“We locked eyes for a moment and felt the bond of sisterhood between two Christians who had hopes and dreams that seemed to have stalled right over the Bermuda Triangle.”

Not a bad descriptive sentence, this, from a born-again—and also talented—writer, Sandra Byrd, author of Don’t Kiss Him Good-bye (2010), the source of the sentence.  The hopes and dreams are those of the narrator, Savvy Smith, an American high school exchange student living in London.  They are the usual hopes and dreams, even for a Christian: the “him” in the novel’s title is a British crush called Tommy, a non-boyfriend for Savvy but not a non-Christian.  Tommy, however, is involved with Chloe.  Will Savvy even be able to attend the May Day Ball as something other a photojournalist for the school paper, London Confidential?

Er, when I picked Good-bye up, I thought it was the first book in Byrd’s series for young people, also called London Confidential; but it’s the third.  Oh, well.  At least the item enables me to see, when the subject of being “unequally yoked” with an unbeliever comes up, how nicely subtle a writer Byrd can be.  And its being #3 in the series hardly left me lost.

Monsieur Hire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A reclusive man (Michel Blanc) who constantly spies on his neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire), in the French film Monsieur Hire (1989), may have murdered a young woman.  A police detective suspects he has.  What we learn, however, is that he has fallen in love—an un-eccentric act.  Is it eccentric, or abnormal, that the Bonnaire character, Alice, might be falling in love with him?

Directed by Patrice Leconte, Hire reminds us that we can never predict what other people will do, except when we can.  I haven’t read the Georges Simenon novel from which the film is adapted, but without a doubt, in my head, the film is worth seeing—and worthy.  It isn’t dated and its cast fills the bill agreeably.  In ’89 it proved French movies could still be respectable.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Loulou

In the 1980 French picture, Loulou, by Maurice Pialat, people drift (rather quickly) into intimacy and betrayal and pain as they lead dismayingly unconventional sex lives.  Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) resists her unimaginative husband (Guy Marchand) and finds, or think she finds, both sex and love with jobless ex-convict Loulou (Gerard Depardieu).  Loulou is a thoroughgoing catalyst, gaining male enemies, prompting a female acquaintance to voluntarily stand topless before him.  He can turn anything on its head.  Depardieu is right for the role but offers a little too much facial play, whereas Huppert’s facial play is proper.

Huppert is superb, making Nelly as ordinary as she is combative, as stubborn as she is weary.  Marchand is marvelously true and subtle.  Pialat’s direction never goes clunky or flat, and with Yann Dedet’s editing the film’s pace is good.  I might add that Loulou also makes you feel like a bit of a snoop.

(In French with English subtitles)

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.