A Box of Faith - Christian Film Done Well

 

Beautiful, kindly film, a really lovely piece, A Box of Faith stands out. 

A lot of well-meaning Christian film-makers give it their best shot, but turn out weak when it comes to story. Ham-fisted miracles, trite dialogue, predictable plots and wooden acting tends to be more common than not. Don't get me wrong there are some indie Christian film-makers that are doing some remarkable work, but the genre is about half a century behind modern film-making's level of sophistication. 

This movie isn't sophisticated. It's good! What makes it a standout piece is the beauty of the story. It made me cry. This story proves that writing can carry a film that doesn't have a big budget. The actors aren't Meryl Streep or Tom Hanks, but they do a good job of portraying real people. 

The story follows a teenage girl and her father through the kind of hopeless hard time that we all pray we never have to go through. The prayers are simple and heartfelt and not stilted. The film is not preachy, but genuine. Dior's father, Tim, is arrested for a crime he didn't commit and Dior dodges a social worker in order to stay out of foster care. The girl manages to survive out on her own. Her bag is stolen. She lives by day in a park and sleeps in her dad's storage unit.

You really root for this kid as she hangs on hoping for some kind of miracle. The movie ends on a positive note as all my favorite movies do. Bill Wetherill who plays the girl's father Tim is wonderful. He's a big sweetheart of a guy and you really feel for him. Dior is played by Savannah D. McMahon is perfect as a teenage girl living by her wits on her own. Julie Van Lith is terrific as the social worker charged with Dior's case.

Right now, the film is on Amazon Prime and possibly some other faith friendly streaming services. It's a wonderful movie for a quiet Sabbath afternoon. This one gets three pineapples for a happy ending, for reminding me of Swiss Family Robinson and Castaway type survival stories and for the clever use of the Box of Faith which ties the story together so cleverly.

© 2022 by Tom King

Lost in Space Gives Us a Great Story Sans "Woke" Cringyness

What I appreciated about the 3 season reboot of Lost In Space, was its handling of male and female characters and their relationships. Maureen Robinson was at once a smart strong woman, but she was also a mother and the wife of a strong man too. With a few hiccups, they became a powerful, mutually supportive team. It also didn't bother trying to make us all accept the idea that the human race would colonize another star system with a bunch of LGBQTLSMFT genetic dead end "self-gendered" colonists. 

 

In this strikingly good series, humans were portrayed as they largely are in nature and didn't focus on the 1 in a hundred sexually befuddled members of our "woke" culture in a ham-handed attempt to educate the rest of us (as so much TV/Movie writing does these days. LIS handled race the way it should have been handled - it ignored racial issues altogether. The writers didn't show us any systemic racism. People were of diverse skin color but all were of one race - the human race as it mostly is these days. Even despite deep misunderstandings with the alien robot race, the people come out triumphant and manage to span the cultural divide between man and AI machines.

John W. Campbell, editor of Analog in the 40s and 50s, used to refuse to publish anything in which the human race came out badly. He shaped science fictions conservative wing for generations to come. Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Orson Scott Card, Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn, Michael Crichton, CS Lewis et al. Campbell would have thoroughly approved of Lost in Space.

Lost in Space got it right for serving a large audience. There was little crude language and a whole lot of good stuff in it and not any detectable in-your-face wokeness. If any of the writers were trying to be "woke", they missed the point. They wrote to the values us conservatives believe in. And even some of the bad guys get redeemed.

Hey, it may have been an accident that this series appealed to the conservative in me. It was, after all, a Netflix production, but there it is. I liked it!

© by Tom King