Making the Movie Momentum Matter
One sportswriter said, “Momentum is a fickle dance partner.” Whether in business, baseball, or building a relationship, when things are going bad it’s hard to change. When momentum is moving in our favor, however, it makes sense to grab hold and dance until the music stops.
For decades we in the Bible belt have been decrying the decline of television and the movie industry. It seemed that with every new entertainment season the direction of Hollywood was to mock, misrepresent, and malign every moral sentiment and family value that we held sacred. Every time we felt it could not get worse, it got worse. Momentum was decidedly against those of us that seemed to hold any standard of morality, not to mention any Judeo-Christian biblical ethic.
The dance partner has started a new dance and we seem to have been invited to cut in. This weekend Son of God is opening worldwide in theaters, a movie depicting the life of Christ. On March 21st the documentary, God Is Not Dead opens. On March 28th, Russell Crowe will play the leading role in the biblical movie Noah, and in early May Irreplaceable is coming to the big screen, billed as “a one night event and documentary that crosses the world to find the meaning of family.” That sounds like momentum to me!
Whatever you think about these films, however unsure you might be about their scriptural accuracy or the purity of their motives, if you have been waiting for the moral momentum of the movie industry to shift, you should get on this dance card. We who have fought Hollywood for so long should be first in line to buy tickets and hope they make a gazillion dollars on these releases. Finally they are playing our song. We need to dance.
For more information and reviews of these movies go to www.christiancinema.com.
Dr. Mike Courtney is the director of Branches Counseling Centers, a group of faith-based counseling offices in middle Tennessee and Florida. He blogs at www.branchesblog.com.