BlueLikeJazz

Review: Blue Like Jazz is Same Song, Different Tune

April 10, 2012 By Rebecca Cusey

Author Donald Miller and director Steve Taylor have tried to distance themselves from the “Christian” movie genre. They don’t want to their new film Blue Like Jazz categorized with Fireproof, Courageous, or, for the love of Rob Bell, Left Behind.

Nevertheless, Blue Like Jazz, opening Friday after a nationwide series of advance screenings, is as Evangelically Christian as church-sponsored coffee houses.

Like Miller’s book from which it is adapted, the film follows a narrative familiar to people of faith: I once was blind but now I see.

Stand and testify, Generation Y!

The story serves as a testimonial for a cynical new generation, a tale of coming to faith. However, it’s told from the point of view of someone who grew up in the Evangelical church of the ‘90s and 2000’s and didn’t much like what they saw.

The movie doesn’t so much preach to the choir as to the kids who skipped choir practice to drink beer in the park with decidedly non-church approved friends.

Donald Miller is played by Marshall Allman, a professional actor with regular roles on HBO’s sexy vampire melodrama True Blood, a show that would make the altar guild squirm. The only main cast member who professes Christian faith, he was eager to play the part. “He said he’d been waiting for a role like this since he came to Hollywood,” Steve Taylor told me.

The movie deviates from Miller’s life and memoir quite a bit, making him younger and simplifying, but not minimizing, his family problems. For the sake of clarity, I’ll call the film version Don and the real life person Miller.

The film character Don is a teen who, devastated by what he suspects is an affair between his single mother and his adored and married youth group leader, leaves his conservative Texas Christian community. He picks the furthest thing he can find from his roots: An aggressively liberal, whimsically hedonistic Reed College outside Portland, Oregon.

The hyper-intellectual culture compels students to patrol campus dressed as a parody of the Pope not just to blaspheme – although that certainly happens – but to have literary, philosophical conversations questioning religion and life itself, often at 2 in the morning. It’s the type of place where ironic invasions of corporate bookstores happens more than book cracking- with the merry prankster students dressed as robots because corporations, by definition, want to control your mind and actions.

No one seems to be being prepared for anything more than having meaty conversations in moody coffee houses and becoming college professors themselves.

Or maybe beat poets. They could be beat poets.

It’s a far cry from Don’s unintellectual roots in which his youth pastor explained Jesus’s love by means of a donkey-riding, blanket-wearing, Mexican puppet with a bad accent.

As Don dives into the culture of the school, he hides his Christianity from the hostile crowd even as he embraces hedonism. His sexual escapades and drug adventures are implied in a purely PG-13 way, but drinking is shown. Making friends with a beautiful lesbian (Tania Raymonde) and an earnest girl (Clarie Holt), he slowly learns that everyone has troubles, whether in the church or out. The frenetic intellectualism echoes frenetic Christian culture as a way to hide from real problems. Maybe this Jesus person has some answers after all.

First and foremost – and this is important when talking about religious films – the production is professionally done. The acting is good, the direction seamless, the cinematography nice. Furthermore, Steve Taylor, who spent years playing with irony in the Christian music world, lets his humor shine through. Whether it’s that Mexican puppet lesson, an angry bear stealing a bike, or the wild protest stunts Don and his friends pull, the humor is fresh, funny, and not mean.

It’s an unusual thing to find oneself laughing in a movie about religion, but Taylor and Miller pull it off.

Secondly, the movie doesn’t dwell much on the politics of Donald Miller, the author. While the college is certainly liberal, the political atmosphere exists as a backdrop to Don’s spiritual journey. One could watch this movie and not know Miller is beloved by progressive (ie: Democratic) evangelicals and/or the emerging church movement.

The thing is, of course, that all of us in the choir do know it.

With a moving ending that embraces Jesus in theory but focuses on the wrongs done by the church, it’s hard to not recognize this film as another salvo in the theological struggles of recent years. Those who lean toward defined theology will find it frustrating while people comfortable with open endings will see it as another conversation in a series of conversations looking for truth.

Most of these questions are irrelevant to mainstream moviegoers, who may leave the theater scratching their heads or – equally likely – touched by an image or moment.

Is it a bad thing to make good movies about streams of thinking in American Evangelicalism? Not at all. That is why Taylor and Miller should embrace the “Christian” movie genre and, in doing so, reshape it as Miller reshaped “Christian” literature.

Filed Under: Faith on Film, In Theaters, Movie Reviews, slider Tagged With: BlueLikeJazz

A Christian fatwa Against Blue Like Jazz Movie?

March 22, 2012 By Rebecca Cusey

In a new post on the Blue Like Jazz movie website, Director Steve Taylor calls out Christian cinema in general and Sherwood Baptist’s Kendricks Brothers, whose “October Baby” opens this week, in particular for condemning the film before even screening it. He claims Sherwood Baptist has issued a “fatwa” against the movie. He writes:

So what is it about Blue Like Jazz that the Christian Movie Establishment finds so threatening?

I’ve now sat in on over one hundred screenings of Blue Like Jazz, and I’m convinced that the reason it’s resonating so strongly with audiences across the country is because, like the book it’s based on, it reminds us of our own experiences. Don’s original story certainly resonated with me – I was a youth pastor at a Baptist church in Denver at the time I was attending the University of Colorado in Boulder. I wanted to make Blue Like Jazz because I felt I’d already lived it. Are there certain stories that we’re not allowed to tell, even if they’re not “safe for the whole family”? Wouldn’t the Bible be a much shorter book if we edited out the parts that weren’t family-friendly?

…..

One of the most consistent criticisms I got as a recording artist came from fellow Christians saying, “Why do you do these songs criticizing the church? Why would you go airing our dirty laundry for the public to see?” And, of course, that same criticism had been leveled at Blue Like Jazz.

This perspective has always amused me, as if the public thinks we’ve got our act together perfectly, as if they don’t already see the hypocrisy in our midst. They just think we’re too dumb to see it ourselves.

Which is why the image of a guy in a confession booth finally confessing the truth started my six-year-long quest to make Blue Like Jazz.

When we tell the truth – even the uncomfortable truth – the truth sets people free.

The book “Blue Like Jazz” was banned from some Christian bookstores when it was released in 2003, although it was embraced by many Christians as well. Some objected to its embrace of liberal politics. Others felt the book did not represent orthodox Christianity in theology.

Read my interview with Steve Taylor earlier this month as well as my piece in The HuffingtonPost.

What do you think? Is this adaptation a good thing? Will you see the movie?

Filed Under: Faith on Film, Featured Tagged With: BlueLikeJazz

Steve Taylor Hopes to Blow up the Theater Real Good

March 5, 2012 By Rebecca Cusey

For many of us growing up in Christian culture in the 1980s, musician Steve Taylor was a voice of nuance, irony, and edginess in a world gone soft-focus. He always seemed to be about truth, even hard truth. In Taylor’s eye, Jesus was never merely your boyfriend and the church was full of silly and sometimes downright bad people…but always with a precious core.

I caught up with Taylor last week. He was on a bus travelling from Nashville to Atlanta on the first leg of his “30 Days, 30 Screenings” of his upcoming movie, “Blue Like Jazz.” Based on the best-selling book by Donald Miller, the film will premiere at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin before hitting theaters April 13.

Taylor had just finished a big job.

When it seemed that “Blue Like Jazz” was destined to remain a dream and not a reality after a major investor backed out in 2010, some fans posted a request for help on Kickstarter.com.

“I didn’t think this was going to work, so I said give us $10 and I’ll call you personally,” Taylor laughed.

He never expected some 4500 donations totaling more than $345,000 in 30 days.

“Anytime I was in the car, I would make phone calls. I ended up last month finally finishing my 3500 calls. It was great. Now we’re all friends. I gotta say I really enjoyed it. I owe these people a lot.”

Those who, like me, came to know Taylor through songs like “I Wanna Be a Clone” and “I Blew up the Clinic Real Good” do not know that Taylor studied both music and filmmaking at the University of Colorado at Boulder but chose to pursue music first.

“I figured it was easier to be a rock star in my 20s and a filmmaker in my 50s than try the reverse,” Taylor joked. However, as MTV developed the concept of the music video, Taylor directed music videos for himself and others, then switched to filmmaking seven years ago. In the meantime, he started his own label to facilitate Christian artists making a transition to a broader market.

“There had developed this glass ceiling,” he said, “We had these Christian artists who had worked their way up in the Christian subculture and deserved to be heard by the world. [A band he represented, Sixpence None the Richer] spoke to a wider audience by in their music and deserved to be heard by a wider audience.”

He hopes to do the same thing in the realm of film.

“I feel like ‘Blue Like Jazz’ has the same potential to speak to a much wider audience as well,” he said, “A Christian movie genre has formed. Our first goal with this movie is that we didn’t fit into this genre.”

“What’s surprising to me is that the genre has become synonymous with family entertainment. I’m all in favor of family entertainment, but when and why would we think that all media from faith perspective would have to be a family movie, and how could you possibly get that from reading the Bible?”

This view was not always popular.

As with certain times in his music career, Taylor got pushback from potential investors, saying they would support the film if certain content was softened. The story follows a young man from a Southern, conservative Christian background who goes to a secular Northwestern college and wrestles with faith. “There was no way to tell this story truthfully without a certain amount of PG-13 content,” Taylor said. The edgy storylines stayed in, reflecting the tone of the book.

As in music, Taylor turns the camera on what he knows, Christianity, which takes a certain amount of bravery. However, he thinks it’s better for believers to mine Christian culture for stories than to leave it to the secular world.

“I think part of the perception problem with Christianity is that there are people on the outside who think we don’t see any of this stuff. They don’t think we see the hypocrisy within our midst. When that perspective comes from the inside, it helps people understand ‘Yeah, we see it. We get it, but there’s another way here.’”

When I told him that someone I knew took “I Want to be a Clone” as a straight statement about Christian desire instead of the satire Taylor intended, he laughed.

“I think they’re so used to the idea that we have no sense of humor or sense of irony, it’s probably an easy mistake to make.”