Raise your Voice is a rip-snorting, fast-moving, young-teen paced movie. This movie made me realize the fast pace our society moves in. I'm in my 40's and don't watch a lot of T.V. This movie was paced so quickly I had to stay on the edge of my seat to stick with it.

For the target market, kids aged 10 to 17, it is a great movie. It's been a long time since I've heard anyone cheer at the end of a movie! The target demographic loved it! It has an attractive young star in Hilary Duff. It has music that is actually creative and high quality. There is a little bit of everything from classical to jazz to even, say, Hilary Duff songs. Whaddya know about that?

The music in this film was fantastic. The kinetic performances of the musicians were very infectious. I grew up in music programs throughout my school career. This was a pretty accurate depiction of the personalities and dynamics at play.

But the film also says some deep things to kids and parents alike. A strong theme from the film: Your strength comes from outside of yourself. Terri is a very spiritual person. At times of great stress she calls upon God. At one point she sings, "someone's watching over me."

But for me, the best part was the wholesomeness of the Fletcher family. Hilary Duff's character, Terri Fletcher, actually comes from a family that goes to church, loves each other, has realistic problems—and yet the parents are respected. Not always obeyed, but respected.

Terri is a "good" girl. Her positive attitude and self-worth protect her from the pettiness of her new classmates, and eventually they are won over. She obviously derives strength from her faith, and her friendships. This ability comes from an already strong legacy started by her parents and extended family.

Terri's good upbringing seems to give her a leg up in the adult world. She is thrust into a competitive school with prima donna artists who try to snub her as soon as she walks in the door. She is apparently unfazed by this and I felt her reaction to the various difficulties she faced were due to her self respect. This self respect came from her loving family life.

Adults will like and learn from Raise Your Voice, too. It is by and large a wholesome movie, neither preachy nor improbable. The families are fairly normal and the challenges the characters face are realistic. Raise Your Voice does a good job of handling the delicate and inexact science of turning your children loose in the world. When personal tragedy strikes, the family rallies around each other—and amidst the mourning, they begin the slow crawl back to normalcy. Again, I couldn't help but be grateful for the depiction of the internal strength of Terri and her family. Terri is actually a good girl who changes those around her instead of the reverse.

Following your heart is a recurring theme in film. Hilary Duff sings about it. The film is also about doing your best, excelling in your talents and passions. What this film does best, though, is show that doing your best gets a great boost from a combination of faith, family, and friends. Only in this context do you truly have the freedom to be yourself.

A lot has apparently changed in Hollywood since the days of The Player. Director Robert Altman’s scathing dark comedy-satire brought the public an entirely new meaning for the word “pitch.” Once a word used to describe what’s delivered from the mound on a baseball field, the sticky stuff you find on your windshield when you park under broken fir branches, or maybe what you'd like to do with a crappy teen drama you picked up at Safeway (okay, that's a verb, but whatever), the “pitch” a director or screenwriter makes to studio honchos became symbolic of everything that was crass, formulaic and decadent in Hollywood.

We can just imagine the response of Tim Robbin’s studio exec if a director were to pitch the following idea:

“Okay. So. Imagine a teen drama, kinda like Fame, only not. This really talented small-town girl whose dad’s a real jerk is all bummed ‘cause she kinda got her brother killed, you know, but she gets into this school for the summer -- and her mom and aunt tell her dad some lies so she can go off to LA. So it turns into this coming-of-age fish-out-of-water story at this arts school, and, well, you know how rebellious artists and teens can be. Only these are really motivated and talented teens, so they really don’t smoke or drink, much anyway, and they don’t really even hardly date or anything either. They just dig their music, and really try hard to win this big competition for a college scholarship. And this girl, see, ‘cause she’s bummed about her brother, gets discouraged, but she’s got this really great, encouraging teacher who encourages her, and she finds this church where she can pray. Oh, and by the way, even though the plot may sound kind of formulaic, we’re going to ignore some of the standard plot conventions of movies like this, including the way in which the movie ends.”

And the director gets marched out the office. End of story.

Now, flash forward fifteen years or so, and a major Hollywood studio itself actually pitches this idea to writer Sam Schreiber, and commissions him to do the screenplay. No kidding.

In interviews with Schreiber in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, members of the religious press were very interested in talking with him about Raise Your Voice, which opens October 8. The movie is directed by Sean McNamara, a Catholic director who attends the same Los Angeles church as Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty). Were star Hilary Duff’s church and prayer scenes scripted, we wanted to know, or did those come from McNamara? They were a group effort, Shreiber told us, that included the studio, too. And he’s pretty pleased with what ended up on screen.

“I think that faith plays a role in a lot of people’s lives, and that Hollywood in general gives really short shrift to that,” Schreiber said. But prayer, he continued, is “real, and I just thought that it was there as a through-line for the character -- that she could turn to that as part of a way of having an organized inner life. And it wasn’t like a crutch. She wasn’t blindly turning to faith. She was trying to use it to help organize and help figure out what she was going through.”

I was surprised, then, that the studio encouraged the spirituality of Raise Your Voice, given Shreiber’s characterization of Hollywood’s treatment of faith. Schreiber explained.

“I think that in the wake of movies like Passion and stuff like that you’ve seen a change in Hollywood, where faith at one point was something that was kind of a “no-go” zone, and now it’s a little bit of ‘cha-ching’ to it. I don’t think that they’re trying to exploit it from a financial perspective, but I think that it’s out there, and it’s certainly not going to do any harm to incorporate it and possibly it might do you some good. So whereas previously, you might have steered away from it and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we really need that scene in a church,’ now you can say, ‘Okay, that’s acceptable for that character.’” But The Passion of the Christ didn’t really change things, did it?

Hasn’t this trend been developing for some time?

“There have been movies where spirituality played a role, but they were always ‘niche’ movies, independent movies, and they tended not to perform especially well. But then you had The Passion, which suddenly said, ‘We’re going to change the rules on you now. You didn’t see this coming, and here’s a lesson.’ I don’t think that Hollywood is going to be able to emulate that. Like The Blair Witch Project, you can’t do it again. It happened once, nobody saw it coming, and any attempt to replicate that is going to feel commercial and fake. But I think it did wake people up to something that exists.”

Something that exists, indeed -- and something that no amount of cash can ever buy.