Wednesday, March 16, 2005

film quiz – Jesus as movie star

Every few weeks in the gospel and film class I am teaching this semester, I have a film quiz. The class are in teams: Fox, Bollywood and Sundance. I fire 5 questions at them, and the overall winner at the end of the semester will receive a BCNZ Academy. Lots of fun, good crowd breaker, and often the information makes good teaching points.

Here’s the questions from last week.

Question 1: The longest film ever made, at 6 hours, is Jesus of Nazareth? True or False

Question 2: Which religious film – The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story ever told, Ben-Hur – was a Top 10 film for the entire decade of the 1920s?

Question 3: Ben Hur was a box office smash in 1959. Made for a then unprecedented $15M, it earned more than $70M at the US box office. Did it win 7 or 9 or 11 Oscars?

Question 4: Put the top 3 movies of 2004 in the correct order:
Shrek 2, Spider-man 2, The Passion of the Christ.

Question 5: Less than 0.1% of people who watched The Passion of the Christ came to faith? True or false.

Update: For the curious, the answers are …


Answer 1: False Ā– The longest film ever made is The cure of Insomnia, 1987, is 87 hours.

Answer 2: This is a tricky question, as both Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur feature in the top-10. Former at no. 3, latter at no. 4. This shows the power of religious film in the early days of Hollywood.

Answer 3: Ben Hur (the remake of 1920sĀ’ movie mentioned above) won 11 Academy Awards.

Answer 4: According to here, the order is Shrek 2, Spider-man 2, The Passion of the Christ.

Answer 5: Less than 0.1% of people who watched The Passion of the Christ came to faith? True, according to research from Barna group here. Note that many more were affected in terms of discipleship. Barna concludes by noting the power of movies for spiritual transformation, but not as one-shot magic bullets.

Posted by steve at 09:08 PM

4 Comments

  1. I hope that you’re going to give us uneducated fools the answers, or are you mean enough to keep us hanging?? šŸ˜€

    Comment by Andrew — March 16, 2005 @ 10:46 pm

  2. Yeah
    Do tell!

    Comment by lynne — March 17, 2005 @ 10:28 am

  3. Not sure that Question 5 is entirely fair… because I’m sure you would expound that it (movie), like much else in life, could be part of someone’s faith journey.

    The whole journey / decision dicotomy comes into play.

    But lets not get distracted onto that…

    Comment by lynne — March 17, 2005 @ 10:31 am

  4. You’re up to question 5 already?? I’m still stuck on the first one.

    Steve, can I buy a vowel please?

    Comment by Andrew — March 17, 2005 @ 5:38 pm

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