Movies: christian campers, hot visitors

This week I watched two really interesting movies. As I’ve said before, I am not a film critic, and I think my taste in movies, and many other things, is pretty mundane. That said, here’s how I decide if I like a movie, or not, or how much: the clock in my living room sits right beside the television, and the fewer times I glance at it, the better the movie.

The first movie, Jesus Camp, was recommended by a friend. I watched it Saturday night, and I found it so disturbing that I watched it again on Sunday morning. This movie portrays modern Christianity in the worst possible way. It goes something like this: a very tightly wound woman organizes and emcees a summer camp that’s all about Jesus. She assembles these impressionable youngsters near a town called, of all things, Devil’s Lake, and proceeds to scare the living shit out of them. It’s battlefield language, full tilt. Somehow, this movie got more and more appalling with every passing minute. Many of the scenes stood out in my mind. One was when the organizer of the camp yelled at the children about how it’s not okay for them to be lazy and get obese while they just sit around watching – they must do something! She’s not exactly a slender reed in the grass herself. The other was when a group of the young converted travel to Colorado Springs to hear one of the Christian right’s biggest stars do his thing. They even get to go up on stage afterward and visit with the guy. The same guy who was eventually outed by the hustler he’d been getting together with weekly to share sex (the gay kind) and drugs. Ted what’s-his-name’s fall from grace happened after the footage was shot, of course, but it was still entertaining to watch him advise the children and boast about how “fabulous” it is to witness fundamentalist Christians influence supreme court nominations. Watching the adults in this movie inflict their sickness on the youngsters made me wonder why they haven’t been hauled into court and tried for child abuse.

The second movie, called The Visitor, was more subtle, a bit quieter, and, I think, the better of the two. The story goes something like this: a widowed professor goes to New York and discovers a couple of people living in the apartment he and his wife have rented for years. The professor, portrayed in a spectacularly non-verbal way, and the two homesteaders weave themselves into one another’s lives in all sorts of ways, none of which lean on clichés, which I thought was amazing. I was really impressed with the ending of the movie. It was not neat and tidy, it was not resolved and it was not happy. I was also impressed by the title (I’m intrigued by titles for some reason): watching this movie, I realized everyone was a visitor, if only to their own lives. It was interesting to watch this in light of the Arizona situation, but the movie was made a few years ago, and given its subject matter I’m surprised our patriots didn’t raise holy hell about it. Maybe they did, and I wasn’t paying attention. Anyhow, finally, in the spirit of full disclosure. I add movies to my Netflix queue and by the time I watch one I’ve often forgotten why I picked it in the first place, which is fun. But that’s not the case with The Visitor: I added it to my queue because I saw the preview and one of the actors takes hotness to a whole new level. I was not disappointed.