Changing your perspective on your own characters

Dan Swensen hasn’t updated Surly Muse much lately — mostly, I suspect, because he’s been busy polishing up his debut novel, Orison, soon to be released by Nine Muses Press. In his most recent piece, he reflects on how flipping the gender of his protagonist helped him grow as a writer and gave added dimension to his story. A central point he emphasizes is that this was done in service of the story, not “to get Magic Feminism Cookies or whatever.” Perhaps the most fascinating part of his post — and the part with which I most closely identify — is that this change was simply a necessary part of the process that helped him get a handle on the story he wanted to tell. That is, despite the external benefits he may derive from having made this particular creative decision, it was inherently an internally-motivated choice that seems to have been more about, well, enhancing his own enjoyment of his work and his creative process. Because Dan is such a gracious and genuinely progressive person, he repeatedly clarifies that there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a conscious effort to be more inclusive or to break out of the often chauvinistic cliches that tend to dominate fantasy; it’s just that, for him, that was not the overriding factor, but more of a natural outcome.

There are a couple of reasons I wanted to highlight his post. First, because I like reading Surly Muse, and I missed it. Second (and more materially), I think a lot of writers forget what a kick they can get out of writing something that challenges them as creators. I don’t mean exclusively fiction authors, either. Even essayists, bloggers, dramatists, poets, you-name-it can find that turning one element of a story (or non-narrative text) completely on its head snaps your perspective into focus in new ways, fresh as a snowball to the kisser. It’s invigorating; an invitation to a game. Playing around can be serious fun, and very good for both the soul and one’s craft. Sometimes this process is a simple thought experiment, or a briefly-entertained notion in a preliminary brainstorming session. If carried through to its fulfillment, though, sometimes it can revolutionize and heighten the work itself. For Orison, the decision to change a character’s gender was necessary, but that doesn’t always have to be the switch that has to be flipped. What’s more, the benefits reaped from being willing to make such a drastic alteration can produce a corollary effect to better craftsmanship: joy. Joy in the work itself. That’s something we can all strive for, and it’s a lesson we often need reminding of from time to time. ☕

2013 reading update

For the last several weeks, I’ve been spending a great deal of time catching up on various things, which hasn’t left a lot of time for blogging. (Hence the paucity of posting.) Directly after Christmas, I caught up a bit on my video gaming, playing through XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was tremendously fun. This occupied two solid weeks of my leisure time. Then I began catching up on my TV shows, including both live action and anime. I’m almost up to date on Once Upon a Time, and I’m currently following at least seven shows currently simulcasting on Crunchyroll. The other big project for 2013 has been a reading project I’ve dubbed a “primer.” I will be heading back to grad school in the fall as a literary studies major. While I have a background as an English major, my emphasis was on creative writing; this has left quite a few gaps in my literary knowledge (even beyond those previously outlined). To that end, my primer was designed to address specific areas of interest that may develop into specializations once my academic career gets underway. So far, it’s been immensely rewarding. My progress is as follows:

• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Language of the Night by Ursula K. LeGuin
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard
• A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek
• Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis

Some of these books I actually read back in the tail end of 2012, and Genji is a white whale I’d been working on since 2011, but didn’t finish until this week. I’m currently chewing on Thomas Pynchon’s V., A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality #1: An Introduction, and John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

Coming up I have W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Kawabata Yasunari’s Snow Country, among others. I’d be interested in discussing any of these in the comment thread. ☕

Playtime: Utopia, in part

I’ve a new article up at Playtime, in which I muse upon Glen Beck’s Independence Park and its relation to utopianism. Check it out. Also, many thanks to my editor, Tracy, who didn’t so much finesse the piece that I originally submitted so much as raise it from a lamb, nurse it to full bloom, personally butcher it, weave its fleece into a snowy white placemat, and serve upon that in a hand-carved bowl an aromatic and bracingly delectable lamb stew.  If you don’t like the taste, it’s probably because she left the seasoning to me. ☕

Who still reads the Watchmen?

“Watchmen is a 13 year old boy’s vision of what maturity in art means.” – Freddie deBoer

Alan Jacobs played devil’s advocate toward Watchmen and stirred up a good conversation over the course of two posts. His prompt was the basic assertion that what has come to be known as the greatest graphic novel of all time… “well, it’s not very good.” His reasoning stems from a dissatisfaction with Alan Moore’s propensity to be a bit too one-note in his tone and characterization — and that his one note is of dour cynicism.

The ensuring debate brought to mind two things. The first was to resurrect the memory of the Playtime Watchmen extravaganza we did back when the film came out. I was not a huge fan of the film, but I did not regard it as a total failure. In many ways, both its strengths and weaknesses were heightened (or exacerbated, if you will) from the source material. Not having read the bulk of Moore’s work, I can’t say with authority how much Watchmen conforms to Moore’s overall style or departs from it. I do know that I’ve read V for Vendetta and several volumes of Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, both of which are from the same era, and both of which I personally like better than Watchmen, even though Watchmen is clearly more ambitious and elegant in almost every formal respect. An exchange I had with the estimable Dan Swensen during the roundtable seems particularly relevant to the issues Jacobs raises:

Matt: I don’t think the film (or book) needed to provide false comfort, but again — it seems very reductive and pessimistic of the film to say, “Compromise. That’s the best we can do.  Screw it.”  I can understand why Anthony Lane thought the whole thing was a bit juvenile.  It doesn’t allow for any real goodness in human nature or the universe, obsessed with how things fall apart, get corrupted, or fail spectacularly to enact positive change.  It’s so engaged with darkness and messed up lives and a screwed up world that, for all its recognition of human flaws and foibles, isn’t recognizably human at all.  That was an impression I had when I first read the book, too, but I can see how the book was more a reaction against the times than a forward-looking, holistic vision.  V for Vendetta has the same set of problems that were exacerbated by the film, although I think Vendetta was even a little more compassionate than Watchmen.

Dan Swensen: I think putting it in those terms might be a bit unfair to the story. I think the text clearly condemns Veidt in the form of the Black Freighter story — Veidt tells himself (and others) this yarn about wanting to save the world and shape the future, but I think the Black Freighter is the story as it actually is — that he has become a monster of the worst kind. The group goes along with his plan not because they believe in it, but because exposing it would cause further damage — in other words, they must accept this evil in order to prevent an even greater evil. That, to me, is the core of the compromise, and in a way, the “new kind of heroism” that Veidt smugly talks about in the end; a heroism that goes beyond punching out criminals or saving babies from house fires. I think that saying it “doesn’t allow for goodness in human nature” is putting blinders on.

Which is not to say that the outcome isn’t dark and potentially depressing, because it surely is. But I think it’s unfair to say that it’s devoid of all hope.

Nearly four years have elapsed since that roundtable, and I still basically see things differently from Dan. The way I understand Moore’s perspective as expressed in Watchmen, even the best of all possible choices is still a horrendous moral compromise. In the world of Watchmen, heroes simply cannot be good. At best, they can only be the least despicable kind of bad. This is one of the main points of the work: to deconstruct the received notions of heroism. It is done quite effectively. So effectively that I honestly don’t understand where Dan (or anyone else) can see anything remotely resembling “hope” in the narrative. Wherever it exists, it is stamped out. Or, even if hope continues to exist, what can it do but beat its impotent fists against the edifices of time (which destroys all things, or brings them round again full circle, including the atrocities) and human frailty? I fully grasp that, from the perspective of the surviving protagonists at the end of Watchmen, they are doing what is necessary to prevent further suffering. The cost of that, though, is a false and doomed peace, which is inevitably accompanied by the corruption and venality of human civilization that necessitated such a terrible “new heroism” to begin with.

Something I’ve been struggling with more recently — the last two or three years, I would guess — is a nearly unchecked expansion of my cynical tendencies. I don’t like being cynical. It is the antithesis of everything I desire to be. Yet it worms its way into nearly every aspect of my worldview, wriggling at the edges of my vision like obsidian flagella, growing and writhing until it seizes upon and begins to strangle objects and ideas until they pallor with lost hope. It sucks. You’d think that with such a jaundiced way of looking at things, stories like Watchmen would appeal to me even more. However, the opposite is the case. The more weary I grow of the nature of things, the more I seek out art and entertainment that offer hope unapologetically.

Now, I don’t mean false hope. Treacle rots the gums and the soul. I’m talking about things that make me feel nourished and refreshed. Even a dystopian action flick like Dredd (quite good, by the way), with all its brutality and pessimism, knows enough to end on a note of hope, acknowledging the costs and losses of a battle fought and won, resolutely setting its jaw to face the battles yet to come. The worlds of Dredd and Watchmen (at least, the cinematic versions) are certainly cut from the same cloth, and they both hail from the same spiritual place in terms of their respective source materials. To be honest, I’d be hard pressed to articulate any more precisely why I felt much safer in the quasi-fascistic hands of Dredd than the hopeless nihilism of Watchmen while still maintaining any moral credibility of my own. Yet I find that the “hard truths” of Watchmen don’t strike me as completely true. Most of the great art hints at the possibility of redemption, be it generations removed or perhaps even beyond the veil of death. In Watchmen, though, redemption is a sadistic illusion bought with blood and psychopathology: “heroism,” in other words.

None of my reservations about Watchmen have much to do with its art; they have to do with where I stand in relation to its moral perspective. V for Vendetta (the comic) ends on a similarly pessimistic note, yet it is a note that problematizes everything that’s come before it in an interesting and morally poignant way. The character, V, spent the entire narrative committing acts of terror and murder in the name of total liberty — largely as a personal reaction against the total tyranny of the fascist government. Moore’s script set up a dichotomy between tyranny and freedom, and encouraged sympathy for V’s cause, even though his methods were little less totalitarian than the government’s against which he fought. The film adaptation embraced V and V’s methods, which made it one of the most repugnant superhero films in recent memory. Moore, though, understood what a dangerous line his antihero had drawn and gamboled across. That’s why he ends his narrative with an acknowledgment that even righteous fury, if misdirected, will breed only more of the same. A pessimistic ending, but morally astute. V’s revolution fails, but then, V was never a hero; he was a revolutionary. And the people who carry on his tainted legacy — the fascists of the future — are the ones making the choice to live by the codes they have received. In Watchmen, the heroes are not revolutionaries; they have the power to offer a choice to people. They refuse to do so or are destroyed. Watchmen condemns this choice, but offers no alternative. At the end of V, a former police inspector walks into the darkness, carrying the knowledge of that choice with him into the future, where perhaps it may flower in more fertile soil. In Watchmen, the choice dies with Rorschach, and the countdown to doomsday begins again.

Maybe it is putting blinders on to suggest that Watchmen doesn’t allow for goodness in human nature, but it certainly indicts its capacity to prevail.

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The other thing that the Jacobs posts brought to mind was the notion that Watchmen probably deserves its canonical status. The proof isn’t simply in the pudding; it’s in the people who debate the merits of the recipe. The comic finished its run in 1987; about twenty-six years ago. An entire generation has grown up since then that was not around to read the comic in its original form, yet both young and old readers continue to discuss what it means, how it means it, and whether or not it is still relevant. You’ll notice that it is frequently canonical works whose relevance is continually questioned. Non-canonical works are usually simply forgotten. Nobody discusses them at all, even if it’s just to ask if they should be discussed. As always, I was struck by how intelligent and how passionate the commenters talked about Watchmen and comics in general.  This time, though, it particularly resonated that we are far enough removed from its Cold War context (some of us generationally as well as by time’s passage) that this work really must stand on its own. It is apparent to me that the comic continues to resonate, even with all the caveats that include phrases like “for its time.” It was also refreshing to see so much attention refocused on Dave Gibbons, whose art carries the entire thing, and who tends to be denigrated by comic fans for having the temerity to happily profit from his co-creation, and not to be a cranky lunatic who worships a snake-god pseudo-ironically.

In the last couple years, I’ve seen many college syllabi on the Internet that include Watchmen as part of “great books” courses or which are specifically about comics or pop culture. It is also abundantly obvious that the conceit of problematizing superheroes is a fact of our culture. Most superhero stories still lean more toward the mythological or heroic mode when all is said and done, but in terms of influence, it would seem churlish not to study Watchmen as the tip of the watershed moment when comics finally legitimized themselves in the public sphere as a vehicle for stories of artistic ambition and thematic seriousness. Not that great comics or graphic novels didn’t precede Watchmen, but it was with it that superhero comics arrived. Jacobs may not think that Watchmen isn’t very good; he may well be right that it isn’t that good. What is significant is that an English literature scholar should be familiar enough with Watchmen, its context, and its legacy to feel compelled to comment, “apropos of nothing in particular,” on its merits more than twenty-six years after its initial publication. To me, this signifies that readers of English will continue to read the Watchmen — let alone query who watches them — for years to come. ☕

Whitewatching: up from “underground”

Impish as usual, Armond White’s latest dual review (a common device with him, in which two recent releases are presented as “dueling” for the soul of American pop culture) contrasts Steven Soderbergh’s alleged swan song, Side Effects, with Walter Hill’s latest, Bullet to the Head (which, given Hill’s age and its box office, might turn out to be his big screen swan song as well). What stood out to me in the review was this sentence:

Soderbergh’s Traffic, Erin Brokovich and Magic Mike belong to an era of cynical banality while Hill’s sharp, inventive technique seen in The Warriors, Geronimo and Undisputed went unappreciated (and underground in TV projects like Deadwood and Broken Trail).

Most film critics now pay lip service to the notion that television series have progressed to the point of being on par in quality with the average feature film. White is one of the old school holdouts who frequently peppers his reviews with sleights against TV in the form of pejorative references: if he thinks a film looks like crap, he’ll say it uses “TV aesthetics” or something along those lines. Of anybody working in his field, White is unquestionably the most candid about his prejudices. He thinks cinema is where it’s at, television is not, and that’s that. For this (among many, many other things), he takes a lot of flack. Justifiably so.

Yet I think it’s true that, while most folks would readily acknowledge TV’s ascendancy over the course of the last fifteen years or so, its newfound mantle as a viable medium for sophisticated art is not yet cemented. For one thing, there are very few shows that have attained what you might call canonical status. Even “classic” shows are usually framed in the context of their time, both in terms of the storytelling conventions adopted, but also budgets and available technology. The lexicon of cinema is very well documented by superb critics and widely accepted as a form of high art. The lexicon of TV, while almost as well documented, is not accepted as a form of high art, and there are very few critics who have made their names doing TV criticism. In most respects, TV criticism is from a fan perspective, rather than a critical perspective. There are many shows considered to be “favorites,” but very few considered to be “greats.”

This is evident in the non-presence of TV references in most film criticism up to the present. While shows like The Wire and The Sopranos are oft-cited as examples of shows that created benchmarks of quality — and thus are often represented in reviews of crime stories — it is not apparent precisely why those shows are benchmarks. At least, not in the context of the reviews in which they appear. Ben Affleck’s The Town invited comparisons to The Wire when it came out, but few critics teased those out. The Evening Standard and The Guardian were content simply to name-drop the series. The World Socialist Web Site asserted that the film didn’t have the show’s depth. Not that comparisons to films like The Departed or Heat are less relevant, but apart from both being crime genre and both fuzzing the moral/ethical line between cops and criminals, what are the relevant points of comparison between The Town and The Wire? Are there similar characters? Plotlines? Techniques? Even on a thematic level, do The Town and The Wire even overlap in their perspectives on the whole cop/criminal dichotomy?

This is typical of how film critics grapple with the relationship between TV and cinema. It is as if critics are aware that there is such a thing as TV; they are familiar with some several programs that they watch, or about which they’ve heard from friends, colleagues, or the buzz in the critical ether; they’ve noted the uptick in production values and aesthetic rigor in TV programming. Yet they don’t really know precisely how to merge the two worlds. So you often find TV references dangling just above the surface of film criticism, serving the purpose of telegraphing that the critics are pop culture savvy, without bothering to engage in any meaningful way with that hemisphere of the culture that keeps millions glued to their TV screens every night.

If I may inch out a little further on this limb before a chipmunk’s sneeze knocks me off, allow me to suggest that this is evidence of a prejudice that critics still harbor about television. Not just critics: us, too. I don’t doubt for a minute that most of us, if we’re honest, would acknowledge that the standards we have for TV shows are a bit lower than the standards we hold for cinema. And not just because of the vast differences still intrinsic to the two media. It’s because that’s simply how the culture views them. For all our protestations and bluster, it is my distinct impression that TV is regarded as the lesser medium. To be crude: cinema is for art; TV is for entertainment.

We all know that it isn’t that simple, though; we know it isn’t entirely true. Even a staunch TV-phobe like White is occasionally confronted by the limits of his prejudice. His Zero Dark Thirty review compares the film to ”the bland procedural manner TV viewers favor,” suggesting that it’s not so much a case that there are bland procedurals on TV, but that it is the people who like to watch TV that favor bland procedurals. In his review of Silver Linings, he says, “TV shows like Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men and The New Normal turn everyday eccentricity banal.” Skim White’s reviews for yourself. Chances are, every time you find a reference to television, it is in the context of implying its erosion of good taste and standards. Yet when it comes to Walter Hill’s forays into TV Land, all of a sudden TV is “underground.” Banal, bland television gains a potentially subversive edge when the right person uses it. A medium utilized nearly four hours a day by almost all Americans is, by this formulation, veritably avant-garde.

As easy as it is to nitpick the consistency of White’s peccadilloes, in this instance, I think he’s fairly representative of his profession. There are dozens and dozens of TV critics out there who have been doing amazing stuff with their criticism (Alyssa Rosenberg does exceptional TV criticism, for instance), but film still gets the lion’s share of the physical ink, and it still occupies the place of pride in the hierarchy of artistic pop cultural pursuits. Just because this is the way things are does not mean that TV is “underground.” On the contrary. What would be useful, however, would be for film critics to start integrating TV into their discussion a little more proactively. Nobody knows for certain how technology will evolve, but it looks likely that TV and film are going to overlap a lot more in the future, so getting ahead of that curve would be a smart idea for film critics who don’t want to specialize themselves into irrelevance. The first step would be to recognize television’s potential and to start sifting through how much of that potential has been historically realized. Many critics have already begun doing this. I hope White and his kind come in from the cold sooner rather than later. ☕

Reader question: What 2013 movies am I looking forward to?

Another reader question. Rob is pretty straightforward:

[A]ny 2013 movies you’re really looking forward to?

Indeed. My primary go-to guide is this io9 preview, which covers 77 sci-fi/fantasy flicks. Since that kind of stuff is definitely my bag, let me just run down a couple highlights, listed in chronological order.

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G.I. Joe: Retaliation – I dug the first one. What else can I say? Bring on the mountaineering ninja battles.

Upstream Color – Shane Carruth has finally made his second movie. Being as how Primer is one of the masterpieces of the 2000s, I couldn’t be more excited for this. I’m especially atwitter over the Kubrickean visual rhymes all over the most recent trailer. I’ll go ahead and say that I hope this will not only be one of the best (if not the best) films of the year, but of the decade.

Oblivion – Cool trailer. Joseph Kosinski did an awesome job with Tron: Legacy, and the biggest misstep with that film was casting Garret Hedlund in the lead role. With Tom Cruise as the headliner, I’m thinking this will rock.

This is the End aka The End of the World – For some reason, I’ve become a huge Seth Rogen fan in the last few years. I still despise Superbad, but I’ve liked most of his other stuff. As much as I bag on raunchy comedy, the redband trailer made me laugh.

The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, RIPD – July’s gonna be packed. The first two films already have cool trailers out, and with Gore Verbinski and Guillermo Del Toro directing them, I’m pretty confident I’ll have a good time. Not nearly as confident about RIPD, but when I saw him speak at a convention, James Hong said that he got strong vibes (Blade Runner strength) about its potential. Good enough for me.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters – I dug the first one. What else can I say? Bring on the Fillion.

Riddick – I’m a fan of the first two films. I fully expect much spacefaring badassery.

The Tomb – Arnie and Sly team up to break out of a high-tech prison. Fingers crossed that Dominic Purcell is their man on the outside!

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – I liked the comics. I liked Sin City. I even liked The Spirit. Odds of me liking this? Three to one in favor.

The World’s End – Pegg, Frost, and Wright re-team for genre shenanigans. What better reason for the world to end, if not to have them do a movie about it?

Ender’s Game – Let me clarify that I’m not looking forward to this per se. Gavin Hood is a hack, and my expectation is that he’ll screw this up. But it’s based on one of my very favorite books, so I’ll be seeing it no matter what. The line between fandom and masochism is oh so very thin.

Thor: The Dark World – The first one was surprisingly solid, and this one apparently has Thor versus the Ninth Doctor. Fantastic!

Saving Mr. Banks – A biopic about the making of one of my ten favorite films of all time? Yeah, pretty pumped.

Gravity – The director of Children of Men does hard sci-fi.

Snow Piercer – The director of The Host and Mother does a post-apocalyptic, socially-conscious… something. Really, I don’t know much about this one, other than the people involved make it a must see.

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That’s the easy part. Other films I’m hoping will come out in the theater near me this next year are as follows:

Chinese Zodiac – Jackie Chan’s last action picture. Absolutely required viewing.

The Grandmasters – Wong Kar-Wai does period kung-fu epic. Advance word is that it’s incredible.

Amour – This should be out pretty soon near me. To say I’m “excited” to see it wouldn’t be accurate. Let’s just say that I expect it to be an experience I will appreciate having had once I’ve had time to recover from it.

Bullet to the Head, The Last Stand – More Sly and Arnie. Because I’m one of those idiots who went to see Expendables 2 opening day.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters – Probably really bad. Then again, the trailers make it seem like it has some Hong Kong-esque energy to it.

Parker – Statham plays Richard Stark’s (aka Donald Westlake’s) most indelible creation. Pretty jazzed about this, especially as a potential franchise. Parker aged along with the books (more or less), so Statham could conceivably have a lifelong ride with this one.

A Good Day to Die Hard – Duh.

Stoker – An English-language vampire flick by the director of Oldboy. Not enough to get me salivating, but the trailer was pretty sexy.

Dead Man Down, Oz the Great and Powerful – I’ll probably be seeing one of these for my birthday. Not particularly looking forward to either, but you never know.

To the Wonder – Terrence Malick hasn’t made a great film since The Thin Red Line, but everything he does is still worth seeing.

Much Ado About Nothing – I’ve already blogged about this one. Very excited.

Oldboy – I expect the remake to be better than the original. You decide if I’m joking or not.

The Monuments Men – I’m a fan of Clooney as a filmmakers, and this sounds like a cool Oscar-season ensemble piece.

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That’s pretty much it for the ones I know I’m hyped about. There are a few big other big ones I know that I’ll see just because, and a few about which I’m on the fence. The biggest maybe-maybe-not film at the moment is probably Iron Man 3. I’m not a particular fan of the first two, though I liked the second one better than the first. I’m also a bit leery of films trying to tap into The Dark Knight in order to grant themselves some legitimacy, and it feels like Iron Man 3 might be going for that vibe. At the same time, it looks visually impressive, it’s gone Shane Black directing, and if there’s one thing the Marvel films have done pretty well, it’s build up the need for heroism, even if the heroes are flawed and human. One of the things I think the trailer did particularly well was have that chest cell behind the logo wink out, then wink back on again. A small gesture, but well-delivered. I know I’ll probably see it within a week or two of its opening; I just hope it tops the disappointing first two films.

All of that said, though, one of the things I most look forward to in any given year is the number of films that I hadn’t previously anticipated, but which completely take me by surprise in the most pleasant way. The above list is by no means exhaustive. I can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store for me that I haven’t anticipated.

So, dear readers: what are you planning to see in 2013? ☕

Reader question: Should Christian movies be more “indie”?

I thought I’d try ye olde blogging standby of answering reader questions in the form of standalone posts. If you have a question you’d like me to consider blogging about, please let me know. The first question comes from Kyle, who posted the following:

I didn’t know where else to post this, but: SERIOUSLY? Nicolas Cage in the new Left Behind movie? Like what?

Sure, their getting hollywood in there, but…..this is not what I want for Christian movies. I think they should stay indie, and try to be innovative JUST like indie films.