Will, Jason and I went to see Bruce Almighty last night. I'm not a big Jim Carrey fan, but I enjoyed the movie. It'd be easy to write the movie off for its theological inconsistencies (or to some blasphemy), but there are some great truths in the movie that shine through. The themes that stood out to me were:

1. The picture of what God's would look like if he were neither Holy nor Omnipotent. As Jason puts it "What would Jesus do if he were self-centered?"
2. God's love for us, and pursuit of us without forcing us to choose to love him. One of the conditions of Bruce receiving God's power is that he can't mess with people's free-will. Bruce has to come to grips with this as he has all of the power, except the ability to make his girlfriend love him. God and Bruce have a cool discussion around this.
3. God wants to give us the desires of our heart. At one point in the movie, Bruce uses his power to give everyone what they want. God's reply was "Since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?" Bruce has to battle through his own self-centeredness.

Check out this interview with the director, Tom Shadyac. I really like where this guy's coming from:
"I think we Christians have to get off our judgmental high thrones. I understand why we're like that, but God is working in each one of us--independently, individually--and He allows people to go on their own imperfect journeys that He will make it perfect. I hope that the Christian community-- the very community that could embrace this movie--will give it a chance as a whole, and not lose the forest for the trees. Christians have a tendency to talk about religious movies as being ones that deal with religion implicitly and it's just not true. This one happens to have it God in it, so it seems like a religious movie, but so many movies can be spiritual movies, but we somehow don't see them that way because they're not about a priest or a nun or a minister. Take for example the movie Scent of a Woman. The movie Scent of a Woman is really the book of Ecclesiastes--but how many Christians stayed away from it because there was cursing and because he slept with a hooker? And it really was the book of Ecclesiastes--a man was saying "all is vanity" and had no hope until the love of a child, God incarnate through a boy, came in and said "I love you," and it changed that man's whole life. If we as Christians stay in our judgmental boxes, we will miss movies that."