yurshta Why Neale Walsch's rise from Bourgeoise, to Homeless, to Nouveux Riche is "touching", and I salute any person who for whatever reason escapes life on the streets. There is one reason Neale Walsch was able to escape the streets: he had not been homeless long enough to have become destroyed as a human being by life on the streets. Many spend practically their entire lives this way. In the movie, Neale W.'s resolution "I will not die in this park!" was the real reason he got off the streets and had nothing to do with his imaginary friend in the Sky. So what is the message of Conversations With God, books or this film? There is nothing new here, and in fact, virtually every tidbit from the CWG ideology is simply a rehash of New Age thought and platitudes and "Motivation Speak". Many higher level corporations use professional motivational speakers to fire up the employees with quasi New Age corporate mysticism, how the Universe is conspiring WITH you, instead of AGAINST you, how God wants everybody to be RICH, how ALL of your problems are basically yours for sitting on your butt and whining, instead of developing a "Can-Do" spirit. We all have heard this crap, and I found, although this is a little info outside of the film, that God's use of stupid word definitions based on treating words as acronyms to be highly unlikely. Here's an example of this New Age Motivation Speak from the book: FEAR means False Evidence Appearing Real. This is the kind of contrived bunkum typical of corporate motivational speakers and New Age gurus who tell people what they WANT to hear, but unfortunately an ideology about as far from reality as possible. We all want to believe that there's a nice sweet loving God up there somewhere in the Sky and when we die we'll live forever in Paradise, and reunite with our loved ones. It's even nicer to believe God is a sweetheart and not the sadistic maniac the Bible makes him out to be. It's nice to think we might live another life with our Soul-mates. All this is pleasant. All this is just swell. And unfortunately is not based on the tiniest fragment of hard evidence. It's all WISHFUL thinking. So who is Neale Walsch? IMO Neale is the World's most successful motivational speaker with all the film-flam, Newspeak, bogus acronyms of his competitors--my personal favorite is S.H.I.T or Super High Intensity Training---and essentially one and the same message. You create your destiny! Remind a beggar child in India--who was abandoned at birth and has spent his entire life living off of garbage and refuse, living in filth and squalor, an illiterate untouchable shunned by society, regarded as totally worthless--- that ALL of his problems are HIS fault for allowing "negativity" to control his life. If he only---like Dr Phil, another ersatz motivational speaker always says---overcame his fears, got rid of his view of a judgmental God, stopped blaming parents or society for his woes and reached down and pulled some Get-Go out of his derrière, his life would turn around! If he thought positive and stopped whining, why his life would go from Hell to Heaven (poof! like magic--which is all this crap is anyway), and next thing you know, he'd be signing his runaway bestseller at Barnes and Noble, and selling movie rights to his books for 25 million dollars. Some people just can't tell the difference between FANTASY and REALITY. Reality is sometimes good, and sometimes rather rotten. Did the 31 students killed by CHO seek their murder to fulfill some spiritual purpose, teach their parents a valuable lesson in Love? Walsch would say they did. The Universe "conspired" FOR their benefit and always will. If I were the father of one of the deceased students and Neale started spouting this absolute fantastic and contrary-to-fact pseudo motivational malarkey, he'd get a one-way ticket to the afterlife.

nacinla This Christian had to force himself to watch what was otherwise a poorly acted, turgid film so riddled with holes it was laughable--just to see what all the fuss was about. The answer: A quest for a sugar-coated spirituality in which we make God in our image. Every 45 seconds, it seemed, we were sledge-hammered with another psycho-babble-larded lecture about self-fulfillment. Consider, for instance, the theology of money presented in this film: It's phony and self- serving. Early in the film Walsch asks why the people who give the most to the world don't receive the most $$$$. Fair enough; who wouldn't agree? But it's a setup to paper over the bankruptcy of the much later scene in which his agent arm-twists another half-million out of his publisher. Question: If the writer had become so connected to God, why did he sit so quietly during the extortion scene? For that matter, why didn't he give his advice away for free, as, say, Jesus did? In fact, that was my biggest problem with the movie: I found nothing likable about the main character (or the others, for that matter, who came across as codependent losers). By the time he got around to distributing those fat cash-packed envelopes, he had lost me. This movie purports to convey that God is with you in your worst moments and will help you lift yourself up. That's a message worth telling over and over. But the real message that comes across is that there are big bucks to be made in spouting clichés about self-development and easy answers for life's most difficult questions (such as, Why did my son die in a motorcycle accident?) Having survived the movie, I think I'll pass on Walsch's books and watered-down spirituality, and stick to Jesus and the breaking of bread, not the making of ($$$), for my connection with God.

haridam0 For the millions of readers of Neale Donald Walsch's superb trilogy, "Conversations with God" and his sequel, "Tomorrow's God," this film might have special meaning. It chronicles in dramatic form, highlights from Author Walsch's rise from a struggling wannabe to a best-selling writer. I've no idea how much of this is fact and how much dramatic license that Scriptor Eric DelaBarre took in fashioning his screenplay. However, I'm sure that structurally he spent too much time with Neale's rags and not enough with the transition to riches.For over an hour our hero struggles bitterly, becoming an outcast homeless person. Then rather abruptly he's getting his writing inspiration and turning into a great success. This imbalance is probably because Eric saw the poverty part as more dramatic and emotion-driven.Still, for those unfamiliar with Walsch and his writings, the movie may come off as not too interesting. Only when one is familiar with the writing product (for myself, the books should be included in "Great Books of the Western World" Series) that the bio takes on special meaning.Fortunately, fine Canadian actor Henry Czerny is cast in the lead role. (Who can forget his mesmerizing performance in "Boys of St. Vincent"?) Yet, Czerny can't save the tedium of DelaBarre's script.As for the film title, it has little to do with the book per se (how can one make a film of a book that consists entirely of dialog . . . Qs&As?).In the end, it's appropriate that the film be judged as film and, according to that criteria, it deserves a less that satisfactory rating.

Not R The quality of the writing and production is about that of a reasonably good TV movie, and the acting turns particularly wooden every time someone has a moment where he "gets it." I wasn't familiar with Walsch's books at all, and after this movie I don't think I want to be. The opening lecture scene makes it all too clear whose "love versus fear" tripe was being lampooned in "Donnie Darko," and I seriously thought it was a self-parody that was going to turn out to be a nightmare sequence.The treatment of physical suffering in the story is particularly dishonest. In the "conversations," one of Neale's first revelations is that all suffering is created by reaction to circumstance and not the circumstance itself. Up to this point, he's been portrayed as simply toughing out all his physical sufferings as though they made no real impact on him, with one moment of exception when he suffers the shame of finally breaking down and eating from the dumpster. It's rather poignant when he seems to recognize the soccer mom and her brat who look at him in disgust as part of the society he was working to build before he lost his job, but the whole thing is cheapened later by the insistence that his suffering really came only from his reaction to them.