SPLICE TODAY: Doomsday Was Yesterday

My latest for Splice Today is a look back at the 1979 Bible prophecy documentary The Late Great Planet Earth, based on Hal Lindsey's unlikely bestseller and hosted by a slumming Orson Welles. Nearly 40 years on, Lindsey's brand of Bible exegesis motivates the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, but his prophecies are all busts.

Culture Shock 01.08.15: Nicolas Cage gets 'Left Behind'

There was a point in his career when one could have bought Nicolas Cage as a man going through a crisis of faith during a time of global turmoil. But not this point in his career, and not in this movie.

In and out of theaters in the twinkling of an eye, Cage's end times snoozer "Left Behind" has landed on DVD at a rental kiosk near your, where it sits side-by-side with the Syfy original movies it resembles.

Based on the first volume of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' best-selling "Left Behind" series, the movie follows those "left behind" after the rapture of the Christian faithful to heaven, in accordance with premillennialist interpretations of the Bible. As such, it's one of many recent low-budget movies aimed primarily at an evangelical Christian audience. But Cage's participation sets this one apart. Despite a recent string of bad movies, Cage still qualifies as A-list talent, which makes his name above the "Left Behind" title a novelty, to say the least.

It's certainly a step up in star power from the first time someone adapted "Left Behind" for the screen, the 2000 version starring former child actor and would-be Christmas savior Kirk Cameron.

Yet novelty aside, Cage brings nothing to the screen that can salvage this "Left Behind." As Christian outreach, it's tepid at best, falling back on canned platitudes about why God allows bad things to happen to good people. And as an apocalyptic thriller, it's light on both apocalypse and thrills.

Even viewers looking for unintentional camp value will be sorely disappointed. For once, Cage's performance is restrained. His histrionics, which enliven such dire fare as "Ghost Rider" and "The Wicker Man," are nowhere to be found. Cage says he made "Left Behind" in part at the behest of his brother, pastor and radio disc jockey Marc Coppola. But in playing the role of commercial pilot Rayford Steele straight, Cage may have succeeded in pleasing only his brother.

One problem with "Left Behind" is screenwriters/producers Paul Lalonde and John Patus think too small.

Say what you will about LaHaye and Jenkins' book, one thing it has is an epic scope. Owing both to budget and time constraints, the movie limits its action mostly to Steele's airplane, which is in midair halfway across the Atlantic when millions of people — including the copilot and several passengers — disappear from the face of the Earth. When we're not with Rayford and his troubled jetliner, the action shifts to his daughter (Cassi Thomson) back on the ground, where she dodges falling planes and driverless cars. For most of the film, she's the "Left Behind" version of Kim Bauer.

As Rayford's devout wife Irene, Lea Thompson ("Back to the Future") vanishes after just a couple of scenes, making her one of the lucky ones. Stuck with Cage is Chad Michael Murray ("One Tree Hill") as unfortunately-named cable news reporter Buck Williams.

Missing from the film is everything that distinguishes premillennialist sci-fi, such as the previous "Left Behind" and "The Omega Code," from run-of-the-mill disaster movies. There's no hint here of LaHaye and Jenkins' antichrist figure, Nicolae Carpathia.

Also missing is any sense of internal logic. After the rapture, Rayford is unable to make radio contact with the outside world, as if everyone with a radio were among the spirited away.

What remains is a bargain-basement "Airport" knockoff, shellacked with a coat of premillennialist theology so thin no one even uses the term "rapture." The target audience must have sensed the watered-down message and stayed away from the theatrical run in droves. "Left Behind" grossed just $19.7 million worldwide, while another preaching-to-the-choir movie from the same distributor, "God's Not Dead," did $60 million in domestic business alone.

For everyone else, "Left Behind" is weak tea even when compared to other end times movies, never mind when compared to secular disaster flicks. Its characters exist in a world of PG-13 explosions and G-rated language. Worst of all, "Left Behind" is the one thing you'd least expect of a Nicolas Cage movie about the end of days: It's just plain boring.

Culture Shock 10.23.14: 'The Great Pumpkin' is a test of faith

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" may be the first and most celebrated "Peanuts" TV special, but "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" is the best by almost any standard.

The animation is smoother, the writing and acting are more assured, and the entire production seems more fully formed, which it is, given that CBS wasn't entirely sold on "A Charlie Brown Christmas" until after it aired and the ratings came in. In particular, CBS wasn't sold on using children as voice actors or the jazz score by West Coast pianist Vince Guaraldi and his trio. But the special's ratings triumph led the network to go all in on two "Peanuts" specials the following year: the seldom-aired "Charlie Brown's All-Stars" and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown."

"The Great Pumpkin" has more than snazzier production values going for it. It better captures the melancholy spirit of the comic strip. Of all the "Charlie Brown" specials in the world, it's the Charlie Browniest.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas," which first aired in 1965, is "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz at his most hopeful. Linus gives a soliloquy on the true meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown gives a ragged little Christmas tree a chance, and at the end even Lucy gives Charlie Brown a break, admitting he did pick a good tree after all. Everyone sings carols, and the special fades out with a happy ending — a merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night. God bless us, every one.

Premiering Oct. 26, 1966, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" is Schulz at his most cynical. The Christmas special reaffirms his faith, but the Halloween special tears it back down. It isn't just happenstance that Linus, for once, ends up with his hopes dashed.

Charlie Brown is the receptacle of all of Schulz's insecurities, but Linus is his philosophical mouthpiece. "It's the Great Pumpkin" shows Schulz is keenly aware Linus can, at times, be more than a little overbearing.

Linus, who proselytized for Christmas a year earlier, is a prophet for the Great Pumpkin, who according to official doctrine, rises each year from the most sincere pumpkin patch and flies through the air with toys for all the good little children. Linus has little regard for the Great Pumpkin's more high-profile rival, "that fellow with the red suit and white beard who goes, 'Ho, ho, ho!' " He leaves Charlie Brown to sigh about how they are separated by "denominational differences."

Halloween becomes a test of faith for both Linus and Charlie Brown.

Linus, naturally, never sees the Great Pumpkin. But rather than question the object of his faith, he blames a momentary lapse. Even a little slip, he says, can cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.

The Great Pumpkin is a jealous squash, and he leaves Linus literally out in the cold.

Charlie Brown fares even worse. He first puts his faith in Lucy (and a signed document) when he goes to kick the football she so temptingly holds for him. And once again, Charlie Brown is done in, this time not just by his faith in humanity, but by a legal technicality: the document wasn't notarized.

Yet the worst is to come. Charlie Brown goes trick-or-treating Halloween night and ends up with nothing but a bag of rocks. It's probably the funniest joke in all the "Peanuts" specials, yet it's also the most mean-spirited. We thought it was just his fellow kids who gave Charlie Brown a hard time, but no. Apparently the whole town hates him.

Audiences, however, still love the blockhead, and they love to see him miserable. ABC's Oct. 15 broadcast of "It's the Great Pumpkin" scored 6.3 million viewers and a 2.1 rating among adults 18-49, according to Entertainment Weekly, topping most of the other network shows that aired that night.

In all the gloom and doom of "The Great Pumpkin," one ray of hope cuts the darkness. Schulz eases up just long enough for Lucy to go outside in the early morning and bring her shivering brother to bed.

Sisterly love doesn't conquer all, but if even Lucy has a heart, maybe there is hope for the rest of us.

Subsequent "Peanuts" specials don't go as dark, and by 1973's "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving," Schulz is doing happy endings again. Staring into the abyss once a year is enough.

Culture Shock 08.21.14: Aronofsky's 'Noah' sails Bible's subtext

If he'd stuck to the text, Darren Aronofsky might have gotten a 30-minute short subject out of Noah's ark. So, like other filmmakers, from Cecil B. DeMille to Mel Gibson, he embellished.

If nothing else, it's a daring experiment, and after months to mull it over, I'm still undecided as to whether Aronofsky's "Noah" — now on Blu-ray and DVD — is a success or merely an ambitious failure.

Perhaps the fact I'm still thinking about it answers the question.

Aronofsky takes the story of Noah and uses it to hammer away at a subtext that runs throughout the book of Genesis: Cities are bad news.

From the start, cities in the Bible are a source of evil and violence. The first city, we're told, was built by the first murderer, Cain. Cain also is a "tiller of the earth," and we know from archeology that the agricultural revolution of the Late Stone Age made possible the rise of cities, displacing nomadic shepherds such as Cain's victim, Abel.

A few generations later, the lineage of Cain produces his namesake, Tubal-Cain. The first man credited with forging tools of bronze, Tubal-Cain makes possible the first great armies, based in fortified city-states and armed with bronze weapons. With the Bronze Age comes the first arms race.

Later still, Abraham would leave the city-state Ur and become a wilderness nomad, returning to the old ways, yet always running into trouble whenever he comes upon a city, whether in Egypt or the infamous Sodom and Gomorrah.

Adam and Eve's fall may have brought sin into the world, but it's Cain's sin, the first murder, that drives "Noah." We meet the teenage Noah just before he witnesses the murder of his father at the hands of the aforementioned Tubal-Cain. This is one of Aronofsky's embellishments — using figures who appear in the Bible solely for the purpose of genealogy — but it allows him to kick off the story with what amounts to a reenactment of Cain killing Abel. Noah is descended from Cain's other brother, Seth, so the tale retains the brother-against-brother conflict.

Noah (Russell Crowe) is portrayed as a shepherd, like Abel before him. He, his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and their three sons, including rebellious middle son Ham (Logan Lerman), live among the windswept hills, far from the temptations of the city, where a battle-scarred Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) rules and all life is cheap.

By "all life" I mean all animal life — people and critters. It's here that Aronofsky is most likely to rub his audience the wrong way. Noah is a devout vegetarian, which kind of makes sense if you think about who you want to captain a boat full of the last breeding pairs on Earth. Tubal-Cain and the other children of Cain, however, obsess over eating meat, which they say keeps them strong and ready for battle. Again, this is Aronofsky compressing all of Genesis into Noah's story: The world before the Fall, the world Noah still represents, was a world without death. But Aronofsky isn't subtle about it.

As for the sin that leads the Creator — the only name "Noah" uses for God — to flood the world and start over, here Aronofsky and the Bible agree, as the only sin Genesis specifically mentions to explain the flood is violence.

"Noah" starts strong, aided by Aronofsky's often quirky choices. Anthony Hopkins hams it up as Methuselah, played as an ancient wizard, and Noah gets help building the ark from rock-encrusted angels who vaguely resemble the golems of medieval Jewish folklore. "Noah" is the Bible as Hollywood fantasy film. But once the rain starts, the movie stops, and we spend what feels like 40 days and nights watching Noah's mental collapse. Savior is too big a job for a mere human.

Noah and Tubal-Cain are both zealots, and Tubal-Cain can twist scripture as well as anyone. As Shakespeare said, "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

Aronofsky is neither devil nor angel. He's just a man who made a movie that will make you think. That is its own justification — and just maybe its own reward.

Culture Shock 05.19.11: It's the end of the world as we know it (again)

Maybe you haven't heard, but Saturday is the end of the world.

Not the end of the world exactly, but it is the supposed date of the Rapture, after which all of us left behind on Earth will be in for a really nasty time, culminating in the real end of the world on Oct. 21.

That's the prediction of Harold Camping, the 89-year-old president of the Family Radio network. You may have seen one of his billboards proclaiming that the end of days is upon us.

It's hard to tell for sure, but Camping seems to have developed a following, even though he doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to forecasting Judgment Day.

Twenty years ago, Camping predicted the world would end in 1994. (Oops.) Camping, naturally, can explain in great detail why he got it wrong then and why he has it right this time. He's sure Saturday is the day.

"It is going to happen," he told National Public Radio. "There is no Plan B."

Technically speaking, this is Plan B. Plan A was in 1994. The real question is, is there a Plan C?

But I don't want to dwell on Camping. Lots of people have foretold the end of the world, using both religious and secular arguments. And they all have one thing in common: They've all been spectacularly wrong so far.

The new book "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better" by Dan Gardner is mostly about the futility of trying to predict the future in general.

But Gardner does spice it up by recalling some of the more notable doomsday predictions of the past century. Y2K, anyone?

There's Marian Keech, a psychic who predicted the end of the world would come Dec. 21, 1955. Then there's Paul R. Ehrlich, the famed biologist who claimed in his still-influential 1968 book "The Population Bomb" that the world would fall into starvation and chaos by the 1980s. Since he wrote, the world's population has nearly doubled, but the percentage of the world's undernourished has more than halved over the same period, according to the United Nations.

(Oops, again.)

Keech is all but forgotten, but Ehrlich is unrepentant and still regarded, by many, as a credible expert.

The 1970s were a particularly fruitful time for doomsday predictions, Gardner notes. Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" was the decade's top-selling book.

In the '70s, as now, people were worried about inflation, unemployment, the price of gasoline and tensions in the Middle East.

When the world seems chaotic, people crave knowledge about the future, even if that knowledge is all doom and gloom. It's a behavior that seems to be hard-wired into our brains.

Even if we get past this weekend unscathed, we still have 2012 to deal with.

Based on a misrepresentation of the Mayan calendar, some people claim that the world will end Dec. 21, 2012.

If Dec. 21 seems like a popular day for doomsday, that's probably because it's the winter solstice, which people have regarded for thousands of years as symbolic of transition and rebirth.

But actually the Mayan calendar doesn't "end" in 2012. It just cycles back to its beginning, which is what our calendar does every December.

That's how calendars work, and there's nothing special about it. The Earth orbits the sun, heedless to how we humans keep count.

The world will end someday. Maybe in 5 billion years when the sun runs out of fuel, expands and burns the planet to a cinder. Maybe we'll be flung out into deep space when our galaxy merges with the Andromeda galaxy in an estimated 3 to 5 billion years. Or maybe we'll go out the old fashioned way, done in by an asteroid, just like the dinosaurs.

But if I were you, I'd still plan on going to work Monday — unless you have a really good Plan B.

All is quiet on the Christmas front

“Peace on Earth, good will toward men.” That’s what we say at Christmastime, and this year we’re getting it — on one front, anyway.

We’re not hearing much about the so-called War on Christmas. That’s a pleasant change from last year, when the airwaves were filled with chatter about a sinister conspiracy that was supposedly trying to stamp out the holiday season.

Instead, when I Googled the phrase “war on Christmas” this week, most of the recent discussions were about how all of the war talk had settled down.

During the Dec. 12 installment of his Fox News Channel program, Bill O’Reilly, whose voice had been one of the loudest decrying the alleged secular assault on Christmas, declared victory. The War on Christmas was over, and his side had won.

But really, how much has changed? I still see signs that say “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” instead of O’Reilly’s preferred greeting, “Merry Christmas.” Isn’t that a sign that the war is still on?

I suppose it would be, if people hadn’t been saying things like “happy holidays” and “seasons greetings” for decades, long before some people with nothing better to do decided those were fighting words.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a real war on Christmas in the past year is a T-shirt with the slogan “I support the war on Christmas.” Of course, it was a joke. The people who made those T-shirts did so only to irritate blowhards like O’Reilly.

Being a contrarian sort of person, I thought of getting one of those shirts for myself. But I decided I didn’t want to risk getting punched in the face.

If there is anything I abhor, it’s violence against me.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, nothing has changed. People are celebrating Christmas this year just as they did last year.

Yes, there are the usual little spats over putting explicitly religious Christmas symbols on public property. The Catholic League, led by the country’s most easily offended man, Bill Donohue, released a list of about a dozen instances in which a town refused to place a Nativity scene on a city lawn or something equally trivial.

Not that Nativity scenes are themselves trivial. They aren’t, and you can see them in front of churches far and wide, which is why one more in front of a courthouse or city hall doesn’t matter. People don’t need the government’s blessing to celebrate Christmas.

But most people don’t get worked up about such legal battles, anyway. How do I know? Well, I’ve seen a lot of houses decorated for the season, and I can’t recall one that had its own Nativity scene. There were lots of plastic Santas and reindeer, though. And since the houses were in Alabama, you can’t tell me that a bunch of Christmas-hating secularists live in them.

If people really did get agitated about the fact that you can’t put up religious symbols on government property, they’d protest by putting up their own — just as some students hold private prayer rallies to protest the fact that you can’t have officially sanctioned prayers in public schools.

It’s not much of a war on Christmas when the vast majority of Americans go about celebrating Christmas as they always have. And guess what? That includes most secular humanists.

Richard Dawkins, the British biologist and atheist who created a stir last year with his book “The God Delusion,” admits to loving Christmas carols. That doesn’t seem like much of a declaration of war, does it?

So, the unpleasant, divisive War on Christmas is over, or as over as something that was never real in the first place can be. If nothing else, it reminds me of the title of a John Lennon song:

“Merry Christmas (War Is Over).”