![]() Instead of easing the viewer into this odd character and his odd views, Old Fashioned immediately reveals its counter-cultural theme in the covert dialogue that now ensues between Clay and his new tenant. And it is this scene, already very early in the story, that shoves the film off course. It turns out he doesn’t have a wife-he just has very fixed ideas about male/female relationships, courtship and dating. Amber asks him what’s the problem and Clay explains that he made a promise not to be alone with any woman who is not his wife. Instead he remains outside the closed screen door, beyond the dwelling’s threshold. When Amber rents the apartment above the Old Fashioned antique store, her new landlord, mopped-haired, frumpily-dressed Clay very strangely refuses to enter the apartment with her to show her around. But Amber, consistent with the free-spirited-type, is driving around the United States, going from town to town, staying only long enough in each locale to earn enough money to get back on the road again until running out of gas brings her to the next temporary destination. ![]() ![]() Amber seems completely nonplussed when her car runs out of gas and she ends up in this charming out-of-the-way village. The story is focused on a romance between Walsh who owns an antique store called “Old Fashioned,” located in a sleepy Midwestern college town, and Amber Hewson (Elizabeth Ann Roberts) a pretty, free-spirited divorced young woman, fleeing her physically abusive boyfriend. Old Fashioned is written and directed by Rik Swartzwelder who also plays the lead-role of the semi-reclusive Clay Walsh. However, those who make Christian-based movies need to do a better job in mastering the relationship between the film-making art and the advocacy of desperately needed Christian ideas and themes. There are many, including several Christian commentators who, rightly concerned about the culture war and the battle for truth in the public square, feel it is wrong to criticize a movie that’s on our side, for the sake of winning that war. ![]() Unfortunately, while Old Fashioned dares to advocate a fresh counter-cultural view on sex and marriage, the movie is weighed down by weaknesses that cause it to ultimately fail as a good piece of cinematic art. This movie may be called fresh and provocative for saying that it does. It may be praised for having the courage to call into question the absolutely commonly accepted morality of our time that sex has no inherent meaning-and certainly does not have an exclusively nuptial meaning. Old Fashioned is definitely an alternative to Fifty Shades of Grey. One might ask: where’s Mel Gibson when you need him? Too bad no cinematic faith-based masterpiece is out there to compete with the likes of “Fifty Shades.” Instead there’s a movie called Old Fashioned, a small independent film that timed its release to be the alternative to the sexually explicit, pornographically indulgent, and tagged as “smut for soccer moms” movie. Over Saint Valentine’s Day weekend, the bacchanal film set a box-office record for an R-rated movie opening in the month of February-and thus the record set ironically by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ eleven years ago has at last been eclipsed. While the Christian world and its religious allies cry in the wilderness that sex is sacred the rest of the world is rushing to see Fifty Shades of Grey. ![]()
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