Moving stories from the Bible brought to life as you’ve never seen before written by four-time Emmy award-winning TV personality, actress, and best-selling author Kathie Lee Gifford, and hit songwriters Brett James, Louis York, David Pomeranz, and Sal Oliveri. This set of oratorios merges the ancient with the modern - bringing to life biblical stories with contemporary orchestral arrangements, powerful narration, and touching visuals. Over the course of 4 movements spanning 75 minutes, these pieces revolve around Kathie Lee as our narrator, a symphony orchestra, and a cast of musical stars singing tailor-made roles such as Nicole C. Mullen, Danny Gokey, Jimmie Allen, Larry Gatlin, and BeBe Winans.
GREAT CONCEPT; STILL POSSIBLE TO SALVAGE IT
I wanted this film to succeed. Yet, there are a few things working against its beauty and brilliance.
First, Evangelical song leaders will likely find several gems in the soundtrack. I anticipate the seeding of songs from this work, directly into the modern Christian experience. Messianics and especially Sacred Namers, will likely capture these songs, and fine-tune the Divine Names. And that will be a further tip of the hat to the composers.
The overtly anachronistic staging of this film took a while for me to accept. Modern vocalists, with modern beard cuts, modern clothes (albeit dressed-down) and sometimes even with eye-glasses, lip-sync to some compelling choral and solo pieces, while re-telling/re-enacting select stories from The Bible. The dramatizations are typically staged in a natural setting, such as a mountaintop, edge-of-the-desert, edge-of-the-sea, on the sea, or even in a village.
Two major problems with the whole affair.
1) The singing is all-too-often drowned out by the instrumental accompaniment. I noticed the name of "Kent Hooper(Hopper?)" as the mixing engineer for some of the scenes. He made a poor choice in the orchestral accompaniment level.
I have a hard enough time enduring modern Worship Song Leaders these days. Frankly, I don't trust them, often using the congregational setting as a canvas, onto which they splash their noisy instrumental adventures. In this case, the orchestra is lovely, but it drowns out the singing and the narration. I strained to understand the lyrics and Kathy Lee Gifford's narration with all that pounding music. It is written, "sing praises with understanding." PS 47.7. THE MIXING ENGINEER SHOULD REMASTER THIS BEFORE DVDS ARE RELEASED.
2) The other nagging problem is the multiple lip-synced musical passages, in which the lips are not synced at all. It's ugly. THE MIXING ENGINEER SHOULD REMASTER THIS BEFORE DVDS ARE RELEASED.
Out of four(4) single-theme segments, the easiest to relate to was part 4, "The God Who Crosses to the Other Side." The dramatizations of Bible characters, who experienced Divine Deliverance, were compelling and moving. Another segment, featured a lovely vocalist sequentially playing three roles. It was hard to wrap my head around this performer expressing the experiences of Hagar, Ruth and Mary, with little discernible break between the episodes. This distinguished talent could have been better managed.
After the credits, the film closes with an extended series of drone shots, captured in a rocky mountain/valley setting, somewhere on this planet. Its tie-in to the movie is not clear, especially given the many minutes it was allocated. Perhaps they could have mingled labeled shots of filming locations, or even the places where these stories took place. I got the impression they were slapping-in breath-taking filler shots, to let the instrumental soundtrack play out. There is no other content at this point. After the credits, you can confidently turn off your disc player, or exit the theater.
Looking ahead, I want to get the sheet music. To rescue this thing before Disc Release, the mixing engineer must get those lips synced up to the soundtrack, and must also lower the instrumentation by about 12dB.