Dennis Quaid and AnnaSophia Robb jumped at the chance to play parts in Soul Surfer, the true-story movie about Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a shark attack.

Dennis Quaid knows what it’s like to almost lose a child to a tragic accident. Two of them, in fact. In November 2007, his two-week-old twins, Thomas and Zoe, almost died in a Los Angeles hospital when they were accidentally given a massive overdose of a blood thinner.

The babies almost bled to death, but slowly stabilized as doctors and nurses administered an antidote. After 12 days, they were well enough to come home, and they’re happy, healthy toddlers today. Quaid, one of Hollywood’s most popular actors, and wife Kimberly later settled with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for $750,000.

Quaid has been rethinking those difficult days recently in his latest movie role, that of a man who almost lost his teenage daughter in a shark attack. The film is Soul Surfer, which just finished filming in Hawaii and should release in 2011. It’s the true story of Bethany Hamilton, who in 2003 lost her left arm to a shark attack at the age of 13. She almost bled to death that morning, but made a courageous and remarkable recovery and was surfing again three weeks later.

Today, Hamilton, 20, is one of the world’s top professional surfers, despite the balance challenges that come with having just one arm. An outspoken Christian, Hamilton credits God with her recovery, perseverance, and desire to tell her story around the world—a story that will now be told on the big screen, with Quaid playing her father, Helen Hunt her mother, and 16-year-old AnnaSophia Robb as Bethany. Country singer Carrie Underwood makes her film debut as Sarah Hill, Bethany’s youth pastor and mentor. The movie is being produced by Affirm Films, the faith-based arm of Sony Pictures, and Mandalay Vision.

CT recently visited the Soul Surfer set in Oahu to learn more about the movie.

Quaid says he jumped at the chance of playing Tom Hamilton after seeing Bethany on NBC’s Today in December, as part of the show’s “Buzziest Stories of the Decade” series.

“I had a dim memory of her story, but had mostly forgotten it,” says Quaid, who watched the Today segment with his twins at his side. “To see Bethany’s story, and what an inspiration she was, I wound up with tears streaming down my face. I just got choked up, it was so inspiring. And it just so happened that two days later, they called and asked if I wanted to play her father in her movie. It was a no-brainer. I said I’d love to do this.”

Quaid says his own nearly tragic ordeal with his twins gave him something extra to bring to this role. “They came very close to not being with us,” he says. “I believe it was the prayers of a lot of people around the world that saved [our twins]. I think that experience brings me to this experience, and what the Hamiltons went through as parents. Our little kids wound up making lemons into lemonade, and that’s what Bethany has done.

“Bethany’s story makes you stop and think about how precious our lives are. It makes you think about how we handle adversity; that really defines who we are, and Bethany has done a stand-up job of doing that. And she did it by walking with the Lord in her life.

“I don’t know how I would have reacted if I were in Bethany’s position—how she overcame the shark attack and went on with her life and inspired others. But the way she came through it is what makes this such an incredible story.”

‘An incredible human being’

Robb, who starred in Bridge to Terabithia, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Race to Witch Mountain, was similarly inspired by Bethany’s story. And because she shares the same Christian faith as her counterpart, she was especially stoked to play this role.

“I was definitely interested because this is a faith-based story,” Robb says. “Bethany is a lot more chill than I am; I’m a lot more [wired]. But we’re similar in a lot of ways. We’re both very determined, we both have strong families, and faith is a big part of our lives.”

Source: http://www.christianitytoday.com

Below is a complete list of the 82nd annual Academy Awards winners and nominees.

Supporting actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Animated feature film: Up
Original song: The Weary Kind from Crazy Heart, Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett
Original screenplay: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Animated short film: Logorama
Documentary (short subject):Music by Prudence
Live action short film:The New Tenants
Makeup: Star Trek
Adapted screenplay: Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Supporting actress: Mo’Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Art direction: Avatar
Costume design: The Young Victoria
Sound editing: The Hurt Locker
Sound mixing: The Hurt Locker
Cinematography: Avatar
Original score: Up, Michael Giacchino
Visual effects: Avatar
Documentary: The Cove
Film editing: The Hurt Locker
Foreign language: El Secreto de Sus Ojos (Argentina)
Actor: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Actress: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Best picture: The Hurt Locker

LOS ANGELES – Pastors have long competed with the NFL on Sundays, but this season a hipster megachurch is turning the tables with a 30-second ad that could muscle its way into that all holiest of sporting events: the Super Bowl.

Mosaic, a 3,000-member megachurch, is one of six finalists in the Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” challenge with a lighthearted spoof that plays off the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If the church’s ad, titled “Casket,” is among the top three vote-getters in an online playoff, it will air on Feb. 7 during the Super Bowl. If the commercial ranks in the top three most-popular ads among viewers, it could win its creators either $400,000, $600,000 or $1 million.

For Erwin McManus, Mosaic’s lead pastor, the ad competition represents a chance to make his faith relevant to one of the largest TV audiences in the nation when viewers least expect it — and are least likely to tune out.

Another more serious religious message planned during the game has caused a stir: A pro-life ad paid for by the conservative group Focus on the Family is expected to feature University of Florida football star Tim Tebow speaking about how his mother gave birth to him despite doctor’s recommendations that she should have an abortion.

But the LA church, a congregation full of hip twenty-somethings who mostly work in the film industry and make short films for a hobby, is taking a different tack. They were careful to stick to the quirky, slapstick-style humor that’s expected by Super Bowl fans.

“We’re not trying to use Doritos to propagate a message, but I think we want people to know that we have a sense of humor, that it’s OK to laugh,” McManus said. “So much of what comes out of the faith community seems so dour and somber and we want to say, ‘Hey, we’re real people. You can be a person of faith and really enjoy life and laugh.”

With its talent base in entertainment, the church is at the vanguard of a growing Christian movement focused on injecting faith-based themes into the plot lines of mainstream TV shows, Hollywood movies and video games that aren’t explicitly Christian, or advertised as such.

Movies like “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” several years ago marked early successes, but the recent blockbuster “The Blind Side” — which wasn’t perceived as an overtly Christian film — really made Hollywood take note, said Phil Cooke, a Christian producer, filmmaker and author.

The Doritos spot, while just 30 seconds, is part of that bigger push, Cooke said.

The tongue-in-cheek ad opens on a funeral scene and then cuts to a young man alive in a closed casket. His body is covered in Doritos and he is watching the Super Bowl on a tiny TV while chomping on chips as mourners sob outside. Two friends, who are in on the prank, snicker that by faking his death, their friend will get a week off work and an endless supply of his favorite snack.

But the man gets excited when his team makes a big play and jostles the casket, which tips over to reveal him inside with a pile of crushed chips.

After an awkward pause, his buddy jumps up and nervously exclaims to the shocked assemblage: “Aaaah! It’s a miracle!”

If it wins, Mosaic’s ad could do more for the church after Super Bowl Sunday than it does in the 30 seconds of air time. Fans remember and recount their favorite commercials long after the clock runs out and the buzz around Mosaic’s ad could amp up because of its genesis, said Mark Labberton, a professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.

Super Bowl ad prices have dipped slightly this year, with CBS selling them for between $2.5 million and $2.8 million per 30-second unit this year, down from an average of $3 million last year on NBC, according to TNS Media Intelligence. The prices are so high because the game is the most-viewed show on television each year, with viewers tuning in to watch the commercials as much as the game itself. Last year, nearly 100 million people tuned in, according to Nielsen.

Mosaic is “saying we’re actually going to enter the scene ourselves, we’re going to become a player ourselves and we’re going to contribute to the landscape of how people talk about the Super Bowl,” Labberton, the professor, said. “It could well become one of the most talked about commercials of the year.”

By Sunday afternoon, the ad had received almost 92,000 views. The finalists won’t know if they’ve won until they watch the Super Bowl, said Chris Kuechenmeister, spokesman for Frito-Lay.

“Nobody’s going to fall on their knees and accept Jesus as a result of this spot. But advertisers on Madison Avenue spend millions on a Super Bowl spot because they know it influences people,” said Cooke, the producer. “It might not get someone converted, but I think it will get someone to say, ‘Maybe there is something I ought to investigate.’”

A Seattle film festival looks for the connections between Christianity, narrative and human rights.

In his 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike depicts several characters who struggle with the tension between religious faith and a love for movies. American culture, Updike suggests, now seeks from film the things it used to find in religion: transcendence, moral instruction, comfort and a sense of order—not to mention the simple act of coming together in a large room to witness a light shining in the darkness.

If he’s even partially right about that, then Christians who want to engage culture can scarcely afford to ignore the movies. Indeed, during the decade since Updike’s book was published, the number of voices offering a “Christian perspective on film” has grown dramatically.

But culture extends beyond popular culture, and the world of movies extends beyond the multiplex. The frontiers of a Christian response to the movies can be found in places like Seattle, where an unusual documentary-film festival seeks to focus viewers’ attention on human rights and social-justice issues while addressing those issues with a Christian voice.

Founded in 2006, the Film, Faith, and Justice festival recently concluded its second annual event. Last year’s screenings took place in a somewhat cramped space above the cafeteria at Seattle Pacific University, a liberal-arts school associated with the Free Methodist denomination. At this year’s venue—a spacious, theatre-style lecture hall at the University of Washington—FF&J nearly doubled its attendance. Students and professors rubbed shoulders with pastors, professionals, activists, cinephiles and international aid workers—and gave their attention in equal measure to films, lectures and panel presentations.

And there wasn’t even a whiff of popcorn.

Engaging the issues

Film festivals are everywhere these days, but most of them don’t intersperse the films with talks by a theologian pondering the possible connections between religion and violence, or by a circus performer exploring the notion of radical Christian community. Likewise, academic conferences on human rights issues are a dime a dozen, but few of them also feature a full slate of films that bring those issues to life simply by pointing a camera at them—sometimes without even a word of lecturing or polemicizing.

Film, Faith, and Justice brings together these two very different types of events. Thanks to the hybridization, lecture topics can move between academic abstraction and vivid cinematic description, and themes in a film can provide topics for a lively panel discussion, to help viewers process what they’ve just seen.

“As we dialogue for a night, we’re pointing at something that goes a lot deeper than just getting up and leaving after the end credits,” says festival director Chris Keller. “I think we’ve stumbled on a pretty important way of engaging these issues.”

Keller, 30, is a psychotherapist and editor in chief of The Other Journal, an online theological quarterly. Most of the films he screens are culled from a larger group selected by the organization Human Rights Watch for itsannual festival. When the opportunity arose to acquire screening rights for the Human Rights Watch films in Seattle, Keller and his colleagues seized it. “We start with the films we like,” says Keller, “and then consider how they fit together thematically.”

But by themselves, Keller notes, most of the films lack an explicit faith-based perspective—so he invites Christian academics and speakers to provide one. “Christian faith has a lot to offer on these issues,” says Keller. “The Judeo-Christian heritage came up with the whole idea of human rights.”

A different kind of doc

Documentaries aren’t entirely foreign to the average moviegoer. A small but growing number find their way into mainstream cinemas each year. Stylistically, such films seem to fall into two categories: quiet, narrative fare about kids and animals (Born into Brothels, March of the Penguins, The Story of the Weeping Camel), and brash, assertive political and social works like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth—each a heady mix of data, opinion and footage, presented by a narrator who more or less tells the audience what to think.

But the works screened at Film, Faith, and Justice don’t quite fit either category. Although they deal with hard-hitting social issues, most of these films maintain strong narratives, show stylistic restraint and keep the filmmakers behind the camera, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. “I think all documentaries have an angle,” says Keller, “even if they’re striving for neutrality. But there’s more of an openness to the films that we choose, so that people who see them can come away with different impressions. They’re thought provoking, but they’re not trying to run you down with certain ideologies.”

The films he’s chosen put human faces on events and concepts that are too often discussed and understood only via abstractions and sound bites—and serve as proof that film can have an emotional impact without being emotionally manipulative. Rather than a stream of statistics, viewers come away from the festival with images like these:

• An 11-year-old Iraqi boy works in a Baghdad machine shop while harboring dreams of being a pilot.
• Farmers in Ethiopia’s Yergacheffe region gather to pray for better coffee prices.
• A Cambodian painter returns to the former schoolhouse where he was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge and confronts some of the men who guarded, tortured and killed prisoners there.

When viewers start to relate to film subjects—to see them as people just like us—then our experience of the film starts to move beyond entertainment, even beyond information, says Dr. Roy Barsness, professor of counseling psychology at Seattle’s Mars Hill Graduate School, who led one of the FF&J panel discussions.

“The more we are removed from stories of other people’s lives, the more we make up a story about their lives. When we do that, we distort their lives, and often create them as different or as ‘other,’” says Barsness. “The moment we begin to see each other as more common than different, it becomes much more difficult to marginalize the other.”

For Barsness, the festival’s emphasis on narrative films with strong human interest is a sign of its Christian underpinnings. “I’m thinking of Jesus as a storyteller, trying to make meaning through story and through his willingness to listen,” he says. “Remember the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman [John 8]. He didn’t come with condemnation, doctrine or dogma, he came with a narrative.”

Adds Keller: “The exercise of sitting down and watching a movie, and following people through that exercise—it does something for us. We probably aren’t going to think about it in any other context. It’s a holy exercise, a healing exercise. We don’t want to remember or consider traumatic events, but it’s good for us, and we’re unable to heal without it.”

Humbled and moved

John Updike may have been on to something about the spiritual dimension of movies, but it’s safe to say he envisioned nothing as challenging or as profoundly Christian as Film, Faith, and Justice. Just as Jesus called his disciples away from their occupations, a festival like this one calls filmgoers to move past entertainment, familiarity and comfort, to consider deeper issues.

“We want this weekend to have an impact on people,” says Keller. “Some people I know have decided to change their buying practices; others have decided to sponsor a refugee family with their church group. But we’re also interested in providing a space where those who attend Film, Faith and Justice will be challenged on a heart level, by experiencing life and suffering in other countries, other classes, other circumstances, and be humbled and moved out of the arrogance that many of us have as North Americans. We want Christians and people of faith to take international human rights issues more seriously, and those who are not people of faith to consider what the Christian tradition has to offer modern-day human rights crises such as torture, global poverty, human trafficking and immigration.”