Mad Max and the War Room
I saw two movies the other night. My son and my wife picked up two movies from Red Box I actually wanted to see, and so I watched them.
The first was War Room, the second was Mad Max: Fury Road. I'd recently seen that Mad Max got an Oscar nomination for best picture. Hmm, maybe it's pretty good.
So I watched them. War Room was a powerful, engaging, touching, compelling drama about the beauty and wonder of prayer and fostering a relationship with a God who heals and saves. Yes it was predictable and melodramatic, yes. But it was a wonderful film that addressed real life concerns in a profoundly moving way.
Mad Max, on the other hand, was a bloated, contrived, ridiculous waste of time. In the interest of trying to come up with the grandest hyperkinetic mega-dystopian thrill ride you'd ever see, you got a gruesome, psychotic, completely uninteresting pile of pap. 87% of it featured big bad-ass kick-ass-looking vehicles doing battle in the desert showcasing the wildest cinematography and CGI ever, and after about ten minutes of this I was bored silly. Oh, and it was just as predictable, just as melodramatic.
And yet, here're the Metacritic scores, a compilation of all the major mainstream journalistic reviews (scale of 0-100): War Room, 26, in the red as one of the worst. Mad Max, 89, in the green as one of the best.
Who are these reviewers?
I'll tell you who they are. They're brought up feeding in the fetid trough of humanist, postmodern dreck fed to them by the deepest politics World Operatives keeping them enslaved like all those people in Mad Max, and even the couple in War Room. The difference is the Mad Max people are "freed" because some cool rebels take down the dictator to get them more goodies. Whee.
In War Room the couple finds God and then finds Him exploding into their lives with mercy, grace, charity, wisdom, humility, understanding, and lovingkindness.
Something else too.
Truth.
After I'd seen these two movies I flipped over to a religious channel and caught a talk by someone at a Ravi Zacharias event. I don't know the name of the speaker, but he said something extraordinarily profound.
He made reference to Pride and Prejudice, when a man expressed to a love interest (please forgive me, I'm not familiar with the novel and don't remember the character's names) that he loved her, but it went against everything he felt and believed and whatever. Thinking this would make it more meaningful to her, he was surprised when she rebuffed him.
She declared that if he was feeling this way against his will, then his love could not then be a true love.
The speaker made the profound point that you cannot truly love without judgment. That is, you have to really be able to judge things, to judge people, to know what you are truly getting into. Love only counts when you know the individual with insightful judgment, and you love them anyway.
Those reviewers don't know anything because they don't honor the principle of that kind of judgment. They've been told judgment is baaad, don't do it! Yet ironically they still judge what they believe is right and true, they just want to do it by adding they don't judge, that they're hip and open and with-it and broad-minded.
I'm sure they hated War Room because they "don't want to be preached at." Do you know how many times I hear that from people who've been put off by religion? I get why! Catholicist-driven religion is a total put-off! I get that!
But whenever they see a film like War Room, where the message is overtly and unashamedly about Christ and His healing power and saving grace, they just shove it away with "Don't want to be preached at."
To be fair, only about a dozen reviewers contributed their thoughts about War Room in Metacritic, again, most all of them reviled it. Nearly fifty gave the most glowing marks to Mad Max, but then that just says it in a different way. "What? Another Christian movie? With people praying? Count me out. What's that movie you're all seeing? Another Mad Max crazy slugfest-across-the-desert, but better? I'm on my way."
Funny, are you not preaching at me when you say something like Mad Max is worth a damn? Really, isn't that what these smug reviewers are doing? Are they not simply saying "See this film about the workers' struggle for economic freedom, about the power to make your own meaning from absurdity, about the meaningless of life and how much you need violent rebels to fight against the man! And look at how cool it all looks!"
Oh, I hear the substance of your preaching, I'm respectful. I listen to it and consider it. I do.
How about you listen to Christ?
And then see His hand extended to you, there for you to place yours?
The first was War Room, the second was Mad Max: Fury Road. I'd recently seen that Mad Max got an Oscar nomination for best picture. Hmm, maybe it's pretty good.
So I watched them. War Room was a powerful, engaging, touching, compelling drama about the beauty and wonder of prayer and fostering a relationship with a God who heals and saves. Yes it was predictable and melodramatic, yes. But it was a wonderful film that addressed real life concerns in a profoundly moving way.Mad Max, on the other hand, was a bloated, contrived, ridiculous waste of time. In the interest of trying to come up with the grandest hyperkinetic mega-dystopian thrill ride you'd ever see, you got a gruesome, psychotic, completely uninteresting pile of pap. 87% of it featured big bad-ass kick-ass-looking vehicles doing battle in the desert showcasing the wildest cinematography and CGI ever, and after about ten minutes of this I was bored silly. Oh, and it was just as predictable, just as melodramatic.
And yet, here're the Metacritic scores, a compilation of all the major mainstream journalistic reviews (scale of 0-100): War Room, 26, in the red as one of the worst. Mad Max, 89, in the green as one of the best.
Who are these reviewers?
I'll tell you who they are. They're brought up feeding in the fetid trough of humanist, postmodern dreck fed to them by the deepest politics World Operatives keeping them enslaved like all those people in Mad Max, and even the couple in War Room. The difference is the Mad Max people are "freed" because some cool rebels take down the dictator to get them more goodies. Whee.
In War Room the couple finds God and then finds Him exploding into their lives with mercy, grace, charity, wisdom, humility, understanding, and lovingkindness.
Something else too.
Truth.
After I'd seen these two movies I flipped over to a religious channel and caught a talk by someone at a Ravi Zacharias event. I don't know the name of the speaker, but he said something extraordinarily profound.
He made reference to Pride and Prejudice, when a man expressed to a love interest (please forgive me, I'm not familiar with the novel and don't remember the character's names) that he loved her, but it went against everything he felt and believed and whatever. Thinking this would make it more meaningful to her, he was surprised when she rebuffed him.
She declared that if he was feeling this way against his will, then his love could not then be a true love.
The speaker made the profound point that you cannot truly love without judgment. That is, you have to really be able to judge things, to judge people, to know what you are truly getting into. Love only counts when you know the individual with insightful judgment, and you love them anyway.
Those reviewers don't know anything because they don't honor the principle of that kind of judgment. They've been told judgment is baaad, don't do it! Yet ironically they still judge what they believe is right and true, they just want to do it by adding they don't judge, that they're hip and open and with-it and broad-minded.
I'm sure they hated War Room because they "don't want to be preached at." Do you know how many times I hear that from people who've been put off by religion? I get why! Catholicist-driven religion is a total put-off! I get that!
But whenever they see a film like War Room, where the message is overtly and unashamedly about Christ and His healing power and saving grace, they just shove it away with "Don't want to be preached at."
To be fair, only about a dozen reviewers contributed their thoughts about War Room in Metacritic, again, most all of them reviled it. Nearly fifty gave the most glowing marks to Mad Max, but then that just says it in a different way. "What? Another Christian movie? With people praying? Count me out. What's that movie you're all seeing? Another Mad Max crazy slugfest-across-the-desert, but better? I'm on my way."
Funny, are you not preaching at me when you say something like Mad Max is worth a damn? Really, isn't that what these smug reviewers are doing? Are they not simply saying "See this film about the workers' struggle for economic freedom, about the power to make your own meaning from absurdity, about the meaningless of life and how much you need violent rebels to fight against the man! And look at how cool it all looks!"
Oh, I hear the substance of your preaching, I'm respectful. I listen to it and consider it. I do.
How about you listen to Christ?
And then see His hand extended to you, there for you to place yours?
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