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Our Father's Keeper (2020) TEASER Jun 18, 2023

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Happy Father's Day! David (Craig Lindquist) is a loving, successful father who takes pride in taking care of his family. But his family's life changes dramatically one day when, at age 55, David is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Fast forward two years: David is a drooling shell, unable to aim food at his mouth when he's eating, and speaking in a childlike voice, wondering aloud, "Why can't both teams win?" while watching a professional football game. Naturally, this puts a tremendous strain on his family. His wife goes back to work, and his constantly-vaping, weed-addicted failson Jacob, who is on on house arrest, becomes David's full time caretaker. When Jacob falls asleep after smoking a bowl, David wanders out of the house and terrifies his family who loses track of him for several days. Fortunately, a homeless girl with a perfect heart named Christine finds David and adopts him as her own father. OUR FATHER'S KEEPER is a genuinely tragic and effective piece of emotional terrorism. It will make you tear up during climactic moments of family crisis, but it will also make you feel bad at yourself for laughing hysterically at David's character's overwrought and selectively lucid manifestation of Alzheimers. The character of Christine is a Christian movie manic pixie dream girl extraordinaire: a perfectly manicured and plucky street kid who (spoiler alert) does not at all get saved from her plight by the upperclass family of protagonists. The real star of the film, however, is Jacob. He's never seen without his vape, and he's constantly battling his role as the Hunter Biden of his squeaky-clean Christian family. He just like me fr!

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Spirit of the Game (2016) Jun 11, 2023

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We celebrate the NBA Finals with a look at the finest God-honoring basketball team to ever dominate in the paint: the Mormon Yankees. SPIRIT OF THE GAME is based on the remarkable true story of an amateur basketball team comprised of Mormon missionaries from the United States who played exhibition games against various national teams in the days leading up to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. These wholesome jocks were victorious against so many countries' teams that they became media sensations in Australia at the time, and the LDS church still seems to take pride in their achievements all these years later. In true Christian film fashion, SPIRIT OF THE GAME uses the story of the Mormon Yankees to create a nostalgia porn mood board, celebrating the golden days when you had to ask a woman's father's permission to marry her, and when swing was considered by some to be "just people shouting things over music". Australian heartthrob Aaron Jakubenko stars as squeaky-clean Delyle Condie, and accomplished Christian film mercenary Kevin Sorbo delights as Delyle's masculine yet tender father. Crack open a fresh jar of Vegemite and join us as we discuss the most exciting basketball event of 70 years ago!

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Challenge of Faith (2006) TEASER Jun 04, 2023

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Stephen Groo is a remarkable artist — an "outsider" filmmaker who boasts over 200 completed films in his catalog. His work was the subject of the 2018 documentary THE INSUFFERABLE GROO, which features Jack Black acting in one of Groo's films. It was the first time a mainstream Hollywood actor had ever engaged with Groo's work, and marked a milestone in a prolific career that until that point was largely obscure and ignored by the film world. Groo's filmography is a bizarre mix of original stories and unauthorized adaptations of existing intellectual properties. BATMAN, TOMB RAIDER, and even YU-GI-OH are some of the media properties that Groo has incorporated into his cinematic universe. With such a huge array of films to explore, we at Boys' Bible Study were pretty overwhelmed to embark on the journey of getting to know this unique filmmaker. Then, our friend Wormy recommended we start with CHALLENGE OF FAITH, a distinctly Christian offering from Groo featuring an original script about the moral dangers of ignoring your faith and family to try to succeed in business. Groo writes, directs, and stars in this picture as Jason Quinn, a humble desk clerk at an unnamed company who gets the opportunity of a lifetime when he is mysteriously promoted all the way up to be the new company president. He's thrilled at first to create a more comfortable lifestyle for he and his wife, but when a mysterious goth stranger starts poking around the office, Jason starts to wonder if this new success was actually the bait to a spiritual trap laid by the devil himself. CHALLENGE OF FAITH is a delightful and relatively sophisticated "outsider" film, tightly constructed but with that homemade, mid-aughts, shot-on-digital campiness that we here at BBS love to see in a film. Add an encounter with a powerful angel, and a spirit quest back in time to the Garden of Eden, and it became immediately clear to us that CHALLENGE OF FAITH had firmly immortalized Stephen Groo as one of our favorite filmmakers.

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The Secret (2006) May 28, 2023

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Papyrus font, LORD OF THE RINGS inspired sound effects, and breathless interviews with "philosophers" and "visionaries" set the tone for one of the most defining spiritual movements of the 2000s — THE SECRET. This metaphysical self-help film, written by Australian author and TV producer Rhonda Byrne, would go on to gross $300 million after she adapted it into a book, and it was famously championed by talk show host and self-help mogul Oprah Winfrey. Basically, THE SECRET instructs us to manifest our desires by thinking positively with intentional focus. Money and other material wants will come "freely and easily" to those of us who are grateful to the universe's bounty, but negative thoughts can just as easily have life-ruining consequences. This idea isn't new — the "law of attraction" had been a pop spirituality concept ever since the New Thought movement of the early 20th century — but THE SECRET crystallized it in such an accessible way that it has become a household concept for millions of people, regardless of their religious identity. Despite its emphasis on positivity, THE SECRET gets dark, quickly. Its intentionally vague promises of easy miracles (free money, cured cancer, dates with beautiful women) are bait to desperate people yearning for a way out of the mundane brutality of their lives. Also, one of the prominently featured "philosophers" interviewed in the film, James Arthur Ray, would go on to negligently kill three of his followers in a tragic accident in a homemade sweat lodge during a "vision quest" experience. Watch THE SECRET and be entertained by its madcap pace and bizarre claims, but do so at your own risk — one incorrect thought can change your life!

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The Notebooks (2021) TEASER May 21, 2023

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A confused man relies on his notes to piece together the tatters of memories of things he's experienced mere minutes ago in order to communicate his sad reality to an audience that pities him — but enough about Boys' Bible Study podcast! Our movie this week is a new entry in our series exploring the immense catalogue of filmmaker Jason Campbell (THE MAN WHO WENT TO HEAVEN, NUN NANCY, THE STORY OF MOTHER'S DAY) who specializes in slice-of-life films that feature surprisingly sophisticated storytelling paired with bizarre technical decisions related to sound, photography, and editing. THE NOTEBOOKS takes a relatively common, yet tragic story of a senior man struggling with a severely impaired memory, and elevates it to the realm of the surreal with sound effects that feel like a haunted house, and a bizarre scene where protagonist Preston Walker turns on a TV just to laugh while watching the static. On a nostalgia trip back to his hometown to reclaim memories of his childhood, Preston influences God's will to fix the life problems of many strangers he encounters along the way, but he struggles with the limitation of needing to write every single detail of his life down in one of his many notebooks to remember basic things such as where he parked his car, and the names of his family members. Could these ordinary notebooks contain a powerful healing secret that enriches Preston's life, and the lives of the people around him? You'll have to tell us, because we forgot!

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The Story of Mother's Day (2021) May 14, 2023

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Happy Mother's Day! We celebrate with this recent film from director Jason Campbell (THE MAN WHO WENT TO HEAVEN, NUN NANCY, and many more) that explores not only the historical origin of Mother's Day, but also the many types of moms that a random troupe of high school theater kids might experience. These include: Rich Mom, Foster Mom, Pill Addict Mom, Alcoholic Mom, Cancer Mom, and Caring Mom Who Works Late. Our protagonists are on a journey to write and direct an original school play that pays homage to the moms who love and traumatize them on a daily basis, but can they secure funding from the school principal, who happens to be portrayed by legendary SUPERMAN actor Dean Cain? Things don't turn out quite the way the kids expect, but they all learn an important lesson along the way: no matter how dysfunctional your family is, God made them for you that way, so you've simply got to love them!

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Not Broken (2021) TEASER May 07, 2023

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When sensitive, artistic teen Winter gets a job at a coffee shop, she struggles to write her customers' names correctly on their cups, so she creatively improvises and draws their portraits instead. If you don't mind waiting 35 minutes for a latte, this would be a quirky and heartwarming tale of a teen overcoming her life's mundane challenges — the perfect subject for a Lauren and Jennifer Havel film. We at BBS first encountered this daughter/mother duo when we reviewed SCREENED IN, the Havels' feature length manifesto about how smartphones can literally put you and your family's lives in danger. We found their work to be largely maudlin and hackneyed, but we couldn't help but be compelled by their sheer ambition and technical ability to organize a huge production on a relatively small budget. NOT BROKEN picks up where SCREENED IN left off, striving to make the most wholesome film possible by slamming together weepy piano stock music, long digital shots of perfectly manicured suburban homes, and monologues about how disability is inspiring. NOT BROKEN references the famous "fearfully and wonderfully made" verse from Psalm 139 to make the inspiring point that we were all crafted intentionally by God. Likewise, this film was fearfully and wonderfully made by Lauren and Jennifer Havel, masters of emotional manipulation, using their ability to take the smallest moments of the average (upper class suburban) life and elevate them to high Christian camp.

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The Secret: Dare to Dream (2020) feat. Ember Knight Apr 30, 2023

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"The Secret" or "The Law of Attraction" is such a simple and vague philosophy that almost every contemporary motivational speaker invokes it, but it can be directly traced to the publishing of a famous 2006 self-help/New Age spirituality book called THE SECRET by Rhonda Byrne. Basically, the book posits that the things we focus on in our minds can become reality, and this can affect us in both positive and negative ways. Your thoughts can literally make you an overnight millionaire, or cure your own cancer — but too much negative projection can directly lead to sabotaging your own life. Although the idea of positive affirmation is harmless, living your life believing your thoughts can literally bend reality has the potential to create toxic, unhealthy, obsessive thought loops, which are easily preyed upon by scammers. But a relatively benign (and bizarre) artifact of THE SECRET universe is the film we focus on this week — THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM, starring Katie Holmes as a worrywart mom struggling to take care of her kids on a meager salary, and Josh Lucas as a radiantly positive (and hot) single man who enters her life with a secret of his own that could change everything for her. To analyze this weird,New Age-y romcom, we're joined by our friend Ember Knight, a comedian, musician and filmmaker who started performing at a very young age as a choir soloist at the Agape International Spiritual Center under the direction of Rickie Byers (who later left the congregation) and Dr. Rev. Michael Beckwith, who would go on to be a featured speaker in the influential THE SECRET documentary from 2006. Ember has a fascinating insight into being a part of a New Age congregation that was foundational in forming the philosophy that would later be called The Law of Attraction, and Ember's current spiritual identity as a Christian is influenced by both the beautiful and dark sides of growing up within this style of worship.

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Emanon (1987) TEASER Apr 23, 2023

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A film that could have simply been a straightforward, wholesome tale about compassion for the homeless becomes a surreal pseudo-Christian epic for the VHS era. EMANON was the directorial debut of Stuart Paul, but the film is truly a family production. Stuart Paul's siblings, Steven and Bonnie Paul, as well as his mother, Dorothy Paul, have credits on the movie. Becoming familiar with these names will unlock an entire world of filmmaking, with famous titles over the years one may not have realized were interconnected — for instance, the BABY GENIUSES franchise, and the BRATZ live action adaptation are all Steven Paul productions. Stuart, however is the one who shines in EMANON - he plays the titular character, a homeless drunk capable of magical feats that cause some to believe he may be the second coming of Christ. He is watched with interest by Jason Ballentine, heir of the famous Ballentine fashion company — a disabled spoiled rich kid who is driven around New York City all day by his faithful chauffeur, Max. Jason's mother Molly is struggling to take over the company after the Ballentine patriarch recently passed away. When Jason discovers Emanon, this unassuming man could unlock the key to creating a truly bizarre "homeless couture" fashion line that will change the world and get the Ballentine company back into financial solvency.

Thank you to Wormy for providing research for this episode. Wormy's introduction to Paul family productions can be found on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/wormwould/list/the-paul-family-empire-the-road-to-stuart/

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On a Wing and a Prayer (2023) Apr 16, 2023

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When God is literally your co-pilot, anything is possible. This is the lesson that 56-year-old pharmacist and amateur pilot Doug White learned in 2009 when he, his wife, and two daughters were trapped in an airborne private plane en route to Louisiana after their pilot died soon after takeoff. Through a combination of Doug's very limited training, the resourcefulness of air traffic control operators who talked him through landing the plane, and the additional guidance of a flight instructor named Kari Sorenson who was patched into the call remotely, the Whites were saved, and they attribute their miraculous survival to divine intervention. This genuinely remarkable event in aviation history lasted all of twenty minutes in real life. The writer/director/producer of ON A WING AND A PRAYER, Sean McNamara (Even Stevens, That's So Raven), managed to stretch this incident into an hour and 45 minute film by editorializing on the Whites' Christian values as they win barbecue contests, feed the homeless, and work their way through petty family squabbles before their near death experience brings them together once again. A star-studded cast (Dennis Quaid, Heather Graham, Jesse Metcalfe) and some bizarre additions to the story, including a deadly peanut allergy and an accidental flight misdirection into a tropical storm, ensure that ON A WING AND A PRAYER is one of the more tightly constructed and entertaining Christian blockbusters of recent years. Many recent Christian genre films have been weighted down with boring descents into complicated conservative conspiracy theories, or bulky runtimes, but ON A WING AND A PRAYER keeps the drama light and soars above the competition.

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