Mom’s Night Out movie director, Jon Erwin, claims that the theme of the movie, “Christian stay at home moms” led to negative reviews. I rarely read reviews, but what few I did read, do indicate he is right. The themes seem to be critical of non-career monogamous Christian women.
However, if I had a choice to go to see a movie and it was between one such as Mom’s Night out and Neighbors, the current number one, I would obviously and did choose the former. The latter movie had one word in a review that led me to choose not to see it: “raunchy”. That is all I had to see, I do not want to see a raunchy movie. It is not what I am about. Indeed, for this article, I did some research and found the word raunchy in quite a few reviews for Neighbors.
It is true Hollywood does not understand the Christian audience because Hollywood does not understand Christianity and certainly does not understand Catholicism. There is often an agenda that has to appear that gives the Hollywood viewpoint of the way things should be in producer’s minds.
What the industry does not understand is that there are buzzwords that Christians know that immediately tell us this is not the movie we want to see. We want to be entertained in a comfortable environment not told what should be fun in our lives. The early movies that gave birth to what is now bid as raunchy were movies that shocked audiences because audiences were Christian, you could call them a guilty pleasure in a sense. However, as the audiences became less Christian, the movies lost their ability to shock well so the key word raunchy means a movie that late teen early twenties boys/men will enjoy, but not anyone else. When I read the root word raunch in a review, I think of one series of movies which I also never saw and never plan to see.
If you want to bring a family or a parish, you obviously will stay away from the movie that is raunchy and stay with the movie that is more family oriented.
It is for the industry to decide which direction they want to go. However, for those of us looking for good entertainment? We usually avoid the word raunchy as something that indicates we will be entertained, no matter how many times the word funny appears around that word because for us, something that is raunchy really is not the kind of comedy that makes us comfortable enough feel entertained.
I enjoyed Mom’s Night Out and know that recommending it to parishioners, there is nothing I have to worry about that would reflect negatively on me for recommending it. I doubt I will see or recommend Neighbors. I read enough reviews of that movie to make my choice, more than I usually do.
Ironically, writing for a Brazilian organization, I know that there is a wider choice of movies in Brazil because they not only receive dubbed releases from Hollywood, but unlike us in the US receive movies from other countries giving the South American venues a wider choice than even we have in the home country of the movie industry. So raunchy gets to be even less of a choice than it is here. I have learned of great movies through the Brazilians and other Latino countries that I also would recommend to parishes. Salvation Poem (Argentina) is also one that most in the US do not know. it is also Christian and a powerful testament to the prayer of the mother.
Fr. Robert J Carr