The Adventures of Ociee Nash (DVD)

While I usually enjoy the productions of Fox Home Entertainment, The Adventures of Ociee Nash is far beneath the quality that I have come to expect. The press notes tout this film as being in “the tradition of classic family fare like Old Yeller and Pollyanna� (Cleveland Plain Dealer), yet I wondered if the reviewer watched the same movie I did. For one, the dog in Old Yeller didn’t have a big ole cable rope tied around his neck so that he could be forced to stay in the action by being dragged around by the children all the time. And, if it we did see the same movie, the reviewer would have seen that Ociee Nash is a very thinly disguised remake of Pollyanna. Honestly, Disney just did it better.

Skyler Day makes her acting debut as Ociee, but, alas, she is no Haley Mills (Pollyanna). She could use a few more acting lessons, but she’s not alone—the rest of the cast seems to have difficulty delivering their lines or portraying convincing characters—even Keith Carradine (Ociee’s father) and Mare Winningham (Ociee’s aunt) struggle. Sometimes it even feels like someone is saying, “I’ve got a video camera, let’s make a movie and make up the dialogue as we go along.� Even the family golden retriever cannot act and has to be hauled around by a heavy cable collar to make sure that he stays in the frame! Everybody is always grabbing for that dog… which is totally distracting!

The film intends to show a young girl coming of age; unfortunately there is some inconsistency conveying the theme, particularly when, just before the end of the movie, someone declares that “even a young girl can make a difference.� (Is she truly coming of age, or just an extraordinary child?) Despite the confusion over her maturity, themes of bravery and selflessness do make an appearance: in the climactic scene, Ociee rescues her friend Elizabeth from her burning home. Subsequently, the town celebrates “Ociee Day,� since Ociee became a heroine by being brave and finding the courage to act—precisely the concept that she has been trying to teach others throughout the film. Sadly, the lack of clarity in the theme was only accentuated by a disjointed storyline.

Perhaps the strongest aspects of the movie are the cinematography and the costuming. (The costume designer nailed 1898 with both the rural and city dress.) The film is beautifully shot in the South and the color is rich and gorgeous; however, this is not necessarily enough to keep a viewer hooked. Other production glitches may overshadow the visual pleasantries. For example, due to some choppy editing, there is a sense of watching a series of vignettes rather than a complete movie, which feels very rushed and perhaps low-budget. Also, the actors seem to be unsure and nervous like they are off their mark and don’t know their lines well—potentially a mark of weak direction. (In fact, several times one or more of the actors does shift right or left while delivering lines.) And to make it even harder for the actors, the dialogue tends to be schmaltzy, laughable, and unrealistic in several places.

To its credit, The Adventures of Ociee Nash is family friendly. The strongest word in the film is “durn� and Ociee is severely chastised for using that. The DVD would certainly make a good “babysitting� film for a rainy day when mom and dad want to get some work done for 98 minutes, but it’s not a film built for grown-ups. Maybe a good conversation-starter with kids, but for my money, I’d rent Pollyanna.

Billy Graham Presents Collection (DVD)

Before getting too far, let me note that the five films in this collection are intended to be evangelistic tools, and I will review them as such. If this is not your cup of tea, stop here!
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First, let’s make one thing clear: I AM A CHRISTIAN—a follower of Jesus Christ! I am not ashamed of that, and (God-enabling) will never deny Him in the face of derision or persecution. However, I will deny affiliation with Christian filmmakers and screenwriters who insist on portraying Christians as simpering, sniveling, pie-in-the-sky idealists whose witness for Christ is reduced to soft, dulcet tones as all nature hushes to hear their words and the heart-rending music swells in the background. If they truly think that this is the way to engage the culture around us, these folks have not visited the real world in far too many years.

Unfortunately, the five DVDs in the Billy Graham Presents Collection (The Climb, The Hiding Place, Something To Sing About, Road To Redemption, and Last Flight Out) all share these characteristics. I can already hear the gasps: “She dares to criticize the great Billy Graham!� No, I don’t dare. First, I am critiquing films, not a man. And second, I feel compelled to ask why a man who has been called by God to preach to over 210 million people in 50 years and be the spiritual guide to world leaders would lend his name to such genuinely poor evangelistic tools as these films. It’s heartbreaking.

Honestly, the spiritual content in each film is theologically solid and consistent. The technical aspects of movie-making (color quality, location, lighting, cinematography, etc.) are well applied, and it is clear that enough money was spent on each film to keep them from looking like low-budget quickies. Also to their credit, there is at least one recognizable actor or actress in each film, so that the audience won’t instantly write the movies off as art flicks full of unknowns. The structure of the films is not the problem. The problems are in both the screenwriting and the direction of the actors—problems so dominant in all five films that I am reviewing them as one.

The rather pathetic dialogue that is spoken and coached out of the actors tends to overshadow all the beautiful settings and artful action directing found in these movies, which generates a feeling of dislocation for the viewer. The background is running and the actors are in the setting, but often it’s like watching a dialogue pasted over a travelogue. Additionally, the editing is rather choppy—sudden close-ups of the actors are overused to emphasize the importance of the words they are going to speak. (Actually, I guess this is a directorial problem, too.) Ultimately, this gives a feeling of contrived get-in-your-face preaching, rather than living by an example that invites interest in what it means to be a Jesus-follower. These excessively dramatic methods also invite overacting, as well as noticeable hesitation and lack of conviction in the delivery of the lines.

But the really painful message of these movies is that the Christian life is passionless. Yes, knowing Christ and living a life that holds Him forth as the supreme example of how to live do bring a joy and a peace that really go beyond all human understanding. However, this does not mean that the follower of Christ becomes an emotionless drone with a universal flat-line personality and the same modulated holy tones of speech and pious eyelifts to heaven. The Christian characters in these movies just don't seem real. They are just what unbelievers run from and do not want to associate with—religious clones. I found it disturbing that I, personally, was unattracted to many of the main Christian characters because I just could not identify with them. What I wanted to do was to take them by their shirt collars and ask, “Where’s the struggle to be like Christ in a godless world? Where is the truth that we all have been given individual personalities and God finds satisfaction in our differences? Where is the passion of the greatest man who ever lived: who knew pain, cried tears, shouted in anger, laughed with His friends, drank at weddings, and called the religious leaders of His time ‘dirty snakes’?�

The Climb has been used as an outreach tool in many churches (even my own); the other films were unknown to me, save The Hiding Place. I would be embarrassed to invite my non-believing friends to view The Climb or any of the other three because I felt embarrassed for Billy Graham and those involved the filmmaking. I am confident that they had the best of intentions and the greatest desire to draw people to really know God, but I also know that they are capable of finding better writers, directors, and actors who could produce a product that enthralls, plants ideas that may lead to life-changing decisions, and gives an honest picture of Christ and what it means to live by faith. Truthfully, time would be better spent viewing a film like End of the Spear and discussing the examples of Steve Saint and his family—real people living real lives—rather than trying to navigate through the insipid Christianity portrayed in this collection.

(Note: In defense of The Hiding Place, it is a restoration of the original Hollywood film released in 1975 when even I believed that living the Christian life was a call to boring acceptance and quiet resignation, so consider it a great biographical story of Corrie Ten Boom and her family and leave it at that. I believe that The Hiding Place would have value in viewing just as an example of great Christians who lived and died for their faith, but not as an evangelistic tool.)

When Crickets Cry (Novel)

Author: Charles Martin
Category: Fiction
Publisher: Westbow
Format: Paperback
Pub Date: April 2006
Price: $14.99
ISBN: 1595540547

Head vs. Heart: The Crisis of Purpose

Charles Martin’s third book, When Crickets Cry: A Novel of the Heart, serves as a treatise on what happens when intellect and faith fight for domination and ultimately come to peace as a complete whole—an undeniable synergistic interdependence between commonly “opposing� spheres of influence.

At its core this book explores the difference between knowledge of the head and knowledge of the heart. Head knowledge is an intellectual endeavor. Information is found, studied, absorbed, and filed away in the proper filing cabinet of the brain to be retrieved when required. A person with a lot of head knowledge (particularly in one specific area) is called an expert and often becomes an icon of society who is sought for his or her expertise—a walking encyclopedia so to speak or, as present day terminology defines, a talking head. Head knowledge is easy to assess; the information is there or it is not. Some people are gifted in combining head knowledge with a particular skill or talent that raises them above the seemingly average person.

Heart knowledge, on the other hand, is a very tricky proposition. Heart knowledge is a spiritual awakening; the information isn’t just filed away for periodic use, but becomes life, permeating every aspect of existence and causing the focus of life to change. Heart knowledge is extremely difficult to assess because motives can be judged but not proven; actions and words are the only way to observe who a person is and what makes that person tick. Because of the struggle between head and heart, intellect and spirit, tangible and intangible, heart knowledge is often considered less valuable, and the person possessing such treasure often written of as either fanatical, misled, or completely unhinged. As individuals, we tend to give more credence to head knowledge than heart knowledge because we equate the latter with touchy-feely emotional nonsense used as a crutch to get through life. People want to be able to prove everything, but that just isn’t how life always works. There are things that have to be taken on faith.

As a young boy, Reese falls in love with the little girl next door, Emma, whose life is ruled by a physical heart, which has a hole. Knowing that this will eventually kill her, he vows to become her savior by learning everything he possibly can about hearts…the science. He dedicates his life to becoming the best heart surgeon known to mankind so that he can “fix� Emma when his education is complete. He believes with absolute passion that this is the purpose to which God has called him. After seven years of marriage, the completion of medical school, and the knowledge that he is the best thoracic surgeon in the present world, Emma’s defective heart decides that it is time to stop. Away from medical facilities, Reese’s attempts to save her prove futile and he plunges into a deep crisis of faith, walking away from a world who needs him, isolating himself and changing his purpose to becoming a boat builder. He couldn’t save Emma, so he won’t save anybody.

Emma had tried to balance Reese by helping him to understand that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. She tried to help him see that perhaps his purpose in life was not to save just her (or even her at all), but many. Emma more than proved to Reese that though her physical heart might be defective, her spiritual heart was more whole than his. In his singleness of purpose, Reese failed to see God’s forest of hearts for the tree that was Emma; consequently, his head knowledge never combined with his heart to make a whole person. Like most of us, Reese did not understand that he was a piece in a very large puzzle—a piece that must take its proper place or cause the picture to have a hole. He failed to understand that everyone has a purpose and that Emma’s was to encourage him and love him toward his. Eventually, it took a little girl, with exactly the same problem as Emma’s, to teach Reese the truth of meaning and purpose through the combined knowledge of head and heart. In the end, Reese does become whole with intellect and faith melded together.

This book would make an excellent summer “day at the beach� or “week at the cabin� read. Charles martin has a flair for description and an obvious love for the South, and his voice is very gentle and sincere. It conveys the mind of a deep thinking person who has probably struggled with the same issues that his characters have—which may not be so surprising since these issues are fairly universal to mankind.

The central character in the novel is a man, but men are not likely to be drawn to this book because the arrow of its compass swings just a little too far toward fodder for the Lifetime Channel and Christian romance novels. At times Martin allows himself to become a little too trite and over-stated, even overly dramatic, to the point that you can hear the music swelling to rend your heart (no pun intended). He also cannot resist the temptation to preach on subjects that he holds particularly dear. For instance, in a conversation with a young homeless man that Reese befriends, there is quite a lesson on pornography. But despite all that, it is really too bad that the market targeted seems to be Christian women who will probably feel as I did while reading the book. I found myself wanting to “fix� this incomplete man rather than look more deeply at myself, and I’m pretty sure that that was not Charles Martin’s intent.

Time provides a disorientation difficulty in several of the chapters. Martin does not seem to have mastered (at least in this book) the art of moving seamlessly around back and forth from flashback to present. Several chapters will take place in the past and then “Wham!� with a turn of the page the reader is back in the present but doesn’t realize it until a couple of paragraphs have been read. This is a bit jarring and slightly ruins the continuity of the story in several places.

Cici, Martin’s adult female main character, vacillates between portrayals as a strong, independent woman to a weak, needy woman who constantly requires rescue. It’s almost as if Charles Martin cannot decide which values he finds more attractive in a woman or perhaps he likes elements of both. But then, this novel is steeped in Southern culture (set in Georgia) where women are still believed to be of a more delicate and sensitive nature than men, and Charles Martin is a Southern gentleman.

Hoot

—1. Overview
—2. Cast and Crew
—3. Photo Pages
—4. Trailers, Clips, DVDs, Books, Soundtrack
—5. Posters (Owls)
—6. Production Notes (pdf)
—7. Spiritual Connections
—8. Presentation Downloads

Not Just Feathers!

Walden Media keeps right on proving that they know how to back the winners! The latest offering from the group who brought us Holes and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is called Hoot and families will love it.

Carl Hiassen wrote a youth novel based loosely on his childhood in Florida and Jimmy Buffett’s teenaged daughter liked it enough to pester dad about getting it made into a movie. Buffett bought the rights, met and became friends with Hiassen whom he united with Wil Shriner (director) and Frank Marshall (producer), and Hoot was born. The goal of the entire team was to produce a family-friendly movie that was enjoyable while having substance and a message. Score!

The message, plain and simple, is that everyone, no matter what size or age or species, has the right to have a place on this earth. Everyone and everything in all creation has a purpose and is important to the good of the whole. Something or someone destroyed sends out a ripple that affects much more than the moment in time when the destruction occurred. Young people should be encouraged to take part in the life of their community and look for opportunities to serve.

Running parallel in the movie are the stories of two beleaguered creatures—the burrowing owl whose habitat is about to be destroyed for the sake of a new pancake house and Roy Eberhardt (Logan Leman), the new kid who has just moved from Montana to Florida and is being bullied relentlessly by Dana Matherson (Eric Phillips) who doesn’t think “Cowgirl� has a right to exist. As did the movie Aquamarine that came out earlier this year, Hoot portrays teenagers as human beings with brains and a genuine desire to make a difference that counts.

While riding the school bus one morning, Roy sees a barefoot boy running alongside and feels driven to discover who he is. He has a number of mishaps along the way and has to constantly deal with Dana who would prefer to bash his head in and leave him in a pile on the bus. A girl named Beatrice (Brie Larson), who is nicknamed Beatrice the Bear because she is so tough, rescues Roy a number of times and eventually reveals that she is the stepsister of the running boy whose name is Mullet Fingers (Cody Linley). Mullet Fingers does not attend school and has been kicked out of the house by Beatrice’s stepmother who is his biological mom. In hiding out and providing for himself, Mullet Fingers has discovered the plight of the burrowing owls and is determined to stop the pancake house corporation from bulldozing over them to build their new restaurant. Roy, Beatrice, and Mullet Fingers team up to save the owls.

Mullet Fingers has been running a one-boy campaign of the annoying mischief type of vandalism—letting the air out of truck tires, putting alligators in the porta-potties, pulling up the surveying stakes every time they are placed, collecting poisonous snakes and releasing them into the compound. He isn’t really hurting anybody or anything, but he is messing with the property of others and producing an atmosphere of potential harm. Roy keeps bringing this to his attention and tries to get him to move in a more Ghandi-esque direction that doesn’t involve trespassing or inevitable escalation into something that could be deemed a felony. This is one of the best things about the movie. Never is it assumed or implied that Mullet Fingers’ defense of the owls is wrong, but his methods are clearly not condoned. There is a strong, strong message to teens to use intelligence to fight for a cause and a powerful statement in support of the ability of young people to make a real difference.

Roy is the foil to Mullet Fingers. It is he who investigates the company and discovers that they have lied about an environmental impact study. All it took to give Roy the courage he needed was the empowerment that comes from key adults who believed in him and allowed him the freedom to pursue the answers. However, it is never assumed that Roy will be successful. In fact, he is cautioned that he probably will fail because the big guy is often the winner and this is not a “happily ever after� world a great percentage of the time. But realistically, “Sometimes Good Guys Win� (the movie’s theme song written by Buffett).

Jimmy Buffett and his friends have really accomplished their goal. All men with children, they were tired of sitting through movies that were safe for their kids to view but nothing but drivel for adults—“mind-numbing movies� is what they called them in the live feed interview after the screening I attended. It was very obvious from the responses to the questions from the audience, that these four men—Shriner, Buffett, Hiassen, and Marshall—will continue to collaborate on additional films that have moral value and spiritual truth clothed in an entertaining, generation-crossing medium. That is, if Hoot is well received. It deserves to be.

If you’re still not sold… the soundtrack is wonderful, the cinematography gorgeous and brilliant, and Luke Wilson as the bumbling Officer Delinko is a hoot—Oops!

— Overview