Mormons at our BBQ

Guess what was at my public library in Indiana? Baptist at our Barbecue! Who would have thought that movie would be in a city so far east of the Great Salt Lake? This little Mormon flick is one of the many I think might be doing it right. It won five different Best Pictures awards in small festivals. It also one Best Film of the Decade at Hope & Dreams Film Festival. I tried to look this festival up, but it's webpage no longer exists. That was sad.

Baptist at our Barbecue was an interesting little film. It was a love story about Tartan a single 29 year-old Mormon. This alone doesn't sound like a very big deal, but if you understand Mormon Culture, you know that being 29 and single is like the having the plague. Tartan lives in Provo, where there are tons of single Mormons. He feels he just doesn't fit in there so he moves to Montana. To a city that is split in half. Half are Mormons and half are Baptist. Thus the religious rivalry begins. Through this all Tartan meets a beautiful single Mormon girl from Utah trying to escape her old life, Charity. Mind you she is the only female in this film that looks like a movie star. The rest look like country folk. Not like the hot farmer's daughter type though. The I've worked on the farm my entire life kind.

The film was okay for a Mormon film. There were a lot of inside Mormon jokes. There were also a lot of weird comedy moments, like when things would be stolen that shouldn't be able too. I enjoyed the movie, but I wouldn't rate it as great. It was nice to be outside of Utah, but you were still in a heavily Mormon community. Anytime you have a town that is half-Mormon, it's a large population. I feel like this film could have been more than it was. It had a good message of communities need to come together and live with their differences. I still want to see a Mormon movie that doesn't have a high Mormon population situation. I know all those Missionary movies out there, but they don't count. A missionary is a sub-culture all in itself. They don't interact with the general population like normal people. I would like to see a movie about Mormon set in the east. Where the character has LDS friends, but their best friends are not LDS. That's how I grew up. I had my Church friends and I had my school friends. Sure a couple of them were in both groups, but not my best friends in high school.

In closing I want to say this movie was good for a Mormon film, but only okay for a regular independent film. I still want to see more films based outside of the Mormon bubble. Plus I want a film I could show people who don't know a lot about the Mormon culture.