The following post-viewing commentary on War Room was submitted by a Looking Closer reader and a Christian friend whose passion for excellence in the arts is an inspiration to many. And he has an incisive sense of humor.
You’ve been warned.
I’m honoring this friend’s request to remain anonymous. (No, it’s not me writing under a pseudonym.)
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When you are walking to your car and confronted by a man with a knife who asks for your money, the correct thing to do is to say, “Put down that knife, in Jesus’s name!” Because the man will look at you as if these are not the droids he is looking for, and then go running, so perhaps that’s what Obi-Wan should have said instead of “Use the Force.” Or maybe that could be a pitch for Star Wars: Episode Ten: Jesus Awakens – A Kendrick Brothers Production.
Elderly African-American pronounce the word “war” as if it is spelled “whoaaah,” and don’t tack an “r” on at the end, although since, in this movie, the word “whoaaa” is always followed by the word “room,” there’s no need for such a pesky, unnecessary consonant.
When you’re in your prayer closet (the one that you’ve taken everything out of so that you won’t have any distractions), make sure to still have your cell phone in there, because it’s not distracting at all. But that way, when you are finishing up your prayer time you can get a text from “Missy,” who just saw your out-of-town husband in a restaurant with some woman, and even though your husband is a sales rep and probably has dinner with women all the time, Missy can spot a slut when she sees one, and is right to interrupt your time with the Lord to spread some juicy gossip.
If you pray for your husband at the exact moment he is at a restaurant considering having an affair, he will get stomach pains, and then go throw up.
If you pray that your husband’s deceit will be exposed, that will happen, too, and he’ll lose his job.
If you pray for Satan to leave your living room, your husband will eventually give you a hot fudge sundae and a foot rub.
You should always have a room-temperature cup of coffee standing by. This is so that, when you are asking your real estate agent about her relationship with God, and it’s clear that she’s kind of a lukewarm Christian, you can offer to get her coffee, and come back with a room-temperature cup of the stuff for her (but a hot one for yourself), and when she drinks hers and grimaces, you can then go into a mini-sermon about how it’s better to be hot or cold, and she will smile and nod at you, as if bringing her that cup of coffee was the perfect way to make your point, except I would have been asking, where’d you get that lukewarm cup of coffee from, when the pot that you poured the coffee from was hot? Only the old woman probably would pronounce it “poahhhhr.”
If your feet stink, your daughter will tell you. Also, your closet will smell horrible, so it might not be the best place to turn into a prayer room, the aroma of Christ notwithstanding. Oh, and then when your husband goes to rub your feet, he’ll put on a surgical mask, thinking he’s being cute, but I would have been asking – all that prayer just saved our marriage; can’t the Creator of the universe do anything about those stanky feet?
If your feet stink, so does your breath. The UPS guy who delivers your prayer journals can testify to that, because you fell asleep in your prayer closet, and when you went to answer the door, you breathed all over him, which is the correct thing to do to a UPS guy who comes to your door.
More than 35 churches are listed in the credits, which means that there were thirty-five times more churches involved with this movie than there were script consultants. Wait, that’s not how math works – thirty-five times zero is zero, so there were zero times as many script consultants on this movie than there were churches involved. Shoot, I think my math is still off. There were more than 35 churches listed in the credits, and zero script consultants; that’s what I learned watching this movie. Unless one of those churches also had a script consultant who went there, which can’t be true, since anyone who knows anything about writing wouldn’t be welcome in any of those churches.
If you’re a paramedic and a Christian, but this movie doesn’t give you an opportunity to demonstrate either of those traits, the way to let the audience know is to say, “I’m a paramedic. But I’m also a Christian.”
Old African-American women numerically order their favorite rooms in the house. They will tell you, “This is my third favorite room in the house,” about the dining room, and “This is my second favorite room in the house,” about the sitting room, but it won’t be until you are leaving that you ask, “What’s your favorite room in the house?” even though you most certainly already opened the door to the prayer closet that is her favorite room in the house because – being a realtor – you would have wanted to see behind every door, except you didn’t look in that one closet, which is the old lady’s favorite room, and also you really can’t count it as a room when you list the house, since it’s just a closet, unless now we’re counting closets as room, which means that one of the things that I learned from this movie is that I live in an eight bedroom house.
About twenty people are credited as “Jump Ropers” in the credits, because there’s a sequence at an event where that’s what people do. It’s quite a popular sport, apparently, as there were literally dozens of people cheering the jump ropers on. Except isn’t the proper term for a person who jumps rope “Rope Jumper”? Nope, according to this movie, anyone who jumps rope is a jump roper.
When your former boss (the one who fired you because you were fudging your sales numbers, and who you confessed to stealing from, too) forgives you and decides not to prosecute you for your crimes, that is an example of God’s grace, because that’s what a character says in this movie. But isn’t that actually an example of your former boss’s grace? Or maybe black people think that white people are agents of God, so I guess that’s what I learned from this movie.
If a closet has been used as a prayer room by an old lady, a retired pastor can walk into that closet, and then step out, and then step in, and then out again, and declare, “Someone has been praying in here,” as if it was a hotel room where someone had been smoking, and you can still smell the odor, except this was a different closet than the one used by that woman with the stinky shoes, so I don’t know what kind of odor that old lady left behind.
More than a dozen people with the last name “Kendrick” are listed in this movie as part of the “Clean Team,” and I have no idea what a “Clean Team” is, but at least now I know the answer to the question, “Who do you have to sleep with to become a member of the Clean Team?”
“Thousands of people” prayed for this movie. I learned this because it says so at the end of the movie, along with the declaration, “God answered!” It should be pointed out that God also answered Jesus’s prayer of “Take this cup away from me.” The answer was “no.” But this move got made, so apparently God responds much more favorably to jump ropers and members of the clean team than he does his own son.
Bill Clinton’s operatives will do whatever it takes to get him elected president. Oh, wait, that’s something I learned from The War Room, a movie with a title so close to this one that a lot of Christians will probably end up watching it thinking that it’s this movie, and wonder when Bill Clinton is going to go into his closet to do whatever it is he does in there, which probably isn’t to pray, but I bet that retired pastor can figure it out, just by looking. Ew.
Orson Welles said that there were two things he never believed when he saw them in a film: prayer, and sex. There’s no sex in this film, so Welles would have been happy about that, but about that other thing, this movie seems to be an exercise in proving Orson Welles exactly right.
(NOTE TO THE FILMMAKERS: Orson Welles was an actor, writer, and director, who made a film called “Citizen Kane,” which illuminates Mark 8:36 (“What good is it for a man to gain the world but forfeit his soul?”) The film is available for purchase or rent at sites other than christiancinema.com.)
We need to raise up an army of prayer warriors, is what the final sermon – excuse me, speech – excuse me, it’s a prayer; it’s the final on-screen prayer by the old woman who has a new prayer closet in her son’s house, who’s probably wondering where his mother wandered off to. But at the end of the movie she prays that God will raise up an army of warriors, who (according to the visuals on-screen as she prays) should pray in the schools, and around tables, and with their babies, and for the city of Atlanta, and at colleges, and police stations, and Washington, DC, and in every corner and culture in America. Except for Hollywood. There’s no suggestion that anyone should pray for Hollywood, because that place is full of heathens, so they can all go straight to hell.