In the 1950 John Huston film, The Asphalt Jungle, we get an idea of what society is up against when a witness is too scared to finger the petty thief Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) in a lineup.  Afterwards, however, conditions prove to be even worse when we learn that the cop who questions the witness is, unlike the other city policemen, on the take.  The “asphalt jungle” is not quite a jungle in this subdued caper movie, but it isn’t pretty either.  All the same, the jewel heist the film is pivoted on slowly becomes undone due to fortune and human weakness—and desperation on the part of the lawyer (Louis Calhern) enlisted to fund the heist.  Interestingly, it is in fact the seedy nightclub owner (Marc Lawrence) who funds it: money comes from all kinds of sources.  It need not be the gentry member who provides it.  He, truth to tell, might be perforce brought down to the shabby guy’s level.

Huston did ace work with compelling material in Jungle, made with Maltese Falcon sophistication and restraint.  Indeed, it outdoes Falcon in incisiveness.  What characters, what a cast!  Calhern has a perfect voice and a humanizing competence.  Hayden’s Dix is appealing in his masculinity, and likable enough that we scratch our heads over what police commissioner Hardy says about him.

Cover of The Asphalt Jungle

Unless, that is, you detest superhero movies.  But if you don’t mind them, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) is a pleasurable ride.

Artificial intelligence in this Joss Whedon flick is not very interesting, but the Avengers themselves are (up to a significant point) and so is their interaction.  In my view, the action sequences are more entertaining than tedious, and I did not detect any mawkishness in the scenes featuring Hawkeye’s family life.  Not so common, this.

A woman (Blake Lively) who ceases to age is at the center of the serious fantasy romance, The Age of Adeline (2015), which is not without sentimentality and phony melodrama.  It was made in such a way as to impress on our minds a contemporary world essentially no different from the early 20th century, when the woman’s miracle occurred.  Very little here, however, keeps the film from being a regrettable waste of time.

English: Blake Lively at the 2011 Time 100 gala. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my review of Lila, I made mention of hell.  This is where Bill Wiese says he spent 23 minutes, despite being a Christian, when God sent him there to find out what hell is like.  His account of this is in a book he wrote and in many stage lectures.

Okay, but Matthew 25:46 teaches that there is correction (kolasis, “punishment” in the King James Bible) beyond this world.  And clearly there is no correction in the place Mr. Wiese describes, but only torture.  Nonstop.  Aside from this, however, it must be admitted that a lot of contradictions exist in Bill’s story.  For instance, the time that this experience in hell began has varied from telling to telling, so that we can’t even be sure it lasted 23 minutes.  It might have been shorter or longer.

Lila, in the 2014 novel Lila by Marilynne Robinson, is a destitute and abandoned child who begins to be cared for by a scrappy woman called Doll (who later dies) and ends up marrying the familiar Robinson figure, John Ames.  Being a true believer in Christ, Robinson has made Ames an elderly Calvinist preacher, and it becomes palpable to faulty Lila that her Christian husband is a good man.  Not so realistic, even so, is Ames’s wedding the unreligious girl since Christians are prohibited by the Bible (in I Cor. 7:39) from marrying non-Christians.

In any event, it does allow the preacher to ponder for Lila’s sake the “mystery of existence.”  Ames can explain very little to her, to a wife who does not know, or understand, God.  She gets baptized but also tries to wash the baptism off her.  She casually declines to believe that the friends she had as a young girl deserve to go to hell, and, to be sure, the novel seems to convey that the doctrine of hell, or “hell,” is too much for humanity to process and handle.  This includes Christians. . . Nevertheless, such a thing cannot negate the truth about a life of faith.  Ames’s marriage is a “sorrow’ to him (he married a non-Christian) but his faith in the Savior isn’t.  Significantly, marvelously, it is an enduring salvific faith which runs from Ezekiel to Calvin to this old man in 1930s-40s rural America.

I had to read Lila slowly, but found it very rewarding.  It is a gentle novel whose concern for theology is surpassed only by a concern for character.