Caught a matinee of Saved!<\/i> yesterday to fend off the boredom (and to spend some time with Elyse before she’s whisked away again to parts unknown). Cute movie, but somehow underwhelming… Overall, it followed the standard teen movie structure pretty faithfully, only using over-the-top religiosity as the plot device and medium for most of the gags. If the film had been more subtle and the cracks against mainline Christianity had been more woven into the film themes and structure, it would have been more effective, I think. As it was, there were a few quite clever zingers but overall the Christian rhetoric the main characters used was inauthentic-sounding and on the surface, which just left me with the impression that the filmmakers didn’t really understand what they were taking on… But on the other hand, perhaps it’s an exaggerated view of what non-Christians see in the Christian community–in that sense, it’s quite interesting and enlightening, since it’s a perspective that’s hard to adopt after having been a believer and regular church-attender for years. We get completely desensitized to how impersonal and fake the language and “standard Christian answers” can sound sometimes (most of the time?). I think it’s a challenge for anyone (not just believers) to speak out of where we really are and not retreat into patent truisms and clich\u00e9s when interacting with someone… That’s what I took away from the film, at least. Anyone else seen it? What was your opinion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Caught a matinee of Saved! yesterday to fend off the boredom (and to spend some time with Elyse before she’s whisked away again to parts unknown). Cute movie, but somehow underwhelming… Overall, it followed the standard teen movie structure pretty faithfully, only using over-the-top religiosity as the plot device and medium for most of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}