picturesque-arts Review of Blue Like Jazz

Blue Like Jazz (2012)

An Unfortunate, Poorly Thought-out Script with Some Nice Filming

[4/10 · 15 June 2013]

I briefly wanted to give my two cents on this film, which I watched without any realization that it was a "Christian" film or having read the book. From the standpoint of an unbiased movie watcher, I found the framing device of the film to be just visually awful. The astronaut in space with the characters' faces photoshopped in, with typed words appearing in space... plainly put, it was bad. As was the hideous carrot and rabbit "traveling to the West Coast" scene. Such poorly placed/developed animated moments essentially ruined the presentation of the film's literary aspects with their artificial and hard-to- look-at appearances. My second thought is the lack of transitions in this film/strange delineation of time in correspondence with the equally strange depiction of college students ended up rubbing me the wrong way. The highly unrealistic and varying sense of time in this film just sent the viewer in all different directions. Along with the purely bizarre and two-dimensional portrayal of students, none of the illustrations of the college and its student body made any sense to me at all (I have never, ever come across an American campus like that, not even on the West Coast). One more thing about character development that bugs is me is that the protagonist is a person trying to cover up his past - but this motif is undeveloped, as the main character never really displays his "shame" of his past, and the film in fact skips over the ambivalence and confusion of his actual attempting to hide his former self. Actually, he seems like he fits in pretty damn well. (It's like the situation in Mean Girls, when Cady tries so hard to forget who she was that she actually does become one of the Plastics). Also, where's the conflict in this film? Obviously, it's not about the girl because she's always forgives him, and it's not about his Christianity because he seems to have quite forgotten about it over his year at college, and it's not about his mom's affair because she really only shows up twice or thrice in the entire movie. One other thing that annoyed me was how much the ending came out of nowhere - Don's emotional confession to Justin and his heedless cry for forgiveness for covering up his past, and his declaration that throughout the pot brownies, alcohol kegs and various activities that southern Baptists would frown upon, he never forgot about God. Interesting return to the "main idea" of the film. There are a lot of issues with this film, from the poor acting to the strange jumping around of themes and messages. Four stars for some well-shot scenes (the big party) and some comedic moments (the Christian/non-Christian debate).