There are few things as wonderful as bad television. The kind of television where you sit there with your friends asking "they actually made that?" And one of the best pieces of television going right now is called Christianmovie.net.
Christianmovie.net, is on "The Word Network" at an indeterminate time on an indeterminate day. I say this because while my DVR is set to record it. Sometimes the show will dissappear for weeks only to show up with another episode just when I thought it was gone for good. Why do I record it you ask? And why do we invite guests to see it? Well let's begin.
The idea behind CMN is that it's a weekly television show designed to showcase, you guessed it, Christan movies. Christian movies are very different from secular movies: namely most Christian movies don't seem to care about: production value, acting, directing, story pacing, writing, or holding a viewer's interest. They do have on thing in commen with normal movies though: length. They're usually about two hours. Unfortunately CMN is only a half hour weekly show. Have you ever spent several months watching a movie? CMN chops up each of their films and gives you a tiny bite to consume each week.
Now every movie show needs a great host, and CMN is no different. It needs a great host, but it HAS Paster Dan. Paster Dan is a portly fellow who inturrupts the film 2-3 times each week to monologue. Despite the regularity of these inturruptions it's fairly obvious that preparation is not a big part of the pastor's ministry. Mostly Dan just improvs about how how much he likes movies saying something like this: "when I was younger I'd go to the movies. They'd be bright and they'd have the candy and the popcorn...and the movies....we need movies....movies are a part of who we are...movies...christian movies. That's why they're so important today."
The previous is not a quote but it's very close to the gist of his ideas. His plan seems to be:
1. Talk about how movies are great.
2. Talk about how he saw some movies one time.
3. Say the phrase "Christian movies" as if all the movies that were good actually were Christian movies which assuredly they were not.
I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish with his plan, but hey he's on television sometimes so more power to the guy.
CMN is a great show for one last reason: in the the middle of the each week's movie episode the movie itself is inturrupted by PREVIEWS of other movies. It's as if the show's saying: "guess what we have a thirty minute time slot to show a two hour movie every week, and we inturrupt it by the ramblings of our fat paster. We're also gonna inturrupt with this!
You will never get through a movie on Christianmovies.net. Not even using your DVR. After four episodes of "Apocolypse" it mysteriously dissapeared to leave us hanging for 4 weeks, only to return with a teaching tale on the dangers of abortion. Which leads to the following dilemma should my girlfriend and I ever become pregnant: if Apocolypse begins and we can't find out if one lone believer can save us all. Is this really a world worth living in? I'm not sure, but I bet that abortion tale will show me the way.
Here's a link the the horrible website if you don't believe me. It's got a picture of Paster Dan:
http://christianmovie.net/Labels: religion, review, tv