Why I Left, Why I'm Back: Memoir of a Christian Movie Critic

I LAST UPDATED this site four years ago; now I'm back, at least in some capacity. There are many reasons why I set it aside, not least of which is that four years ago I lost my job, and my wife and I started a business from scratch. I didn't have money to watch films in the theaters anymore, let alone the time to write about them. By the time we'd made our business work, we had a baby, and he has consumed much of my time and energy.

But beyond that, my heart just wasn't in it anymore, and hadn't been for several years.

To explain why (if you're interested), I must take you on a journey back to the beginning of my crazy dream to become a Christian movie critic, and what I had hoped to accomplish.

AN UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY
Movies weren't much a part of my life growing up; being raised in a Christian household and attending a Christian school in the '80s meant a good dose of paranoia about the surrounding culture, and movies were exhibit A in the depravity department. "Back to the Future" is the last movie our whole family attended together, after our pastor eviscerated it for reversing the natural order, having a child who teaches his parents.

Then, at a new church, in 10th grade, I was invited along to see the latest Oscar-winner with a few other guys in my youth group. It was the first film I saw that was intended for adults, that evoked actual emotions. I was mesmerized. The feeling of having walked in another man's shoes was absolutely visceral, the understanding of the cruelty of war was blindsiding, and to vicariously taste the power of compassion was overwhelming.

Up until that point, every story I knew, from Bible stories to kids stories to the few kids movies I had seen, had always been presented as an Aesop's fable: The moral of the story is "___". Stories to me were bloodless, non-involving, constructs of ideals to learn and absorb. The movies were my entry point into adulthood, where not everything worked out in the end, where questions remained unresolved, where experiencing empathy for fellow human beings was more important than drawing a pat conclusion about the story.

I had learned all about hope, faith, and love in my church, but only as constructs, not how people struggled with them and suffered for them and experienced them. The movies made me realize that there was more to life then knowing the ideals, that they often collided with our humanness, and we had to struggle with that. Many of my friends and teachers feared for me, worried that the movies were going to lead me away from God, but just the opposite was true: I was finally discovering how Christianity applied to life, because I was finally learning something about what life was, rather than just keeping my head down, doing my schoolwork, and trying to be a nice person. Movies let me see the possibilities, to understand what it meant to speak out, to take a stand, to actively show grace and love in real situations.

After a few years of discovery I decided I wanted to become a Christian movie critic -- someone who could recommend to other Christians films that could help them in developing their walk as I was developing in my own. Keep in mind that this was 1992, a full decade before Christianity Today would publish its first film review in its magazine. I faced a particularly uphill battle. One of my high school teachers warned me that as Christians we are to think only about what is pure, good, and lovely. But that verse in Philippians, I believe, has more to do with what we choose to dwell on, and that's what I wanted to highlight in writing about film: dwelling on what is true, honest, and virtuous.

BUILDING A MINISTRY
I spent all four years on my Christian college newspaper as a movie critic, from my first year as a freelancer through my senior year as editor-in-chief. I started out as a terrible writer, mostly rehashing the plot of the film while I tried to emphasize the powerful emotions that it evoked, thus ruining most of the viewer's emotional experience. I am quite surprised I was allowed to stay on, frankly, but I got a lot of support from my freshman friends who were simply excited to see movies acknowledged by an official college publication as something worth interacting with.

As I learned to find my voice, and actually articulate the case that movies could be used for spiritual growth, my message seemed to confuse many people. This was still the heyday of Siskel and Ebert after all, and there were a number of friends who only wanted to know if something was good or bad, thumbs up or thumbs down. There were a number of people in the drama and media studies departments who thought I should be analyzing only high art, rather than what most students were watching. There were those in the administration who wondered why the paper was covering movies at all, particularly R rated ones, and why I wasn't busy condemning them. At the time, the only prominent Christian movie publication was focused on tallying offensive content.

My approach was akin to that of a food critic, to use a metaphor, who spends much of his column promoting one idea: "Chew slowly. Take your time to eat; think about what you're eating; savor the flavors and textures; give thanks to God for it. No matter if you eat fresh organics or greasy burgers, haute cuisine or mom's cooking, if you take the time to taste and delight in what you're eating, giving it its due, the more aware you will be of God's gift of nourishment to you." The response to such a review would probably solicit just as many scratched heads as I was getting, from people who just wanted to know whether to eat at a certain restaurant or not, or those who feel strongly that a certain type of food is best, or those who question why food is spiritual.

But there were many people, not movie fans in particular but students eager to consider new perspectives, who took to my idea that there is something to find, some morsel worth considering, in every film, if you are willing to look for it. Where I think I helped most was to help feed the late-night dorm room conversations, ask big questions. When people wanted to chat with me about my articles, they usually didn't want to talk about a particular film, but about life, about something that triggered a new thought in their mind, or brought two disparate ideas together. I think I largely succeeded at doing what I intended: not to simply recommend a handful of films, but to help students who were trying to become more spiritually aware of themselves, more mature, more tuned in to the voice of God speaking to us through everyday experiences.

Looking back, I see now that what I enjoyed most was this aspect: the personal connections, the privilege of speaking to people's hearts and having permission to go deep with a new friend by simply talking over a shared film experience. I most loved being able to help people take a step forward in their spiritual lives. But at the time, I thought that movies were the method I had to use to get there. The silver screen, after all, was the place where I discovered how to walk in someone else's shoes, to find empathy, and shatter old notions. Movies were what tilled the soil of my heart so that new things could grow. It seemed to me that movies were indispensable to doing the work I wanted to do.

THE PLAN GOES AWRY
My original plan after college was to find a job as a newspaper movie critic until I could convince a Christian publication to bring me aboard. But the style of writing that I had developed in college -- reflective, personal, and open-ended -- didn't quite fit the standard newspaper review. So rather than postpone my dream, I decided to create it from scratch, launching a 12-page, black-and-white, photocopied magazine available by subscription, titled "Film Forum." (These days, of course, I would just have started a blog, but that technology wasn't available in 1997. How quaint!)

Response was enthusiastic, considering how little marketing I could afford. Several strangers wrote and volunteered to write for the magazine as well, and I began meeting other like-minded people who wanted to engage film. When producing, stapling, and mailing the magazine became too much for me to keep up with, one of these new friends designed a website for me so we could transfer operations online. The website started drawing traffic particularly when "The Matrix" came out, and everyone was discussing its theology and implications. I found more writers, more friends. Before long I was tapped to write several reviews of religious-themed films for the online version of "Christianity Today." In some sense, I was living the dream I'd set out to accomplish. But then something unexpected happened.

The stereotype of the movie critic is that they are cranky, grumpy, and mean. I swore that would never happen to me -- but it did. In college I had had the luxury of going to a movie only when it appealed to me, ignoring the vast number of releases that weren't my cup of tea. As an aspiring "professional" I started seeing more and more current releases and pushing myself to comment on them even when I had nothing to say. When the frustration of mediocrity confronts you over and over and over, and you have a forum in which to let your zingers fly, it's hard to keep up a thoughtful, tempered demeanor. I was the only one forcing me to do this, yet I could feel myself palpably wanting revenge on any film that left me wanting more.

The corollary is that any time I did find a movie I wanted to praise, it was of such importance to me that I almost outright demanded that everyone watch the film and recognize it as a masterpiece. Somewhere along the line I lost the casual, friendly tone of sharing discovery, and instead became stridently divisive over what was and wasn't worth watching -- particularly in my personal conversations with people, and in my forum posts, when I had less time to edit my feelings. More than once I was told that I'd made someone feel particularly small for liking a film that I'd trashed, or for not "getting" a film that I praised to the rafters. Categorizing the art had become more important to me than seeking a connection with people through art, more important than listening.

NEEDING SOMETHING MORE
At the same time, when I actually was connecting with God through film, my reflections started pointing me toward a particular conclusion, over and over. When I first discovered how powerful movies could be, it was because I only understood many of the aspects of the Christian faith only in theory. Movies helped me to feel more viscerally what it means to love, to lose love, to have hope, to take a risk, to understand a stranger. For a long time that was enough, simply to be acquainted with these truths in a heartfelt way. But after a while the nagging question became: What am I doing to actually embody and live out these ideals? When have I actually taken a risk? Whom have I loved? When have I taken leadership? In what way am I being selfless? Was I just going to write about Christian beliefs, or was I going to find a way to actually follow through on what I believe, to incarnate the truths I hold?

The next year was a somewhat schizophrenic time. Every time I would write it felt like I wasn't doing enough, like I was ignoring a bigger calling. But I wasn't prepared to walk away from film criticism, because watching movies, and processing those experiences through writing, was the primary way that I had to connect with God at the time. I didn't want to lose that, particularly because we had just moved and were having trouble for a long time with finding a permanent church home. I frankly didn't know what, other than art, would lead me humbly before God in the same way. It got to the point where I wondered if I even worshipped God at all, or only worshipped art itself.

When sat down and I actually wrote out that sentiment, and saw it on the screen in front of me, by the time I reached the end of that article I knew that it was time to walk away. I had pretty much dared myself to see if I could pursue God through means other than art: "I have to be able to say I'm willing to explore other forums for getting to know God, to humble myself and put myself at square one in an arena I'm unfamiliar with."

MEETING GOD IN THE MUNDANE
One of the main lessons I tried to stress when I wrote about movies is that you do not have to look far to learn something about God. God has not restricted his presence in this world only within church walls. He gave us this created world. He gave us imagination, reason, and inspiration. He gave us art. He gave us bodies, and food, and sleep, and breath, and laughter. He gave us one another. My message had always been: pay attention to your life, take time to notice where God is present, including at the movie you see with your friends on a Friday night. God is speaking; listen.

I had to return to this train of thought as I began a new quest. In what other ways was God caring for us and nourishing us in ways we easily overlook? For two years I penned a monthly column for a friend's online magazine in which I explored the ways in which God speaks to us through, say, waiting in line, or idle chatter, through our hobbies, or our work, through our choices of clothing, or taking out the garbage, or cooking, to name just a few. This was good practice -- I had many new arrows in my quiver to rely on in connecting deeply with God -- but I was still just writing. The words went out into the world, where maybe they did some good and maybe they didn't.

It was still some time before I learned to sit down with a person, to ask them about an average day, and what excites them about their everyday life, and explore together how it is that God can be present and speaking in those moments.

LIVING OUT OUR FAITH
Concurrent with writing my monthly column, I also started to lead at our new church a small group Bible study for my first time. This had been part of my plan to move on from film and engage the church more fully without the intermediary of art. But it wasn't an ordinary Bible study. Because I knew where I was struggling spiritually, I asked them to join me in my struggle to find ways of living out my faith in tangible and challenging ways. As we read the Bible together, each week I would ask them to pick one verse or phrase that convicted or inspired them, then make a goal to respond to that in a concrete way.

We had scattershot success at first, but I was excited to be actively working toward changes in my life, to be learning to express God's love rather than simply make interesting observations about it. The breakthrough came when I realized that people had the best success with their goals when the chapter of the day dealt with an issue they were already trying to deal with in their everyday life, rather than when they had to shoehorn a verse to fit their concerns. So I decided to let our inspiration for change come from the strong and present voice of God in our everyday moments, and the group transformed from one with a lot of homework and tasks to one of an authentic journey of God-led transformation. I reconnected to that excitement I had in college of being able to help people take a step forward in their spiritual lives.

Finally I felt like I was doing what I had been meant to do; at long last I had combined all three things that were important to me: helping people to find an awareness of God in their ordinary moments, investing in people rather than making proclamations, and being confronted with incarnating my faith in tangible ways. Or as a friend of mine recently put it: "You love to draw out the part of people that draws them to God."

This past summer, after two years of cultivating this group at my church, I spun off this ministry from the church to be open to anyone here in the Seattle area. My intention and prayer is that I will spend the better part of the rest of my life leading and growing these Christlikeness Groups: a small-group experience focused on hearing God in the mundane and following through on what he convicts and inspires you to do. Our website is at www.cgroups.net if you're curious to know more.

RETURNING TO FILM
This leaves us with only one question unanswered: Why am I back reviewing movies?

The answer, I suppose, is a little anti-climatic given that I have found my calling and purpose elsewhere. I'm not back with any sense of gusto, or on a crusade for any particular idea. It's just that art still is one of the key ways that I connect to and hear from God in my life, and my skills are getting a little rusty. Writing is just the way I best process a encounter with a film, clarifying my thoughts, bringing me deeper into it, and cementing it in my mind. I still watch a lot of movies, and I often have thoughts and ideas that I want to ruminate on, but over time they evaporate. I'm writing again more or less for myself, to strengthen those muscles that I let atrophy a bit when I set aside reviewing.

Secondarily, I had been thinking what a shame it was that I never got around to writing about a lot of my favorite films. My years as a critic were spent largely focusing on the current releases, since that's where the readership and the active conversations were grounded. Many films I grew to love after years of re-watching, and my initial review only scratched its surface; other favorite films I've never written about at all. I spent all those years writing hundreds of articles, and I have little to show for it in terms of a final statement on the films I value and cherish. My plan is to fill in those cracks and only rarely to comment on the current film scene.

And finally, I thought it would be fun. The dynamic has finally changed, after a long, long sabbatical, from something that I have to do to something that I get to do. Exploring movies seems like an adventure again, rather than a second job. Writing again feels like a refreshing and joyful break in routine -- one that I hope invigorates me as I step outside of my busy life for a moment and give thanks to God for the insights, beauty, joy, and inspiration that the movies have been able to impart to me.

photo courtesy of Cancia via stock.xchng