This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.
(This is part of our Fireproof review week–here’s the review itself and here’s where I talk about how the movie assumes that only Christians can make marriage work. Consider this, like all my movie posts, full of ALL THE SPOILERS. Also, I’m popping this into our Unequally Yoked Club series Read more
While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.
Everybody can learn new things. Why, just this morning I figured out how to get italics into my blog post titles. So I knew going into this movie that it’s about Kirk Cameron’s character saving his marriage, so who knows, maybe I’ll learn some amazing new tips and tricks to use in my own relationships!
This reboot of Left Behind is actually an imitation of a bog-standard disaster-on-a-plane movie.
But even in its attempt to slavishly imitate a specific genre of movies Americans got tired of in the 1980s, it couldn’t come anywhere near the quality and enjoyability of another take on the genre: 1980’s Airplane.
It’s a very ugly fantasy–the demonstration of a very broken psyche on display in the lewdest possible manner–and though the movie itself isn’t a critical masterpiece, seeing that fantasy marched across a screen for that runtime made me feel like I was reading some Nice Guy’s short story about his revenge on all those high school girls who rejected him long ago. It was that obvious and that disquieting to see this movie and think, “This is what they really think of us.”
To my astonishment, a quick search on Netflix revealed not only the new version of the movie but also the original Kirk Cameron version–and the two Kirk Cameron sequels. I feel like a five-year-old on Christmas morning suddenly. I’d say we’re set.
When Christians say they love movies like “God’s Not Dead,” or stoutly defend dreck like it against all criticism, I wonder if they realize what they’re telling me about themselves?
Evangelicals are long accustomed to dwelling in a bubble of kiddie league of media and art–dumbed-down, overly-obvious, telegraphed, hamfisted, unoriginal, willfully-ignorant, uninspired, blubberingly-sentimental, sexist (and often racist and bigoted as well), lowest-common-denominator-appealing, and yes, rinkydink. And that’s before we get into their numerous technical flaws, especially in the area of movies: the terrible plotting and pacing, the shoddy characterization, the dropped storylines and overly-simplistic conflicts, the unworldly way people react in them, the scenery-chewing and puppy-kicking villains devoid of any humanity, and the cardboard-cutout heroes.