March 23rd, 2004

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Movies
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Good-Natured Yuck Fest or Biting Satire

I’ll change subjects in a minute, but first I wanted to reference Saved, a new film starring (gulp) Mandy Moore and (quadruple gulp) Macaulay Culkin. Now I like a decent teen comedy as much as the next guy (though I prefer the term “teen comedy” to be bifurcated by the term “sex”), but I watched the trailer for this movie and am kind of perplexed. The IMDB listing describes the plot this way: “A girl at a Southern Baptist high school finds that her pregnancy makes her an outcast.”

This comes from the lads at Tagliners, who seem to share my confusion:

Is there any hope? So far I’m thinking a feelgood Christian morality tale about the values of friendship. And God, or Jesus, or something - I mean it’s not like that sort of thing goes down well at the box office these days, oh dear me no; why would MGM put out a movie like this right now? Because they’re desperate and only have the Bond franchise to fall back on? Surely not.

Is this a lightweight gentle poke at Christian youth or a biting satire a la Drop Dead Gorgeous? The casting seems to suggest the former, but the fact that Michael Stipe is producing suggests the latter.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

alan
March 23rd, 2004
2:49 pm

I too saw the trailer and thought it to be a “biting satire.” I remember thinking that I wanted to see it. Mandy Moore plays an enthusiastic fundamentalist it looks like. It looked more along the lines of Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys as opposed to an episode of 7th Heaven.

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Ami
March 23rd, 2004
4:22 pm

“It’s like those monster vampire high school kind of movies, only here the monsters are Jesus-freak teenagers,” says Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. lead-singer turned movie producer .

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A
March 23rd, 2004
5:38 pm

I know nothing about this film at all. But off the top of my head, I’d say its appeal rests suspciously in line with current American political idealism. Abstinence, anyone?

Likely it’s just Hollywood trying to redeem itself to all those politicians who moan about the ‘evils’ of left-wing immorality.

But that’s just a guess…;-)

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Augie De Blieck Jr.
March 24th, 2004
5:09 am

Somehow I doubt Hollywood is ever going to worry about being Family Friendly or trying to go against their own left-wing tendencies. Hollywood is about 90-95% left wing. It’s very tough to get a movie that’s not screamingly liberal put out there. When it happens, it’s an amazing thing, but a bit of an oddball.

I didn’t quite know what to make of the trailer. It looked like more religion-bashing to me, which I found odd given Mandy Moore’s appearance in it. She’s usually more family-friendly than that.

We’ll see.

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