us hollywood types

Christy and i got to goto* a preview screening of The Nativity Story last night in Green Hills.

I have to say, my expectations were pretty non-existent. I hadn't seen any trailers for the movie, and hadn't seen any promo material or anything else about it. I just had heard that it was coming out soon. Christy is the entertainment writer (as well as a general editor, etc) for Lifeway.com, so she got invited (with guest) to come see the sneak preview.

My impression afterward was mixed. I'll go with the good part first, then the bad parts, then the amazing parts...

The movie itself, as a whole was ok. Nothing amazing, but pretty good. The settings, costumes, etc all seemed very authentic (not that i would know if they weren't, but the point is i believed they were). The story flow was good. They also did a good job of throwing things in that you could buy into to keep the story interesting. This is obviously important given that well over half the audience probably knows this story pretty well in advance. They took a few liberties away from how i understand things 'really' happened, but they were obviously for the sake of making it interesting, or appealing to conventional/traditional tellings of the story (3 wise men arriving the night of the birth are the most obvious example).

Two complaints i would have were the dialog in a few spots, and the music.

The dialog overall was good. The movie starts out with Zechariah in the temple mostly speaking Hebrew. After watching The Passion and other such movies, it was kind of disappointing when everyone started speaking English shortly there after. That part i could live with though, and the dialog was good for the most part. The bad part was that it didn't fit with the Biblical quotes. Everyone would be talking fairly normally - or at least how i would expect ancient Hebrew familes in small villages to talk in a movie - up until they ran into a part where the Bible actually has a verbatim quote of what so-and-so said. In those cases, they jumped right into the King James, then once the quote was done, they'd return to well-written dialog. That got pretty annoying. Luckily, most of this movie is filled-in assumptions, so that didn't happen very often.

The music was...ok most of the time, but a few times was down right bad. The movie opens with a Christmas carol (I can't recall which one) being played very epic soundtrack-ish. Then most of the movie stays out of the way. My wife, who's knowledge of church and choral music far exceeds my own says that most of the music was based on other Christmas music themes, but they were originals were obscure enough, or they were modified enough as to not be destracting. The exception to this was what was supposed to be the tension/stress-filled climax to the movie. I don't think i'm giving anything away here, but in the event that someone really doesn't want to know anything about the movie, i'll hide the text in black - just highlight below to read it....

[begin possible spoiler]
Just as Joseph and Mary are on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Mary suddenly goes into labor (which according to a comment she made earlier, means Jesus was several weeks premature). Joseph goes into the standard father-to-be panic to find her a place to actually have the savior of all mankind. Thus making the whole "there is no room in the inn" thing a practical action sequence. It was a little goofy, but the real problem was this - the music for this sequence was "The Carol of the Bells", played high-tension style with fast strings in a minor key. My wife had to shush me more than once i was laughing so hard. It turned a decent/good moment in the movie into a comedy sequence.
[end possible spoiler]

Anyway. Overall the movie was good, but here's what was awesome about it:
I cried.
3 times.

I didn't cry at Mary (she was decent, but just kinda there). Joseph was great, very well acted and written, but he didn't get me either. It was the shepherd. He was amazing. His story, as short as it was, and the way he played it, just killed me.

Anyway, that's my review. They let us go see it early, and i think the idea was that we would tell people about it. So consider yourself told.

* Those of us that learned BASIC in school growing up (for me it was 1st grade) learned that "goto" is a word. Spell check constantly reminds me that it is not, in fact, a word. But that hasn't stopped me in 20+ years of writing. To this day, i have to go back and put in a space at least 5-10 times every single day at work. Basically every time you see me say "go to" on my blog, i have had to do it there too. This one time, i thought i'd leave it in for old times sake.