The Christian Students United (CSU) Club at Genesee Community College invites the college and the community to a Free Movie Night from 6 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 29, in the William W. Stuart Forum of the Batavia Campus, located at One College Road, Batavia.

"The Case for Christ" is a 2007 Pureflix movie based on the award-winning best-selling book, which portrays the real-life story of Chicago investigative journalist Lee Strobel's journey from atheism to Christianity.

The film stars Mike Vogel, Erika Christensen, Faye Dunaway and Robert Forster.

For more information about the film, click here.

CSU will be selling inexpensive homemade baked goods and the proceeds will go to the student club's sponsored child from Haiti, 11-year old Fedson Hyppolite.

CSU's student mission is to edify and encourage one another to be the light of Christ at GCC. The club welcomes all students regardless of their religious affiliation, and the group meets on Thursdays, 12:30 - 2 p.m., in room T122.

Any questions can be referred to the CSU president, student Anna Sprout asprout@my.genesee.edu, or to the CSU advisor, Jim Simon jsimon@genesee.edu, 585-798-1688, ext. 4191.

Just watch.

It's a look at the events leading up to the Taliban's attack on Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai for speaking out on girls' education followed by the aftermath, including her speech to the United Nations.

For more information, call the library at 343-9550 or log onto www.batavialibrary.org.

With a cast and crew into the dozens of people in Batavia today, scenes for the upcoming bio-pic about Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, were completed today at the Old Courthouse in Batavia.

There are no pictures here of Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Marshall, because producers asked photographers not to take pictures of him in costume. They want to preserve the mystique of Boseman in character until the film is released, one of the co-producers said. We were free to wander the set and take pictures of all other aspects of the production.

The interior of the Old Courthouse was dressed up to look like a county courthouse in Oklahoma in the 1940s. Light switches were removed and the holes covered, the exit sign removed, an old clock and fans installed and pictures hung on the wall suitable to the time and location. There were also a 48-star U.S. flag behind the bench and the Oklahoma state flag.

Carl Hicks, who grew up in Le Roy, is interviewed by Mike Pettinella for the Buffalo News. Hicks was the construction supervisor for the set.

What story is Schiefer trying to tell? The story of “Godzilla: Heritage.” 

Schiefer and Director Greg Graves have been working on the film for six years. It’s all coming to fruition. However, to make the movie the way they have always pictured it, the crew needs help raising money.

Thirty-Six days remain for the project’s crowd-funded Kickstarter. They have so far reached $10,463 of the $40,000 goal. If the project does not get fully funded, the production will not receive any of the money raised.

This is the second kickstarter campaign following a successful lead. The first time, the crew asked for $10,000 and received almost $20,000. The money that was raised went toward nicer cameras, travel, filming the teaser and the creation of the monster suits.

The suits are being made by season six winner of the SyFy network show "Faceoff," Rashaad Santiago. Santiago moved to Batavia to help with the movie. Godzilla has been a fascination of his since he was a child.

“For me, he was an escape from reality growing up,” Santiago said. “My mom recorded seven or eight hours of a Godzilla marathon when I was younger. I would watch it on loop until the film popped.”

Schiefer and Graves brought several other professionals onto the project. They include Chris Barbis, Kyle Gilmore, Tyler Graves, Billy Rupp and Christopher Bloomer. Bloomer has done visual effects for “Zombieland” and “Dragonball: Evolution.”

The cast and crew need the money to finish making the monster costumes, pay actors, promote the film, for anticipated filming permits and other expenses.

“Eighty to 90 percent of the movie will be filmed in Batavia,” Schiefer said.

Ken Mistler, owner of several local businesses, including City Slickers, has donated the spaces that “Godzilla: Heritage” will be filmed in. Additionally, the movie may need to be filmed outside on a street and permits would be necessary.

The character of Godzilla is not in the public domain. In fact, he’s heavily trademarked. It is for this reason that Scheifer and his team are creating the film as a fan film. No money will be made off of this production. They are making the film strictly for the passion they have for Godzilla.

Watch Selma, A chronicle of Martin Luther King's campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. The movie is shown in our community room on our BIG screen with FREE popcorn!

Registration is required!

Visit us online at www.woodwardmemoriallibrary.org or by calling 585-768-8300.

Godzilla's got a new home. At least for a few months. Right here in Batavia, New York.

He'll be hangin' with Rashaad Santiago and Tim Schiefer and their associate from Watertown, Greg Graves, while making a moving staring himself, the King of Monsters.

It's a small budget production -- less than $20,000 -- but much of the filming will be done in Batavia and involve some very talented people, such as Santiago, a costume and monster designer, and Christopher Bloomer, a visual effects expert.

It's mostly a labor of love made for the filmmakers' own enjoyment with an eye toward showing it in Chicago at the 21st annual G-Fest.

That's right, there's a whole festival devoted to the creature who terrorized Japan in the 1954 classic "Godzilla," and went on to star in more than 28 other feature films.

It's that G-loving community that brought Santiago, Shiefer, Graves and Bloomer together.

Right now, Santiago is kind of the star of the show. After signing on to the Godzilla movie project -- the title of the film is "Godzilla: Heritage" (here's the Facebook page) -- Santiago won a sport on the Sci-Fi Channel's reality series, Faceoff.

Originally from the Bronx, Santiago moved to Batavia a couple of months ago, first to work on the Godzilla project, but also because he thought Batavia would be a better place for his two children.

Santiago has had a passion for monsters ever since he saw the original Godzilla for the first time when he was was 5.

"Just seeing something different than a dinosaur, because I was a big dinosaur guy, so seeing something that was like a dinosaur, but different, and the size he was, really got my mind going on monsters," Santiago said.

Already of an artistic bent, Santiago started drawing his own monsters.

And his fascination with monsters grew as movies such as Alien, Predators, Tremors and Jurassic Park, came along.

He went from drawing monsters to building monsters.

People who saw his work encouraged him.

"I didn't know this was a career when I was younger," Santiago said. "As I got older, people would say 'why don't you sell this or why don't you get paid for doing this', and me, being naive and young, I didn't know, and now I'm doing it."

He said he dreams of owning his own monster studio someday.

Faceoff might be a jumping off point to that next career level.

He was selected for the show after an audition in Burbank (where all the filming took place).

The show airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m., and on those nights, Santiago is appearing at City Slickers to watch the show and answer questions from the fans who watch it with him.

Ken Mistler, owner of City Slickers, is giving a good deal of support to the local moviemakers. City Slickers will be a location in the film, as well as other Mistler properties, and his former gym location on East Main Street will be where the filmmakers build their sets and do all of their interior shooting (some filming will also take place in Watertown).

Shiefer said watching Santiago build the Godzilla suit for the movie is truly seeing a master at work.

"After three our four hours he had only the body outline and we're like, 'that's really impressive,' " Schiefer said. " 'This is only the outline. There's not any detail,' he said, and we were like blown away. Then he started detailing the head, making the little grains of the scales with tweezers. It's just the most impressive thing you can possibly see."

Shiefer said that anybody who tunes into Faceoff will be impressed with Santiago's work.

Santiago -- the monster expert -- is also working, appropriately, at Foxprowl, the collectables store on Ellicott Street. So if you want to meet him and miss him at City Slickers, there's Foxprowl on week days.

Photo by the producers of Godzilla being made for the film "Godzilla: Heritage." Used with permission.

A screening in Gettysburg, billed as the world premiere, earned director Ron Maxwell a standing ovation.

Writer James Simpson, in a piece of PJ Media, takes a detailed look at the historical and political context of the movie and concludes,

This is a movie well worth seeing; both for its accurate depiction of the times, its rich narrative, and the unique, rarely discussed subject matter, which was in fact a major component of the days’ controversies. It is also completely family friendly – a rarity in Hollywood these days.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the L.A. Times critic comes off as a bit of a snob and calls the film "lugubrious."

Another Hollywood-based critic says the film is purely for history buffs (while too narrowly constricting the scope of the audience, may be a bit of a left-handed compliment -- this isn't "Fast & Furious 6").

That writer, John DeFore, seems to believe only "Tea Party" types care about the Constitution, writing, "Beech is a dairy farmer who's opposed to slavery but, in language that will resonate with Tea Party-affiliated viewers, argues that Lincoln's war is unconstitutional."

Apparently, one must not color outside of the lines in Mr. DeFore's world.

Though, one of the more favorable reviews has come from Katie Kieffer, writing for the conservative Web site Town Hall.

Copperhead is worth seeing because it re-tells American history with an intimate, engaging and non-textbook approach.

It will be interesting to watch the different reactions to the film from America's various political factions -- especially the simple-minded red state/blue state divide -- to a film that challenges pat answers to questions about the Civil War.

Kauffman has said the movie isn't intended to be preachy or a message movie, except maybe to reinvigorate the lost notion in America of the value of dissent.

In his own lengthy piece about the film for Front Porch Republic, Kauffman writes about the constricting nature of political debate in the country these days.

We live in a time and in a country which finds principled dissent of the sort exercised by Eugene V. Debs and Abner Beech almost incomprehensible. In one sense, freedom of expression knows no bounds: Internet pornography, snuff-game videos, libelous tweets – laissez faire, man. But with respect to politics, art, culture…seldom in American history have the limits of permissible speech been so narrow, so constricting. True, our Eugene Debses aren’t usually thrown into gaols, but nor do they become cause célèbres, like Debs. Their prison is the red state-blue state idiocy under which the limits of acceptable opinion are demarcated by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and writers live in the fear (which, I can tell you as one who has long worked with members of the DC punditocracy, absolutely paralyzes careerists) of saying the wrong thing and running afoul of the hall monitors and tattletales who police American discourse.

In media coverage closer to home, Jay Moran interviews Kauffman for WBFO.

"Copperhead" is playing in Pittsford and Williamsville.

Previously:

• 'Copperhead' hits all of Kauffman's themes, and is a big hit with screening audience
• Screenwriter Bill Kauffman and film director Ron Maxwell discuss 'Copperhead'
• Trailer for Bill Kauffman's 'Copperhead' released, film opens June 28