Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

a question about religion and film

I just saw Anthony Hopkins in The Rite last weekend. It was a halfway decent movie with its high points but after The Exorcist it is difficult for any exorcism-themed supernatural thriller to impress or cover new ground. (Although, Drag Me To Hell wasn't bad and the Angel episode I've Got You Under My Skin had a nice twist.)

It occurs to me that (even apart from the super-obvious examples like The Ten Commandments or The Passion of The Christ) there are plenty of Hollywood movies which assume that Christianity is basically true (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Rapture, The Book of Eli, Left Behind). There are also a number of movies where Hinduism is true (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Love Guru) and movies where Buddhism or other Eastern philosophies are true (The Golden Child, Little Buddha, a number of martial arts films). But I was hard pressed to come up with a movie where Islam was true. Apart from The Message, the only one I could think of was The Jewel of the Nile (which is actually full of your typical Arab stereotypes, but the "Jewel" of the title is an Egyptian Sufi with real powers.) Are there any others?