This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the last decade, the Cricket has watched a great many films made by Mormon filmmaker and dealing with Mormon themes.
And, though there were a few good movies in the Mormon Cinema boom, the vast majority of them were middling to awful.
Why? Microscopic budgets and amateur production values occasionally played a part - though that didn't explain it. (Lack of resources doesn't keep a great many great movies to emerge from the Sundance Film Festival every year.)
No, the main reason is that too many Mormon filmmakers are more concerned about being Mormons than being filmmakers - and promoting the faith takes precedence over telling a compelling story.
The same thing is happening, more broadly, in the realm of Christian filmmaking. Over at Salon.com, film critic Andrew O'Hehir - prompted by last weekend's release of "Soul Surfer," whose main characters are evangelical Christians - writes a thought-provoking commentary, titled "Why are Christian movies so awful?"
O'Hehir blames the divergence of evangelical Christians from mainstream culture:
"American cinema and the Hollywood system and the rest of our society were turned upside down in the '60s and '70s, and the rise of the Christian-oriented film industry, like so many other things in our cultural life, is an aftershock from that earthquake. It's only oversimplifying a little to say that pop culture went in one direction and the evangelical population went in another, and despite a long process of reconciliation, it's still not clear that they speak the same language."