There aren’t many movies that advertise themselves as treatises on masculine love. Look hard, however, and you can find them. Try as it might, “Secondhand Lions” (2003) isn’t one of those wistful, sepia-toned, “written and directed by” pieces of sugar candy that help one pass a lazy Sunday afternoon. It isn’t simply two feral geezers and an abandoned kid trying to figure each other out in rural 1960s Somewhere. It helps that Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment are the principals, but underneath the tall-tale bluster, there’s a heart to this film, and it’s shared by those three.
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Wall Street values of the Reagan era are mocked in “American Psycho” (2000), a film that balances on a knife’s edge between satire and horror. While it may have succeeded in its moment, this film has no current purpose. The values of subsequent eras are even more twisted. Therefore, making fun of musical tastes (Huey Lewis, Phil Collins) or competitions over who has the fanciest business card or reservations to the trendiest Manhattan restaurant seem quaint in retrospect. However, this was one of Christian Bale’s first big roles and it’s quite fun watching him learn how to be a star.
If you only watch comic-book movies, sequels and sequels of comic book movies, I’d like to inform you that Jesus movies make money. Once megachurches successfully baptized themselves in the Hollywood pond, bigger and bigger players lined up to make uplifting movies with themes promoting faith, i.e., Christianity. NBA star Stephen Curry helped bankroll “Breakthrough” (2019), the based-on-a-true-story about a kid who drowns and then comes back to life, presumably through the power of prayer. It attracted actors like Mike Colter, Topher Grace, Dennis Haysbert, Josh Lucas and Chrissy Metz and grossed $50 million off a $14 million budget. Ka-ching.
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