Anybody seen the Left Behind movies?

[jenk]

They sound like a scream. A sample:

In low-budget movies there are just some things that you can't portray convincingly. The end of the world is one of them, and the spinning wheels of geopolitics is another. In Left Behind: World at War, the world is never depicted at war, but we do get a brief snowmobile battle.
[...]
The president slips out of the White House in the trunk of a hatchback, invades a chemical weapons lab (the nefarious Nicolae has been poisoning Bibles, causing Christians to become sick), takes out the bad guys by surfing down a flight of stairs on their faces, and then sneaks back in to the White House undetected. Once there, he orders the "SS" to launch an attack. I think he means the Secret Service, but I'm not sure whom the president is trying to scare, as we've already seen his Secret Service detail and there are only two guys on it. At the end of the movie, the Christians discover that communion wine can stop the plague, and the president finds God and almost immediately sacrifices himself in a missile strike on Nicolae. A fine effort, but Nicolae emerges from the rubble without even a smudge on his European menswear. Roll credits, start planning sequel.

Amazing ... the books sell like crazy, but the movies are both dismal and have dismal sales. Hm. Perhaps the sales are influenced by "the gift factor". What's the gift factor? It's from the preface CS Lewis wrote for the edition of The Screwtape Letters I have at home. He didn't think sales of the book reflected the actual number of people who read the book because it's the type of book that gets given at confirmations, graduations, Christmas, and the like. See also sales of Bibles compared to reading rates ;)