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The relationship between Hollywood and Christianity had been a rocky
one from the get-go - sure, there had been Bible adaptations pandering
Christians by playing up to their beliefs since the silence era, but over
the years, Hollywood had also become (in the eyes of the Church) a
cesspool of sin that eventually led to the iplementation of the Production
Code in the 1930s, which essentially limited what could be shown and also
told in a Hollywood picture rather massively - which also meant that if
movies tried to question Christian belief as such, it had to be in a coded
way, and maybe even with a forced ending that set things right for the
Church (see 1955's Night of the
Hunter for example). And it should also be pointed out that the
Church stood firmly on the wrong side of history when it cames to the
1950s' Hollywood blacklist. On the other hand of course, also in the
1950s, Bible-based epics saw a resurgence, before over the next few
decades, Christianity gradually lost its hold on Hollywood, also due to
the replacement of the Production Code of old for a more differentiated
rating system. And in 1988, with the release of Martin Scorsese's only
superficially blasphemous masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ,
that relationship seems to have it its low. But the mega-success Mel
Gibson's The Passion of Christ from 2004 helped the rise of
faith-based films - and even if pretty much all biblical adaptations after
that movie flopped, and many faith-based flicks going the science fiction
route aping much highter budgeted blockbusters soon became the stuff of
ridicule, over the years more earth-bound (and with stories matching their
budgets) fare like 2014's God's Not Dead found box office success -
if almost exclusively among believers. And faith-based films eventually
emerged as a genre, with an in-built audience for sure, but also all the
challenges and shortcomings genre filmmaking brings with it (the film very
correctly correlates this to the emergence to the slasher genre in the
late 1970s/early 80s) ... Now no matter what you think about
faith-based cinema, about Christianity of whatever persuasion of even
about religion as such, if you're at all interested in the film history as
such, you're very likely to find this film immensely interesting,
basically because it doesn't try to preach or paint a perfect picture but
is based on research and views everything through a critical eye - to a
point where it shows parodies of faith-based movies from The
Simpsons and Saturday Night Live to point out both
genre tropes and flaws, yet not as a point of ridicule but to portray it
as a still emerging genre. And the film clips alone from the silent era to
today's cinema show an indredible easily infectuous love to cinema as
such, which really makes the story all the more engaging and also
fascinating. So basically, it's really a documentary by and for film
lovers, and one that, despite being genre-specific, celebrates cinema as
such.
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