Blue Like Jazz: The Movie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Taylor‘s Blue Like Jazz (2012) is based on a memoir by Donald Miller.  In it, an evangelical kid—Miller—is so stunned by his Christian mother’s having an affair with a youth pastor that he flees to the Portland, Oregon liberal-arts college his pagan father has enrolled him in.  The student body there is eaten up with leftism and tends to glorify sex and drinking, with the result that young Donald happily dismisses conservative evangelical belief.  What we end up with is a basically Christian film, but one which expects Joe Christian (in this case, Don) to duly apologize to the world for the shabby conduct of the devout.  This includes everything from the Crusades to “U.S. foreign policy.”

Nice try, Steve Taylor, but no cigar.

True, the film is reasonably intelligent, but not without many flaws.  It seems to consider the Southern Baptist denomination a “strange church” (i.e., not liberal).  The action of the story is rather forced, the characters are scantily drawn and, to me, Marshall Allman (Don) is not a very likable actor.

Blue Like Jazz: The Movie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Steve Taylor‘s Blue Like Jazz (2012) is based on a memoir by Donald Miller.  In it, an evangelical kid—Miller—is so stunned by his Christian mother’s having an affair with a youth pastor that he flees to the Portland, Oregon liberal-arts college his pagan father has enrolled him in.  The student body there is eaten up with leftism and tends to glorify sex and drinking, with the result that young Donald happily dismisses conservative evangelical belief.  What we end up with is a basically Christian film, but one which expects Joe Christian (in this case, Don) to duly apologize to the world for the shabby conduct of the devout.  This includes everything from the Crusades to “U.S. foreign policy.”

Nice try, Steve Taylor, but no cigar.

True, the film is reasonably intelligent, but not without many flaws.  It seems to consider the Southern Baptist denomination a “strange church” (i.e., not liberal).  The action of the story is rather forced, the characters are scantily drawn and, to me, Marshall Allman (Don) is not a very likable actor.

Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need—and want—money!  And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it!  Even Tyrone Power‘s Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn’t seem like one.  The whole movie doesn’t seem to be about corruption and irresponsibility.  Frothy, it isn’t satirical or mocking, but genial—and with inoffensive Loretta Young.

Teaming up again with Power (who is miscast), this time in a droll non-farce, she is deeply palatable.  Unlike Power, she has charisma and can match the dignity of Adolphe Menjou, who is also in the film.  Congrats to the supporting cast.  CM is moderately entertaining.

Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need—and want—money!  And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it!  Even Tyrone Power‘s Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn’t seem like one.  The whole movie doesn’t seem to be about corruption and irresponsibility.  Frothy, it isn’t satirical or mocking, but genial—and with inoffensive Loretta Young.

Teaming up again with Power (who is miscast), this time in a droll non-farce, she is deeply palatable.  Unlike Power, she has charisma and can match the dignity of Adolphe Menjou, who is also in the film.  Congrats to the supporting cast.  CM is moderately entertaining.

The spiritually proud, over-rigorous follower of Christ is a figure too familiar in literature, but her appearance in the 1941 novel, A Woman of the Pharisees, by Francois Mauriac, does the book no harm whatsoever.

The Christ follower in question, Brigitte Pian, complacently butts into other people’s lives and ends up damaging them.  She is not like the gentle, prudent Father Calou, whom she also damages.  Brigitte’s stepson Louis narrates the woman’s story but, by and by, fails to do so without self-righteousness and a certain contempt for Brigitte.  So, inevitably, there is sin and folly everywhere here, but also the idea that God truly values every human being.

Even when they suffer, as the book’s characters—Brigitte among them—do; but the suffering is not senseless.  These people approach, or will approach, “the throne of the Great Compassion” (i.e. God) and, frankly, there springs up in the novel a hint about the universal salvation I believe in.

A Woman of the Pharisees (La Pharisienne in French) is a lucidly, wisely written novel which does not stint on human complexity.  It is a great Christian novel.