Christ!

Yesterday was my mainstream movie day. I caught The Departed and The Prestige at my local evil five-plex. Both good movies, and The Prestige was particularly noteworthy for being a fantastic exploration of artifice and deception, a real puzzle of a movie where the structure of the movie is the same as the structure of its subject – magic tricks.

Of course, we were bombarded with trailers. When I’m putting together the programme at the Varsity I normally attach a maximum of four trailers. Any more than that and I feel like I’m taxing the audience’s patience. At the evil five-plex you get twenty minutes of advertising for products and TV programmes and then six or seven (I lost count) trailers for coming features. Each one is about two and a half minutes. Towards the end of the reel or trailers, just as Jeff and I were asking each other if we were ever going to see the movie, an extended version of this played. "One family. One journey. One child who would change the world… forever." It looks like it will play well to the churches by the interstate in most of middle America. It looks fairly well shot in a Milk Tray advert style.

However, just in case Americans are in danger of forgetting what Christmas is all about, here’s another movie to remind them, Christmas at Maxwell’s, "powerful story of Christian happenings" complete with a small boy with wiggly eyebrows and crackling dialogue.

Look at this neat album! All of the pages are blank.

And here’s a movie about the people who are most likely to watch the previous two movies, Jesus Camp. I feel I should preface this trailer with a warning. It’s almost enough to put you off your dinner.