Woodlawn

I'm new, very new here. But I thought I'd post my first review here, just so you guys can get a basis on what it's like to read my jumbled messes.

I was given the opportunity to go see Woodlawn with some friends, free tickets, based out of a local church. The movie had been out for a while and I didn't get the chance to see it prior. Well any opportunity to expand my movie numbers is welcome. Honestly, I'm not sure what I expected coming from a movie produced by a company entitled PureFlix. While it has good heart and a potentially necessary message it wants to give, it gets itself bogged down by trying to tackle and return relevance to one to many controversies.
It has a better than average cinematography, and the actors all give compelling performances, but it's predictability out weights it's need to build character, and cliched writing does to much to aid in that problem. It occurred to me who this movie is really for when the people I saw this with started clapping as a character was getting baptized. This isn't a particularly bad movie, but it has no appeal to me because if you take out it's forced religious quota, it has nothing much else to offer.

Dr Soup, is that a Christian produced film? I've seen some and some have mediocre production values and so so stories, but I have seen a few that were actually pretty good.

It is Christian produced, and honestly I've never been a huge fan of Christian produced films, in fact God's Not Dead, my least favorite movie of 2014 put a lot of strain on that genre in my eyes. Woodlawn was welcoming, cause while I wasn't a huge fan of it, it definitely was more watchable. Though it was still really preachy, almost to the point of being distracting. Instead of the Preacher character in the film talking to the characters it felt more like he was talking to the audience, and that's understandable considering who the film is marketed to, but that cuts out a core audience that might want to watch it.

I'll actually be seeing a movie called Risen, Thursday of next week. As I do with all Christian films I look at them objectively, and that will certainly be the case for this upcoming movie, but I have better hopes for it than others of it's genre, it looks like it has some better ideas that it wants to pursue instead of just being a sermon.

Also, God's Not Dead 2! That's gonna be great! Right?

God's Not Dead 2....really? they made a sequel and called it that? Do you watch a lot of Christian films? I ask because I know of 2, that are pretty well made without being preachy.

One of my favorite films of all time Dead Man Walking is religious in nature. I don't really shy away from any movie and that applies to Christian movies as well. I am religious, I'll say that, and I've never felt there has been a truly great representation of faith in a movie. I've seen it done great a few times, but other times its felt pandering and weak. What two movies did you have in mind?

Just letting you know if you type [ rating ] 3 [ /rating ] (without the spaces) it will show up like this -

dude...that's cool

You should check out Seanc's thread: A Cinematic Journey of Faith
link: http://www.movieforums.com/community...ad.php?t=43202

I'm sure he would welcome the input and you might learn of a few good faith based films too.

The two films I know of are:
Molokai (1999)
"Molokai: The Story of Father Damien" (original title)
which surprisingly has a big name cast for a Christian project film: Sam Neil, Kris Kristofferson and even Peter O Toole have smaller parts in the film.

Alleged (2010) about the Scopes Monkey Trail, it was an interesting comparison to the much more famous Inherit The Wind (1960)

*laughs* Ooooh... they've got quite an unfortunate reputation now.

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