearts,” and that we are all made in the image of God. The glory of God has been made evident to everybody, so we are without excuse. These constant reminders in Scripture tell us that it’s not just Christians who have a handle on what’s true and what’s beautiful. Sometimes artists who are lost themselves in the darkness are, whether they realize it or not, bringing order out of chaos. They are finding design in a world that they might say themselves is meaningless. But when they hold that story up to us and it is meaningful to us, we recognize it as true because we have eternity in our hearts as well.

C.S. Lewis says that artists do not create anything. We simply rearrange and present, put a frame around, elements that God has made. Since God has made those things to speak to us — “The heavens declare the glory of God,” “Every day creation pours forth speech…” — they still do. So it doesn’t matter who films a beautiful sunset. If they show the moment powerfully, the meaning and glory of that sunset it going to shine through.

The same goes for storytelling. When Hamlet, who is half out of his mind, puts on a play of a character murdering another character in front of the wicked murderous king, the power of that evil deed on display awoke the conscience of the king and he stood up and shouted “Give me some light!”

Sometimes that storytelling art from anyone can bring right and wrong, light and darkness into such sharp focus that we can’t help but respond to it in a revealing way. I think about how many mediocre, preachy Christian films have scared off audiences that don’t want to hear a sermon. But recently, Amazing Grace played in Seattle. They played it in one of the most unchurched areas in Seattle, an area you don’t want to wander around alone at night. I sat in the theater watching the film and there’s this amazing moment when the great John Newton, with tears in his eyes, says, “I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great Savior.” The crowd gasped and handed around Kleenex. At the end of the movie there was applause and I said, “What is different about this movie from other Christian movies that they would never sit still for?” Well, the movie was made with beauty that kept people glued to the screen. It was made with excellence so that it reflected a world they recognized as real and relevant to their lives. They saw the darkness of that world so strongly that they recognized the light when it came on; when the truth was introduced.

I think we can learn a lot from that. We can make great art for a culture that desperately needs it, for we ourselves desperately need it.

CC.com: To what, then, do you attribute the willingness of Christians to buy the poorly-made films that have been declared by some to be worthy of placement in a “Bad Christian Movie Museum?”

Jeffrey: I think there are several things. A lot of Christians have not been exposed to great art, so they go to the best of what they know. Unfortunately, that’s setting the bar pretty low. Growing up, we would go to the Christian bookstore and I would go to the art section. There would be a section called “Photography,” with very mediocre pictures there. They would be sunsets, mountains and waterfalls with a verse stuck on them. It seemed the feeling was if it was just a photograph, it was pointless, meaningless, and you had to put a verse on there to make it meaningful. That contradicts what the Bible says about the beauty of creation — that it speaks for itself. But that was all I had growing up, so I didn’t understand the point of having a photograph of a landscape on the wall unless it had a scripture on it. But as I came to understand more and more what art was about, I realized it was narrow – telling me what it meant, boiling it down for me so I didn’t have to think about what it meant. It also boiled it down and limited the possibilities for what that photo was about. So I think Christians have not been exposed to great art or taught how to interpret it very well.

I know I’m making a gross generalization. There are many Christians who appreciate great art.

Another thing we need to think about is this: A lot of entertainment and art in any culture is popular because it’s what we want to hear. It’s what we already know and agree with. We like to hear stories that make us feel good about ourselves; hear stories that say Christians are good, Christians win awards, Christians win championships and get their prayers answered. Women who want to be pregnant will get pregnant if they just pray. We like those positive messages that tell us that we were right.

But art, when it tells the truth, often makes us feel uncomfortable. Art will tell us that our prayers aren’t always going to be answered in the way we want them to. You aren’t as righteous as you think you are. Christians don’t always win. In fact, if we’re to believe Scripture, we should believe Christians are more likely to suffer than others. In fact, following the road of Christ is a path of carrying your own cross.

I find that art that shows us what the world is really like, how hard life can really be, just makes us uncomfortable. So that becomes unpopular. We would rather watch over and over again movies about the Christian football hero who wins in the end.

CC.com: That brings us back to the point that movies are seen as a form of entertainment rather than a vehicle to explore truth and culture. Is there a happy medium between the two? It seems there is a lot of tension surrounding what people think Christian filmmakers should do. On one hand, there’s a group that says it should be edgier, everything can’t wind up happy, and we need to be more realistic. On the other hand, be true to your calling.

Jeffrey: I don’t intend to single out movies with happy endings as bad. But when I was growing up, that’s all that Christians watched or read. Anything that was complicated or had the harder part of life was rejected. If you make a habit of that, it warps your understanding of the rest of the world, and makes you very uncomfortable once you step outside the boundaries of your Christian culture.

Having seen so many Christian films with happy endings that happen when you pray, I’m more interested in seeing a more complete picture that addresses what happens when you don’t get the answer you want. But we do need a balance.

Look at Chariots of Fire. It was full of answers to prayer and thrilling victories and signs of grace. But because it was such an honest film, we could also see the disappointments and struggles. And we could also see it wasn’t just Christians who were experiencing good things. The Jewish character, Harold Abrahams, also won. Some of their other countrymen won for other reasons at the Olympics, and there were things to learn there too. I think it’s a matter when you frame your story to consider what are you leaving out, and what are you including? Are you making it look like if you find Jesus, you’ll live happily ever after? That’s not a very complete picture of the Christian life. If you say it’s all hardship and a happy ending is a lie, well that’s not a complete picture either.

CC.com: What are some films recently that have been under a Christian banner, or openly publicized as faith-based, that have succeeded? Are there producers and directors that you feel have provided us with stories that show the uncomfortable side of faith? Have you identified some filmmakers that should be watched for their work?

Jeffrey: Absolutely. I would say that some of them are Christians that have released films under the faith banner. There are others that would fit beautifully there, but they have been released into the mainstream market by people who aren’t even Christians, yet their films offer a very powerful, truthful vision of faith. Let me give you a couple of examples.

The Second Chance – directed by Steve Taylor and starring Michael W. Smith. A lot of people missed it, but I think it’s worth tracking down because it portrays conflicts within the church that are very real and speak to issues that certain churches are dealing with right now. The film did not do very well and I read again and again that the reason it didn’t do well was that Christians don’t like to sit down and watch movies about trouble within the church. I even read protests that this film is talking about things that we shouldn’t discuss openly; that we should only talk about in the privacy of our churches. Well, I don’t think we are going to stand much chance of changing if we keep our own sins hidden. We need to admit that we are flawed and struggling, and there is a lot of reconciliation that needs to be attained. I think that’s what Steve Taylor was getting at in that film, the difference between inner-city Christian ministry meeting the needs of the poor, getting by on very little resources, and the way that some mega-churches work. They get so caught up in how big they are and in production values that they forget about the poor. It was a very powerful story. I was even impressed with Michael W. Smith's acting. That’s one that got overlooked, unfortunately, and deserves a bigger audience.

I would also point to Scott Derrickson as a director who is trying to tell powerful stories about good and evil and spiritual warfare in such ways that people come away from it talking about good and evil. He directed the box office hit The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which I wouldn’t recommend for small children, and even some grown-ups. It’s very disturbing. But it’s also very true. Demon possession, if we are to believe the Bible, is a very real thing. It is happening today, and we should take that very seriously. Both times I saw the film, I walked out of the theater listening to the people around me. They weren’t talking about what was the scariest part for you (like they often do after a horror movie). They were asking, “Well, do you believe that?” "Do you believe in demon possession or do you believe it’s just a psychological disorder?" Well, that is making a difference when you stir up questions like that. I’m excited to see what Scott Derrickson does next.

I also loved when the Veggie Tales videos came out. I would sit and watch those videos with my nieces and nephews. I was so impressed with the imagination, humor and intelligence of those little cartoons! They were packed like The Muppet Show or Monty Python with humor that worked for children, but also with subtle things that adults would enjoy. Sometime the kids would get bored and leave the room and I would stay glued to the set and watch them myself. I think that’s a great standard to set.

I’d also point out a couple of other movies that show what can happen when we take the time to tell these stories with surpassing excellence. One of them is called Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. It won the Oscar two years ago for best foreign language film, and yet 99 out of 100 Christians I’ve talked to have never heard of it. It was directed by an atheist who didn’t go into this wanting to spread the gospel. Yet he was so powerfully moved by this story of a Christian German woman who spoke out against the Nazis and was dragged into interrogation that he knew this was the kind of story that could command the audience. So that film basically follows this Christian woman through her capture and interrogation. When she is interrogated, it is as intense and frightening as the conversations between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. What we see over the course of that story is a powerful Christian testimony and I would encourage Christian adults to sit down and watch and discuss that. We’ve rarely seen faith represented as powerfully on the big screen as we do in that film.

Read the rest of our interview with Jeffrey here .