Why unlikely? In college, some 120 years ago, we encountered Eric Hoffer's slim little book "The True Believer", a bone chilling treatise about what happens to mass groups when they surrender their free will and individuality to a belief system.....(and the charismatic leaders who represent those systems.) What it boils down to......true believers never tolerate unbelievers.....which has forever stained the history of mankind with war, barbarism and bottomless wells of cruelty and misery.
We took Hoffer's book to heart and lived out our subsequent days with a healthy suspicion and general disrespect for true believers of every stripe. And so far, recorded history hasn't changed our minds......
Before anyone starts getting hot and bothered, the purpose of this post is not a knock on Christianity......we churched up our daughter just fine, thank you......and the BQ has been on this earth long enough to know it's a better idea to embrace compassion, kindness, generosity, love of friends and family and tolerance for others.....all that good stuff.
But true believers, even the ones who purport to do good in this world, still confound us with double standards and hypocrisy. No one has been able to rationally explain to us why Evangelicals embraced a crotch-grabbing philanderer who worships only two things....money and himself. And installed him in the White House as the leader of the free world.....
Which brings us to why our skeptical radar went into overdrive as we sat down with beloved daughter to watch "I'm Not Ashamed", the story of Rachel Joy Scott, the first of the twelve victims of the Columbine high school shooters.
Produced by the Christian film outfit Pure Flix, this is their best attempt yet at crafting a film that, on the surface at least, resembles a mainstream Hollywood movie. It looks professionally photographed and edited and most of the time, competently acted. (They've cut way back on their biggest flaw - casting church-volunteer non-actors who sound like they're reading off of cue cards...)
But the Pure Flix gang still hasn't solved their fundamental problem.......they're not cinematic storytellers, they're proselytizers, preachers. For them, the message comes first, the art of moviemaking comes second. And in service to their agenda, their films invariably collapse into numbing tedium, a collection of prosaic scenes randomly stitched together to hammer home points to the faithful.
"I'm Not Ashamed" spends almost two hours preparing us for its penultimate moment.....Rachel Scott dying as a Christian martyr at the hands of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who were well aware of her faith. (Some would find it offensive that the movie expresses little or no interest in the deaths of the other executed victims......but then again, Pure Flix has enough trouble trying to fashion a coherent story out of Rachel Scott's life.......)
Before arriving at this scene, the movie spends an eternity aimlessly wandering through the teenage angst of Rachel's last few high school years. The shapeless, scattershot script slowly trudges from one min-drama to another......self-worth issues, peer pressure issues, boy-crush issues, bullying issues...and winding up her judged an outcast for fully embracing her faith. But as we already pointed out, none of this is edited together for any dramatic impact......it's just a long pile-up of teachable moments, sometimes interrupted by ominous vignettes of Klebold and Harris reading 'Mein Kampf' and playing shooter video games. The movie might as well have dressed them up as Roman Centurians from 'Ben Hur'......
The atrocities of school shootings open up a fully stocked Pandora's box of societal ills and evils that need urgent addressing...(but not by Congress, who still think it's okey-doke for nutcases to have assault weapons) ,,,so for Pure Flix to simply isolate and pluck Christian martyrdom out of this terrible event to serve their film's purpose......sorry, but to us, it seems more than little exploitative and self-serving. Rachel Scott's death was profoundly tragic.....but so were the deaths of the other eleven innocent victims. A better group of filmmakers would have included all of their stories....and that approach might have been a far better representation of Christian ideals than what's in "I'm Not Ashamed".
We can only pray Pure Flix gets better as they go along.....2 stars (**)
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