The film does a good job of showing how people discussing the biblical rejection of homosexuality often lack knowledge of scripture, but only allows theologists who agree with the film’s message to debunk the passages in question. Scholars from Desmond Tutu to Harvard’s Peter Gomes argue the case for gay rights; sane, educated, traditional Christians are sorely lacking….

[It also] argues that the gulf between homosexuality and the church can be crossed by a simple awareness campaign and shows many happy, healthy gay individuals enjoying their lives to prove its point. For people who agree, “For the Bible Tells Me So” will be an affirmative study, but the chasm is not entirely one of ignorance, and the film skips over those details. For all its talk of education and acceptance, the film manages to parody Christians much the way homophobes categorize gays.

Read it all.

A broadcasting company with programs produced by and for Christians in the Middle East and North Africa is rolling out this fall a situation comedy touching on moral and ethical issues in a lighthearted way.

The Arabic name of the show, “Mayli Min Kil Aileh”–the English title is “Faces of a Family”–is a Lebanese expression that says every situation can be looked at in different ways. The sitcom is written and produced in Lebanon for SAT-7, a broadcasting company established 12 years ago by Christian ministries in the Middle East and around the world to establish a Christian voice in the region through satellite TV.

Mette Schmidt, assistant communications manager of SAT-7 International, told EthicsDaily.com in an e-mail the series is in production. The fifth episode currently is being shot. The program is scheduled to start airing in January.

The first episode introduces the family: father Youssef, mother Nihad and children Tony, 17, Rogee, 14, and Samar, 10. Ethical dilemmas begin in Episode 2, when the parents are forced to leave the children in the custody of their grandparents and a family friend due to a family illness. Other episodes deal with real-life issues like cheating at school, stealing, lying, smoking, selfishness, sibling rivalry and the precious relationship between grandparents and grandchildren.

Read it all.

This is definitely something to program the VCR or DVR for.

Why would Hollywood release a controversial feature film about alleged Mormon terrorists of 150 years ago while all but ignoring the dangerous Muslim terrorists of today?

The movie industry has pointedly avoided harsh treatment of modern Islamic radicals, but September Dawn (to be released nationally Aug. 24) portrays the 19th century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a deeply corrupt cult led by an all-powerful, blood-thirsty mass murderer.

Read it all.

Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors ”” the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa ”” who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics ”” religion, death, existentialism ”” to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Read it all.

French director Laurent Tirard’s second film, Moliere, has been likened to a French version of Shakespeare in Love.

Tirard is the screenwriter and director of the movie, which has its U.S. release Friday. The movie imagines an undocumented period of the great French playwright and actor Moliere.

Tirard talks with Robert Siegel about learning to be a director in America and learning about the differences between French and American cinema.

Listen to it all.

Nearly 5,000 people are on the network’s email list; “people who want to create art but keep an ethical and moral code to our lives,” Covell says.

And the ministry has put together nearly 650 prayer partnerships, in which a Christian outside the industry is teamed up with someone on the inside.

Payne was going about his business in Illinois a year ago when he saw a blurb in some random church publication about HPN seeking prayer partners.

“And I thought, ‘Now there’s something I’d be interested in,” he says. “I’m an Anglican Priest. But I’m also an old thespian.”

Payne has stood on many a community theater stage, once playing the lead cowboy, Curly, in the musical Oklahoma. Yet he is “disgusted” by many of the movies they make these days.

“They exploit women, that’s what they do,” he says. “And they portray religious people as, you know, strange.”

Yet now he prays up to an hour most every night for the makers of those movies, and specifically for his prayer partners, two Hollywood writers whose names he doesn’t feel comfortable divulging. The writers email Payne when they need divine intervention. One of them recently asked Payne to pray that his writers block lifts and his manuscript sells. There’s been no word on whether Payne’s prayers have been answered, he says, chuckling. “But nevertheless, to me, it’s a form of ministry.”

Read it all.

The Lives of Others. Elizabeth and I both caught it on the way back from London recently. It is a must see–KSH.

Baby boomer mothers who take their daughters to the film expecting the classy heroine of their youth will find instead a 99-minute mockumentary of what Martha Stewart must have been like as a tweener. This character is Nancy Drew in name and convertible only. They began filming when actress Emma Roberts was still 14, and she was grounded by her mother for impudence the week before her publicity tour began.
What accounts for Nancy’s newfound youth? Perhaps Hollywood wanted to make her believable to a modern audience.

When Edward Stratemeyer invented the character in the 1930s, Nancy Drew followed the formula of the other books in his fiction factory: no touching, kissing or violence, according to Marvin Heiferman, co-author of “The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys,” which chronicles the series’ success. But when was the last time you saw a chaste 18-year-old in any Hollywood production? Quick, Nancy: Look 13.

In the books, Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s “special friend,” is a hunky college football player. Theirs is a chaste relationship; they dance sometimes and take strolls in the moonlight, but rarely do they even kiss. In the movie, there is no mention of college, and boyish Ned is little more than a sycophantic satellite for Nancy. They share one kiss, and it’s fleeting and sweet, in one of Mr. Fleming’s few nods to the original. But for a movie heroine to be sexually innocent these days, she can’t have graduated from ninth grade yet.

Read it all.

Don’t read any reviews, and go see it. I am serious. One of the best portrayals of blue collar life on the screen in as long as I can remember, with a fantastic lead performance.

Now that I have seen it I read the reviews. One wrote: “The writer-director Adrienne Shelly…took such perishable ingredients as wit, daring, poignancy, whimsy and romance, added passionate feelings plus the constant possibility of joy, decorated her one-of-a-kind production with pastel colors and created something close to perfection.” I don’t disagree with a word–and besides, it has Andy Griffith!

Lately…it seems that a slight virginal breeze has been blowing through the worlds of publishing, theater and Hollywood.

There is something quintessentially British in …[the] troubles [of the two lead charcters in Ian McEwan’s new novel, “On Chesil Beach”]. (It’s almost laughable, for example, to imagine a French couple in their place, even in 1962.) And of course, sex with consequences didn’t go away with the pill, in life or in novels, even those peopled with sexual-revolution partisans like the ones created by John Cheever, John Updike and Joan Didion. Then came AIDS, which united sex and death in a more real way than the Victorians ever did, providing the playwright Tony Kushner and others with a powerful metaphor.

But there is a sense that these recent artistic creations are partly a response, maybe partly unconscious, to the current state of sex in our society, where it can often feel like just another form of the cheap entertainment and distraction that now pushes in from all sides. That impression is fed by proliferating cable channels and the Internet, where the leak of the latest celebrity sex video already seems like a weary ritual, not more much momentous than the latest short-lived reality series….

The sociologist Alan Wolfe, who has conducted hundreds of interviews over the last two decades for books about the country’s beliefs and politics, said he saw a reflection in such works of the way people seem to struggle now for a greater sense of societal structure. “They do want to go back to a more conventional sexuality, morality, whatever,” said Mr. Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “But they do not want to go back to an era of repression. So a kind of muddled, middle position is where it seems to me that most Americans are these days.”

Read it all.

More important than the lesson Mel Gibson taught Hollywood about drunken anti-Semitic tirades (that they’re bad for publicity) is the one gleaned from his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ.” The movie demonstrated just how many evangelical moviegoers there are and how much money can be made from them.

Mindful of that market, Universal Pictures has teamed up with Grace Hill Media, a public relations firm that reaches out to religious groups, to publicize the mainstream film “Evan Almighty.” Scheduled for wide release on June 22, it stars Steve Carell as a politician who abandons Congress in order to build an ark, taking off on the story of Noah.

“Forty-three percent of this country is in church; that’s a big chunk of folks,” said Jonathan Bock, the president of Grace Hill Media. “You get into the once-a-month ”” that’s two-thirds of the country. That’s not a little niche audience.”

Mr. Bock was approached last year by Universal executives to help with publicity for “Evan Almighty,” the sequel to the director Tom Shadyac’s 2003 movie “Bruce Almighty,” which starred Jim Carrey.

One result of the effort isArkAlmighty.com, a Web site that promotes good deeds. It suggests acts of random kindness and helps participating congregations create online bulletin boards to post requests for help and offers of service among members.

Read it all