the Unexpressed Advantage

Well This is Exciting.

I was working on a blog about Barack Obama and I wanted to get a perspective on some of his "problem" views, so I went over to this conservative website that had an article listing them titled the Audacity of Hype. I'll let you look at them if you like and hopefully talk about them later.

While I was there I got distracted by the banner ad on the page for the movie "Amazing Grace." It had pictures of people in renaissance style clothing and sported a tagline that said, "Behind a Song you love is a Story you will Never Forget." My initial reaction was, "hmmm, that's cheesy."

Then I started thinking that this was another one of these strange Christian Industry endeavors on par with something like the gifted. "Which boian and >brody both put on their blogs and made me sick to my stomach just thinking about how asinine it is. Thanks a lot you guys. (oh that's classic, i just found out that if you go to that site it blares "Amazing Love" at you, just to make you even a little more sick). I fyou think I'm being harsh, you should read the original article I wrote about "the gifted" (it was inappropriate for children under 13, I had to delete it).

Whoa… Got a little off topic there.

So to hopefully sooth my skepticism I clicked on the banner ad and went over to the "Amazing Grace" site. And it turns out to be a biopic about William Wilberforce and John Newton

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE AND JOHN NEWTON! HOORAY! YAHOO! ALLRIGHT!

...maybe you don't know who those guys are (hint hint: wikipedia).

Anyway they're great. I did a search but I guess I never wrote about them before. I should have. Most pastors leave seminary having Wilberforce and Newton as two of their heroes. Newton for his faithfulness to the pulpit and Wilberforce for his faithfulness to what he felt was God's call on his life, the abolition of slavery in England.

If you need more convincing than that then I suppose you'll have to keep reading.

So I think this is going to be an interesting movie and one worth watching. I'm not without my reservations though. The filmmakers are going to mess some historical stuff up, but mostly I figure they'll get it right. I've thought for a while that this would make a pretty good movie. One could argue that Wilberforce was one of the primary motivational forces for the ending of slavery in England (and by extension, the US). One of the things he was known for were his long and eloquent speeches. Add in some stunning background characters (Albert finney as John Newton? wow.) And you've got some pretty killer drama.

The added bonus, for people who like history, is that there's nothing out there that's even remotely good concerning this saga. One of my profs had this ancient video from the BBC that was pretty good to watch, but it had scratchy sound and was pure biography. So it was pretty boring.

The beauty of the Biopic, of course, is that you get to replace the boring details with a little fluff.

Of course the people who like history probably won't like the fluff that much.

The use of the title "Amazing Grace." is a little cheesy and the reason for my initial skepticism. It's properly applied to newton but it will be interesting to see how they work in the themes of the song with the movement of Wilberforce and his colleagues. I imagine the movie is going to make Wilberforce look quite heroic (and handsome, apparently), and for the title to work they're going to need to demonstrate Newton's influence on him as a preacher and a pastor. If they do that well, it will be pretty cool, maybe even a solid vehicle to spark discussion about the Gospel (thus the title becomes perfect, right?). If they overplay the heroics of Wilberforce or the audacity of Newton or the importance of the song then it will just be really irritating (but still worth watching).

The Title is a little Fluffy. But I like the shiny stuff.

The romance angle hopefully will be omitted, because it's not important to the story. But it's important to making money I guess. That should bother me more, but for some reason it's not. I guess because I'm in the right demographic and thus incapable of doing anything other than my media/marketing overlords are telling me to do. It follows then that I will enjoy the romance part, even though Wilberforce got married when he was 37 in real life (so you can see why the romance isn't important).

Still worth watching.

The romance is really fluffy.

Also, of course any community, church, or fan movement associated will be frustrating and irritating for those against the industry. In this sense, when I say industry, I'm referring to the lowercase "i", that being the Christian mass media marketing industry. In fact I'm going to start calling them the "i" or the "lowercase i" from now on. Because they really bug me. There's already a movement to sing the song all together some time on some day, which is pretty dumb (tell me if I'm wrong here, tell me), but If I start seeing "Amazing Grace" posters at churches like the whole "Passion of the Christ" debacle (you probably don't remember it as a debacle, per say), I'm going to tear the posters down. Sorry, but movies need to stand on artistic merit firstmost, not their usefulness as an evangelistic tool. Apologize for the rant. I'll clarify in articles to come.

fan movements in general are really fluffy.

So that's the potential fluff. Not really a big deal though, even if this movie's horrible (which I suspect it won't be), it's still worth seeing. It's gonna be a neat story, and if the speeches are well written, a tear jerker. I could talk about it more, but I'm not going to. Just go watch it. – dan

p.s. If you read this far then I declare FIRST on Jeff Boian who didn't beat me to this post.