Hey, you missed the "Left Behind" marathon!

[onager]

All three of those cinematic masterpieces ran back-to-back today on the GMC cable channel. That's Gospel Movie Channel, I guess.

I live in California, where the marathon must have started at 5 AM. The turd...er, third one showed from 9 to 11 AM here. So maybe you still have time, depending on your geographical location!

No future re-plays that I could find, dammit. Since I wouldn't mind DVR'ing all 3 and doing an MST3K on them.

I had never seen - or even heard of - the last of the trilogy, Left Behind: World At War.

No wonder. It reeked of cheap and the Ed Wood School of Movie Sets. The only exterior scenes were brief shots of (probably) Montreal, standing in not too convincingly for New York, Washington, etc. etc.

When the President of the US conferred with world leaders, their images just appeared on TV screens with a helpful indicator posed behind them. e.g., the President of Egypt always had a rug hanging behind his head.

The US President was played by poor Lou Gossett, who at least looked properly embarassed.

Apparently, future budget cuts have eliminated the entire Secret Service. This President frequently jumps into cars, alone, with random citizens in the middle of the night.

Oh, he also personally conducts a Guantanamo-style interrogation of Kirk Hameron. Who takes about 30 seconds to convert the formerly non-believing Pres into a Fundie! Using the same moldy old sales pitch you get from any street-preaching Fundie - "God loved you so much that he came to Earth, bla-bla-bla."

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT! I'M GIVING AWAY THE ENDING!

:rofl:

In the ending, the Romanian Antichrist unleashes a Revelation-style plague upon the Earth. Millions are dying all over the world, especially Xians.

So it briefly looked like a happy ending.

Then the Xians miraculously find an antidote!

"Red wine. We had a Communion service and we were all healed."

And the damn thing ends, right there.

Jebus! This crap makes Ray Comfort look like Thomas Aquinas.

[Warpy]

1. Since I have no clue about what the GMC channel is

and guess it's been ghettoized by Direct TV on the high end of the dial with all the fulminating, lectern pounding preachers, I had to make do with the Drop Dead Diva retrospective for sappy viewing.

Thanks for the warning about #3. It sounds almost campy enough to be worth the two hours out of one's life.

[and-justice-for-all]

2. Ah man, I was going to watch that....

:puke:

[HarveyDarkey]

3. They're movies? Why hadn't I heard of that?

I thought they were just a series of poorly written polemics.

[onager]

4. Movies! TV series! Video games! And big ol' Xian lawsuits!

:rofl:

Google "Left Behind" for hours of entertainment. But because I'm a bitter ol' Fundamentalist Atheist, I'll get you started.

1. The Movies: so far three have been released escaped, as I note above.

When the first one came out, it was going to CONVERT THE WHOLE WORLD! For a while, Fundie Xians sounded a lot like $cientologists. The first Left Behind movie would be a BIG BUDGET HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION, with BIG NAME STARS!

After all, the books had sold millions of copies to barely literate Bible-thumping suckers avid Xian readers worldwide. The movie was bound to be a smash hit, right? What could possibly go wrong?

From the Xian propaganda website "Crosstalk":

Recently (Tim) LaHaye filed suit against Namesake Entertainment, a film company that was to make the film with a big budget and Cloud Ten Pictures, an outstanding Christian film company that produced Tribulation in 1999.

According to Religion News Service, the suit says that Namesake representatives originally promised to spend $40 million on the film and release the production in time to catch the Jan. 1, 2000 millennium hype.

However, Namesake couldn't rally interest in Hollywood so it worked with Cloud Ten and the well-known Lalonde brothers film team to make a $17.4 million project, which released its videotape product in November. The effort is the best yet for a dramatically evangelical film.

http://www.crosswalk.com/509418/#Close

2. The TV Series

October 15th, 2001 - Fans everywhere of the popular best-selling ‘Left Behind’ series are celebrating as PAX TV and Namesake Entertainment turn the book series into a television series.

Namesake Entertainment originally announced that “Left Behind: TV Series” would premier in January 2002 on PAX TV. However, sources at Namesake have just confirmed that the premier will be pushed back until Spring 2002.

We will report the stars as soon as it’s released.

http://christianfilmnews.com/1021/left-behind-tv-series-4/

Left Behind: The TV Series was a project planned by Cloud Ten Pictures, for airing on the PAX Television network in the United States.

While NBC (one of PAX's partners) wanted to tell the story as it was written in the Left Behind novels, Cloud Ten Pictures wanted to make the TV series a The West Wing type series, set in the Left Behind universe. Because The West Wing was so popular at the time, NBC rejected Cloud Ten's idea.

Cloud Ten Pictures made an attempt to move ahead with the project, going so far as to continue a national casting call in major US cities. By the time Left Behind: World at War was released in the fall of 2005, all references to the planned television series was removed from Cloud Ten's official website. As of July 2006, the idea had apparently been abandoned.

http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Left_Behind_(TV_series)

3. The Video Game (from Wikipedia):

Though some reviewers praised the game for originality, many panned it citing a ridiculous plot, mediocre gameplay, poor graphics and sound, and technical problems with the user interface, pathfinding, and A.I.

In addition, many reviews criticized the game for promoting sexism, bigotry, and religious warfare, and the option to play on the side of the Antichrist in a Christian video game...

In October 2007, Left Behind Games sent letters to various bloggers demanding them to remove "misleading" reviews of Eternal Forces from their blogs.<29> The letters read in part:

"Left Behind Games Inc. is demanding that you immediately remove any and all information contained on your site about the above stated game that is false and/or misleading, including any such statements or commentary and the responses thereto. This includes posted comments made by others in the context of reading the incorrect or misleading statements. If you do not comply immediately, the company will be forced to pursue additional legal action which will include claims for damages, costs of suit and attorney’s fees. This may subject you and your organization to significant legal and financial damages."

[HarveyDarkey]

5. I knew about the books and the video games

but not the teevee series or the movies. I hopw they achieved the success they deserved. Sounds like they did.

[realisticphish]

6. haha; threatening lawsuits over reviews

someone doesn't know how media works!

[Synnical]

7. Drats!

I rented the first one; it was awesome! Awesomely funny!

Yeah, that's all of my life they are getting from me.

Thanks, though! :-) I love your dedication to research.

-Cindy

[Euromutt]

8. Thanks for watching that shite so we didn't have to

Red wine. Talk about your deus ex machina, huh?

Strikes me, though, that the entire (Kiss My) Left Behind series contains a few--dare I say it?--heresies to make the story work. For starters, I'm fairly certain that according to Millennialist ideas, you don't get to be saved after the Rapture. After all, once the Rapture's happened, you have conclusive proof of the existence of God, and proof precludes faith; it takes faith to believe in God before the Rapture.

Second, that deus ex machina of the communion wine rather implies that actually, the Catholics are the ones who have it right. To the best of my knowledge, transubstantiation is not part of Evangelical Protestant doctrine.

[LeftyMom]

9. Not to mention that a significant fraction of fundies drink communion grape juice,

wine being forbidden in Baptist theology. So either they could easily hand out the cure in little boxes with Grover on them if so inclined, which means that the LB Christians are genocidal assholes for failing to save their fellow man, or all those fundies are wrong.



eight doses of fundamentalist plague panacea