Krystal Meyers is a Christian rock (not pop) artist, and a number of her songs has convinced me she made a pretty good showing during the Aughts.  Her 2006 CD, Dying for a Heart, is only half-impressive, but at least it’s that.  Too often only about 10% of merit emerges on Christian, and secular, albums.  The cut called “Together” has a wonderful, nuanced guitar and is excitingly tuneful.  “The Beauty of Grace” starts like a ballad but speeds up with a very attractive chorus to bestow. . . Okay, “Elvis is dead / But my King is alive” is not much of a lyric; still, “Only You Make Me Happy” (the “You” is God) turns out to be an ingratiating rocker.

Meyers has a fine voice, now winningly tomboyish, now nicely feminine, as in 2008’s “Up to You”–the feminine, I mean–which is an effective relationship song. . . I’ve never heard her first, self-titled CD but one of its tracks, “The Way to Begin,” is melodically interesting, forceful, saucy.

Spiritually-themed rock seldom gets much better than these five songs.  Go and ahead and purchase Dying for a Heart.  Or, if not, I sincerely believe Meyers has a place on your iPod.

Cover of Dying for a Heart

Dumb as it is, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012), starring Dwayne Johnson, is a fairly palatable family film.  Or . . . at least it would be if beautiful Vanessa Hudgens (ah, that jet black hair!) in her tank top didn’t lend the movie too much sensuality.  Luis Guzman plays her oafish father, and his affectionate attitude toward Hudgens’s character, Kailani, is thoroughly phony, unconvincing.

All the same, nifty CGI adventure scenes proliferate:  a giant lizard, a tiny elephant, etc.  It’s not as good a film as Sky High, but it has its moments.   Kids will love it.  Teenage boys, frankly, will love that tank top.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - JANUARY 15: Actors Vanessa Hudgens (R) and Josh Hutcherson arrive for the world premiere of 'Journey 2: The Mysterious Island' at Village Cinemas Jam Factory on January 15, 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Critic Ross Douthat has panned Damsels in Distress in National Review magazine (May 14, 2002).  He writes, “If the world of Damsels . . . isn’t the real one to begin with, then how much can we care about the characters’ struggles to build up their own equally unreal alternatives?”  I suppose the answer is that we can’t care about these struggles–but it doesn’t matter.  We know Violet is eccentric; we care about the values she endorses, such as self-improvement.  And we care about those messages and implications I mentioned which filter through in the basically tame world Stillman has created.

His first picture in 14 years, Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2012) revolves around three college girls who recruit a new student for their suicide-prevention center (at fictitious Seven Oaks College) and for their larger idealistic purpose of gently freeing the college from male “barbarism.”  In other words, they want their milieu to be more refined, albeit the leader of the pack is the strikingly eccentric Violet (Greta Gerwig), who aspires both to help the depressed–the suicidal–and to start a new dance craze.  The new recruit is reasonable Lily (Analeigh Tipton) and the other two coeds are Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore).  Yes, they all bear the names of either flowers or flowery plant life.

I mentioned male barbarism, but Damsels is not a feminist film.  It is, in fact, philosophically conservative.  Violet says of her quartet, “We are all Christians.  Or, well, Judeo-Christians”–an important line.

What Stillman, writer and director, constructs here is a world which doesn’t really exist, but through which we receive messages and implications about the world which does exist:  our world.  One of the implications seems to be that “God’s in his heaven” and the human condition is not so bad.  (Unfortunately, after Violet loses her boyfriend and sinks into a depression, what gets her over it is not at all credible.)

Too, there’s a message that eccentricity, Salvador Dali-like “madness”, has little worth in our culture, that, according to Lily, “what the world needs is a large mass of normal people.”  And it may also be that Stillman is telling us that unless we generate what we genuinely value–everything from good hygiene to sensible religious belief–naught but absurdity will prevail.

Damsels in Distress is seriocomic and intelligent.  Only intermittently is it funny, but altogether it is very droll and very charming.  Stillman is still not examining his characters, although this time around it is rather unimportant since he’s letting go of verisimilitude anyway.  Like his Last Days of Disco, the current film ends with delightful dancing–in one sequence, to the tune of a Fred Astaire song.  This is how Stillman expresses his optimism but, well, since Violet considers dancing therapeutic, maybe in addition the folks here are giving a bit of therapy a try.  Who knows?  It would sort of justify Violet’s nutty idea of starting a new dance craze.

Greta Gerwig (Photo credit: Wikipedia)