Scary movies

I Am Legend is a very, very good movie. Will Smith is alone in most of the movie and he is able to carry it - there are no boring parts in this movie. The premise is that there's an event that wipes out most of the population and leaves the rest violent at night. Except for Will Smith, of course, who is immune. Much of the movie follows him in his daily activities.

I found the movie very, very scary; I was shaking with fear for most of it, which worried Ian because he could see that I was scared and he didn't know what to do. I don't actually remember being that scared at any movie ever before. Intellectually, I know that part of my fear was built up by the sound and music, but there was an instinctive part that was scared. As Ian said, the movie does a good job of balancing suspense-scary with "boo"-scary.

This movie is rated 14A but I wouldn't recommend it for children. There isn't really any gore or violence - it's pretty much all implied - but it could be quite scary. I'd recommend this movie to adults - although I was scared, it is really an excellent movie. Will Smith is alone for most of the movie and he really pulls this off; I hope he's nominated for something during the award season.

Later on, we watched a recording of Jesus Camp, a documentary that showed on tv. That movie was disturbing and scary for other reasons. It's about kids 5-13 years old who are evangelical Christians and go to this evangelical camp. I don't much care about which religion people belong to, but I don't think that kids that age should necessarily be indoctrinated in the way they were.

I do think that they were indoctrinated into this religion because no other points of view were expressed to them. During the camp, they were asked to come forward and share their sins publicly, with all of them crying. That's not really normal, is it? Later on, those kids were going up to people on the street and doing things like telling them that Jesus loves then and they could go to heaven. Personally, I don't think it's right to ask or permit children to do this.

One of the people who spoke to the children at this camp was an anti-abortion activist who taught them some slogans, put tape on their mouths, and led them to an anti-abortion stance. And led them to do a demonstration in Washington, DC. Again, I don't think that children - who barely know anything about sex and abortion anyways (of course they're told that it's murder, but without opposing viewpoints) - should be taught this sort of thing, let alone be allowed to protest.

The documentary did a really good job of showing just how far these extreme right-wing evangelical parents and churches are willing to go to use their children. In a way it was sad to see, because those kids have no idea what other viewpoints are out there. At the same time, it was frustrating because those parents and those people running the camps are using the children. It just seems so wrong - aren't children supposed to be innocent? What will happen to these children when they get out of the home-schooling environment and get into the "real world"?

This documentary is interesting and I'd recommend it. As Ian says, the scariest thing about it is that some of the people in the film will think that they're being portrayed in a positive light. They're not - at the end, what these people do to those children is appalling.