Cynical Cinema

There is a conventional wisdom surrounding movies, music and art in general that states certain people are not cut out to make that art. Traditionally, those who suck at making movies and music and the rest of it are from two areas. Either the hard-core Republican-type right wingers, or the hard-core Christian evangelist types. Of course, very often these people are one and the same. Of course there are exceptions, and please don’t write in listing every one of those exceptions. I am aware of them. Alice Cooper, for example, is a Republican. One way to look at this is documentary movies - compare right-wing biased documentaries with left-wing biased documentaries. Michael Moore stuff, anti-war in Iraq stuff, pro-pot stuff. Now, name me one right-wing documentary you know of. Just one. GO ahead, name it. Well, they’ve been made, but they are not well done, and no one has heard of them. Perhaps the most famous is FahrenHype 9/11, a movie seen by fully 3 percent of the number of people who have seen Fahreheit 9/11.

Perhaps the man who proves this rule best, Republican-wise, is Jack Abramoff. As a movie producer in the 80s, he managed to get a neo-con, anti-commie, ridiculous film made. It was called Red Scorpion, and it starred Dolph Lundgren, and it was staggeringly bad. He followed this up with Red Scorpion 2, released in 1994. Then, he joined the George W. Bush team, and along with Tom DeLay, he managed to extort, steal, embezzle and misappropriate millions and millions of dollars from, among other groups, the native American tribes of the U.S. He also inspired dozens of jokes, both good ones and bad ones. If Abram helped you off a horse, would you help Jack Abramoff? And so forth.

And the Christians? Two words. Christian rock. Does that make you cringe just a little? Yeah, me too. Scott Stapp, why have you forsaken us? However, rules were made to be broken, and there is at least one Christian production team that does good work. They are called Big Idea Productions, and they are the fiercely pro-Christian, pro-God company behind the Veggie Tales. And you know what? They are good. In some cases, they are absolutely great! I grabbed the Veggie Tales series from Alliance Atlantis because our eight-year-old loves them. At first, I was awfully leery about this stuff - evangelical, pro-God songs? Christian values crammed into the faces of kids? It scared me a bit. Then I started watching. And I found myself laughing. Actually laughing. So much so that when the latest shipment of DVDs arrived, our 8-year-old was not even here, and I still opened them up and started watching them. By myself.

The double feature DVD is Very Silly Songs, and the Ultimate Silly Songs. Which is the best part of Veggie Tales. Their songs are very, very good. Although the wisdom of creating a 2-DVD package, each DVD being song-related, is debatable when there are five songs repeated from one disc to the next. Why bother? Couldn’t you fit all that on one disc, rather than making two? In the end, you get about fifteen songs. Which brings me to complaint number two. MY favourite Veggie Tales song is not on here! The one about the ball that was kicked into the tree, and it bounced in to the gated community? Hilarious. Gated community. Haha. There are still some comedic gems here though, that kids will love and adults will, hopefully, with an open mind, find quite amusing. Songs like I Love My Lips and The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.

Yes, some of the Veggie Tales songs are preachy and irritating. But most of them are well done and not crazy God-centric, and those are very good. It proves that rules are made to be broken, and Christian producers can be just as good as atheist Golden Compass-type producers. Also out on DVD are actual Veggie Tales episodes such as Larry-Boy and the Rumour Weed, and Madame Blueberry, of which Madame Blueberry is the superior DVD. But the silly songs are the way to go. Christian movies can be good (the Ten Commandments), Christian music can be good (Handel’s Messiah) and Republicans can be cool too (Alice Cooper). I am leaving out Ted Nugent here, because although he has made some great music in his life, he is a class-one, Grade-A nutjob.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under 2007, Cartoon, Kids, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.