More Than One Lesson

The first episode of VidAngel’s biblical television series The Chosen is a mostly dull approximation of a cable prestige drama. To the show’s credit, there is an attempt at production value but it doesn’t do much to draw us in over its first hour.

In this episode, Tyler and Reed discuss the Erwin Brothers’ I Can Only Imagine and James Mangold’s Walk the Line.

In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies.

In this episode, Tyler and Josh are joined by Kahle McCann to discuss comedy and coarse joking.

In this minisode, Tyler talks about Charlottesville, racism, Donald Trump, and hopelessness.

When it comes to sexuality in the movies, many conservative Christians tend to err on the side of extreme caution. Some might use a service like VidAngel to filter out sexual content, while others prefer to skip a given film/show entirely. Rather than making case-by-case judgment calls based on the extent or context of specific scenes, they simply cut the Gordian knot: If it has something sexual in it, it can’t be good, end of story.

As a rule of thumb, this certainly has merit. Few films were ever improved by adding a sexual scene. Pick one at random, and you can safely bet it will be heavy on indulgence, light on edification. Hollywood’s track record in this department does not impress, to say the least.

But already, I know there are some people who would be uncomfortable with my wording just there. “Few? What do you mean? Why not just say ‘no’?” If I say Hollywood gets sex wrong more often than not, some may ask, “What would it mean to get it right?”

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In this episode, Tyler and Josh discuss Jon Gunn’s The Case for Christ and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:50- Intro, Worth Watching
00:02:40- Logan article, Bob’s baseball article, Thimblerig’s Ark, Digisciple Me
00:08:15- The Case for Christ
00:47:30- 12 Angry Men
01:21:30- Episode wrap-up

In this minisode, Tyler discusses depression.

Martin Scorsese has never kept his Catholic upbringing a secret. While he has certainly never made Christian films, his lifelong internal struggle of faith has informed his work throughout his now 50 year career as a filmmaker. It is most overt in works such as Mean Streets, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Gangs of New York. But it is such a part of him that his films that don’t have at least a small piece of Christian iconography are notable for the absence of it. He is probably the only mainstream filmmaker of which that can be said. Now with Silence, Scorsese takes an unflinching look into what it means to truly be a follower of Christ under the harshest of circumstances.

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