This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Saturday Night Bleeds Into Sunday Morning
Plot Overview
Sunday
morning, Pastor John Keebley (Randall Franks) is preaching from his
well-thumbed English Bible:
(Rev. 3:15-16) “I know your works: you are neither [hot nor cold]. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”—ESV
The gist of his sermon is that purported
“Christians” whose goal is but to do the minimum to get
by put themselves in jeopardy of losing it all come Judgment
Day. The camera toggles back & forth between the message and
congregant Luke Rogers (Jeremy Jones) who is fast asleep in the pew
having had a rough night of carousing Saturday. He's dreaming of
his childhood when his dad told him he and his wife were
“splitting up.” He explained that meant Luke and his
mom would be living in their current house while dad would live in
his own special dad's house. That did not set well with the boy.
Our movie develops various housing during
its course. A bum named Billy lives in a hovel constructed of
plastic, cardboard, and scrap metal. We can almost feel the
chilly wind seeping in. His place is cold. Luke's friend Sam Herod
(Jason Burkey) is selling his tavern Club Inferno to a
developer who can make it “anything,” let's call
it condos. An “inferno” is bound to have healthy
central heating. The condos will be toasty. Luke and his
girlfriend Jessie Silver (Nicole Gale Anderson) live in
a unit of a motel converted into apartments. Their schedules are
mismatched so we see them each alternately sleeping on the couch
covered by a throw blanket. They cook their food on a hot plate.
The place is warmer than Billy's, for sure, but lacks the heated character
of Sam's. We might categorize these as did author John Sandford:
“Never been to Miami.”“It's concrete blocks from top to bottom, Palm Beach to Key West,” Lucas said. “Same on the West Coast.”
“Plus the mobile homes,” Bob said.
“Yeah. They're like the architectonic spice to illuminate the stucco,” Lucas said. (46)
The hot–cold–warm motif is the same one seen in the opening, but what has that got to do with the sermon? Beats me, but they're laying it on thick.
Let's look at the
residents: George Rockwell (Rusty Whitener) is a bigot and a bully;
he's downright cold to the gospel. Black Brother Thomas (Bill
Cobbs) does street evangelism and sundry good works. He's on fire
for the Lord and is rightly called a “Jesus freak.”
Luke stumbles in early in the morning after a night on the town.
He's a poor excuse for a Christian.
Occupations follow the same line. Jessie is a volunteer in a soup
kitchen ministry that doesn't pay. Luke had been working at a
factory that couldn't afford to pay much; they laid him off along
with others. Now he can make three times as much working as a
bartender in Sam's Club Inferno. He justifies it
saying, “Not all Christians live like the Amish. We're
allowed to have fun sometimes.” Part of the job
description, as Sam points out, is to please the customers. The
place also serves food. People have got to eat, right? But he
didn't have to make a man take a strong whiskey as his first drink,
having turned 21. And he might have tried harder to keep Sam from
drinking and driving. Yet he could use that income if he wants to
marry Jessie. He's properly conflicted.
Lastly, there's Jessie's marriage
prospect(s). An “old bum” Howard at the shelter where
Jessie serves gives her a mock proposal with zero expectations of
it being accepted. Out of the blue, an acquaintance Matthew (Brett
Pack) having gotten lonely in New York makes a serious offer. He
wants her to drop Luke (“He's got you living in a
dump”) and accept his rich offer. Luke could probably keep
her if he got serious about his Christianity.
Ideology
There's more. Luke and
Sam stay after hours playing poker with a couple barflies. By and
by the doorbell rings and Luke gets up to answer it figuring
it's pizza delivery. The blonde goes with him to stretch her legs
and takes his arm for support. It's Jessie at the door who thinks
the worst of it. Since it's innocent, it might be Jessie was
projecting from some past flirtation or whatever. She'd had
easy banter with Howard so she gets along with the guys well
enough. The clincher is the skimpy skirt she wore when Luke took
her to dinner. This explains why Matt having loved her from a
distance drove all the way from New York to make a play. He saw her
as available to a good enough offer; she was advertising.
Bible translators being mostly men diddle around with clothing epithets not necessarily understanding the repercussions; their goal is enough variegation to make their translation unique, to acquire a copyright necessary to sell their product. An example of the worst in attire is being moderately modest as updated by the NKJV. The modernized New King James Version (NKJV) opts for a simplified vocabulary, (1 Tim. 2:9) “that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation.” Schoolgirls seem to embody the expression, “If you got it, flaunt it.” Flaunting it in moderation is Jessie covering up any cleavage but displaying a lot of leg. This translation leaves us cold.
Brother Thomas quotes roughly from the King James Version (KJV) that being melodic was very popular with black folk in the South. (Matt. 5:44-45) “But I [tell] you, Love your enemies, … and pray for [those] which … persecute you. That [you] may be … children of your Father … in heaven.” He also quotes verbatim the familiar John 3:16. The unchurched he passes his Bible to receive plenty of help from it. It is a most excellent translation.
And of course there is the ESV the pastor preached
from in the plot above.
There is no need to correct its content, and the message from the
pulpit is valid enough. It just lacks the elegant Bible language
some of us are accustomed to. Those used to the refined tone of the
King James Version would find the cut down tone of modernized
versions off-putting. As George P.
Marsh put it in an 1859 postgraduate lecture on the English Bible:
the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general English tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean? (448–9)
When Luke is eating with his father,
his dad goes to a cabinet in the next room to get some spice for
his bland sandwich. He asks Luke, “You want some chili powder
for your food?” Some Christians prefer to have their Bibles
spiced with the KJV
language, others not so much.
Production Values
“” (2012) was directed by Thomas Makowski. It was written by Christopher James Miller, Kevan Otto and Sean Stearley. It stars Jeremy Jones, Bill Cobbs and John Schneider. Schneider delivers a good performance playing a wayward dad. Cobbs holds down his minority role well. Jones recites all his lines.
It's not rated but tailored for
Christians. The production values are abysmal, as is often the case
with faith-based movies, but it's brilliant for keeping the sermon
material at the forefront of our consciousness. It ends on a
constructive note of people maintaining the church grounds. The
Extras on my
DVD include a multi-page
tutorial in question & answer format on its biblical
messaging, complete with scripture references. That's beyond the
scope of my review. Runtime is 1 hour 38 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
This movie will likely only appeal to Christians who never go to the movies so don't know how to take them and are thus unaware of what they are missing. Cinema is a medium that takes the viewer outside himself and typically employs unfettered artistic license. The uninitiated will compare it unfavorably to sermons—an entertainment venue itself—and will be disappointed in anything different. To them, however, this “Lukewarm” would be the cat's meow.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: No action, no adventure. Suitability for children: Suitable for children with guidance. Special effects: Wake up and smell the 1990s technology. Video Occasion: Good for Christian Groups. Suspense: Not very suspenseful. Overall movie rating: Three generously given stars out of five.
Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted, scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Scripture quotation marked NKJV is from the New King James Version, Copyright © 1979 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Print.
Marsh, George P. “Formation
of our English sacred dialect.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to
read or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
Sandford, John. Ocean Prey. Copyright © 2021 by John Sandford. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org