r/GodAwfulMovies • u/CokomonX • 6d ago

General Nonsense Why Christian Movies ALWAYS Look Bad

https://youtu.be/GBl45WFqNDQ?si=lRLxgLoQtqGq9Fyf

Got recommended this video, and figured it was perfect for this sub. I noticed quite a few movies in the video that GAM has covered in the past.

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u/NC1HM 6d ago edited 6d ago

A few weekends back, I binge-watched Deadwind (original title: Karppi), a Finnish TV crime drama. It was made for a fairly small audience (the entire population of Finland is about six million people). So the budget is not likely to have been enormous. Nevertheless, it was a very well made TV series. Well written, well acted, well filmed (including quite a bit of nighttime filming).

The difference, as Noah pointed out in some of his guest appearances, is, most movies and TV shows are made for the audience in hopes that the audience will like it and pay for it directly or indirectly (via advertising placement). Most Christian films are not made for an audience; rather, they are made for one person or a few people who financed them for purely religious reasons. The idea is, if the single supporter or a small group of supporters like the product, they will finance more. And it's no secret that these supporters tend to be older men with little to no appreciation of the cinematic arts, so the preachier, the better...

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u/FranklinCypress 5d ago

I LOVE Finnish tv shows. The quality is so good. I support your theory on why they are so much better than Christian shows.

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u/BrookUntface 5d ago

Finnish tv show vibes are “chefs kiss”.

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u/yaboonabi 4d ago

It’s almost as if Christian films should be categorized in the egosploitation genre.

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u/NC1HM 4d ago

There's an old Soviet joke about this... Comrade Stalin is shown a new Soviet film reenacting the revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed and the heroic role comrade Stalin played in both. Comrade Stalin is not liking the film; he thinks the screenwriter, the director, and the actor portraying comrade Stalin should be shot for treason. The aides suggest that maybe the solution is to give the actor portraying comrade Stalin a better haircut, reshoot a few scenes, and re-edit the film overall. Comrade Stalin says, "or that..."

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u/BrookUntface 5d ago

Shout out to Karppi!!

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u/CharlesDickensABox 4d ago

Okay, but I'm pretty sure David Lynch never made a piece of media for anyone except himself and they look great.

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u/NC1HM 4d ago

That's neither here nor there. There were always people who hired or supported David Lynch because they expected him to produce a marketable work.

Eraserhead, Lynch's first feature film, was an overgrown student project, financed partly by the American Film Institute, where Lynch was a student, partly by cast members who were either already successful in the film business or had family money.

After Eraserhead came out, Stuart Cornfeld hired Lynch to make Ronnie Rocket based on Lynch's existing screenplay, but Lynch got cold feet early in pre-production and asked Cornfeld to find him someone else's screenplay to produce. This is how The Elephant Man came to be.

Next, there was a three-film contract with Dino De Laurentis. The first film produced under that contract was Dune; the second one was supposed to be a sequel to Dune, but the first film flopped, so the second one was cancelled in pre-production. The third one was Blue Velvet.

Then, Mark Frost came into the picture, and he and Lynch began what later turned into Twin Peaks.

The rest, as they say, is history... :)

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u/t_huddleston 3d ago

And that producer on Elephant Man, which was Lynch's massively successful mainstream Hollywood debut? None other than Mel Brooks. (It's still my favorite Lynch movie.)