Review: "I Still Believe"

“I Still Believe” is a good old-fashioned three-hanky romantic tearjerker. Boy meets girl, girl runs from boy, boy chases and catches, girl gets sick, and the tears start flowing. It’s been a familiar formula with minor variations since “Love Story” 50 years ago.

It’s a heartfelt, engaging movie bristling with music, light, joy and sadness.

You could actually enjoy this picture beginning to end without realizing it’s part of the faith-based film pipeline. There’s no overt proselytizing and it has recognizable actors like Britt Robertson, K.J. Apa, Shania Twain and Gary Sinise.

If this biographic of musician Jeremy Camp weren’t set at a Christian college and feature songs with lyrics about faith and forgiveness, it would be pretty indistinguishable from any other flick at your local cinema.

I say that not as praise or disapproval, but simply observing how you can measure the success of outlier movements by when they join the mainstream.

I can’t say as I’m a big fan of Christian pop music or Camp’s songs in particular. To my ears there’s a generic sameness to them, starting with plaintive, plucked guitar strings and inevitably building to soaring crescendos for pronouncements of faith and glory. It’s a white-people aural pudding.

(Speaking of, good luck finding many POC in the movie.)

Apa plays Jeremy, an impressionable kid from Lafayette, Ind., who moves out to California to attend bible college circa 1999. There he meets Melissa (Robertson), who seems a little older and wiser, and immediately is struck by the strong pull they have. Jeremy has a gift as a singer/songwriter, and dreams of following in the footsteps of Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons), an alumnus who broke out big.

Apa brings a lovable decency to the role. With his dark, lanky good looks and breezy charisma, his Jeremy sort of reminds me of Jim Halpert from “The Office,” minus the snark. Jeremy’s parents (Sinise and Twain) are struggling financially and have a younger special needs son, but there’s love and support all around.

I really like Robertson as a performer. She hasn’t broken through in any big movies, with “Tomorrowland” and “The Space Between Us” both missing and starring roles in several short-lived TV/streaming shows. There’s a probing intelligence behind her eyes, and she takes what could have been a very reactive role and really becomes the engine that drives this movie’s emotional momentum.

We see her fear at falling for someone so quickly – especially, as we soon learn, because Jean-Luc has feelings for her. Melissa asks Jeremy to keep their (chaste, of course) romance a secret.

But then she falls ill with stomach cancer, just as Jeremy’s music career is taking off. He sings to the audience of his love for God and his fiancé, and begs their prayers to heal her. For a while it seems like a miracle is in the offing.

No, this isn’t a particularly subtle or sophisticated movie. But it’s a well-told one, by directing team the Erwin Brothers, Jon and Andrew, with Jon also supplying the screenplay with Jon Gunn. They’re all veterans of the Christian film school and seem to know its rhythms well.

Young love is powerful, transformational… and sometimes tragic. “I Still Believe” gives us the highs and the lows, and what comes after.

Video review: "The Hate U Give"

“The Hate U Give” may be the best movie of 2018 most people haven’t heard of. This smart, heartfelt and riveting drama is perhaps the finest cinematic exploration of race relations in American in the past decade.

It takes as its jumping-off point the shooting of an unarmed African-American man, but this isn’t a heedless Black Lives Matter screed. Amandla Stenberg plays Starr, a smart kid from the bad part of town who attends an upscale, predominantly white high school on a scholarship. She narrates about traversing these two worlds, show us how she speaks and behaves around her white friends, including boyfriend Chris (K.J. Apa), and her black family and friends.

One day she meets up with an old childhood friend she’s sweet on, and he winds up getting shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop. For a while no one in either her white or black communities know she’s a witness, and Starr struggles to find a middle way that will protect those she cares about.

The terrific supporting cast includes Russell Hornsby as her dad, who has a powerful scene where he gives “The Speech” about how black teens should behave around law enforcement; Regina Hall as her mother; Common as her uncle, who’s also a member of the LAPD himself; and Sabrina Carter as a white friend who turns out to be not as woke as Starr thought.

Directed by George Tillman Jr. from a screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the book by Angie Thomas, “The Hate U Give” offers no easier answers but many nagging -- and important -- questions.

Bonus features are quite good, cemented by a feature-length audio commentary track by Tillman, Stenberg, Hornsby and editor Craig Hayes. Such commentaries are always better when they include cast and crew.

There are also three extended scenes six making-of documentary shorts.

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Review: "A Dog's Purpose"

“A Dog’s Purpose” is an unrepentant tearjerker, as movies about dogs often are.

There’s just an indescribable purity about a dog. Treat it well, and it will return that to you in the form of boundless love. A dog will wait hours in your office while you do stuff they consider dreadfully boring (like writing a movie review), hoping for a chance at five minutes of playtime.

They may not be great for the pocketbook -- how much for flea medicine again?? -- but when it comes to spiritual replenishment, the ROI on dogs cannot be beaten.

Director Lasse Hallström, who made the seminal “My Life As a Dog” 30-odd years ago, gives us a fanciful tale of a super canine, a red retriever named Bailey who lives out several lives during the course of the movie, always being resurrected as a puppy with a new chance at finding its reason for existing.

Josh Gad, with that incredibly flexible voice of his, narrates Bailey as he morphs into Ellie, a German Shepherd police dog, a Corgi named Tito with a tremendous appetite, and a big hound named Buddy. He retains his memories as Bailey, and strives to do good by the humans in his life, despite some of them not being very caring owners.

The strongest relationship is with Ethan, a boy growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. He’s played by Bryce Gheisar as a kid and K.J. Apa as a teen. They’re inseparable buds, even when Ethan becomes the star quarterback on the high school football team and starts dating Hannah (Britt Robertson), who’s clearly The One.

But dark stuff in Ethan’s family and circumstances push things in a darker direction, with Bailey trying to make sense of it all from his perspective underneath the kitchen table. In his simplistic paradigm where sniffing, eating, playing and licking are the sum total secrets to happiness, humans are a tremendous conundrum.

Let’s talk about controversy. Or rather, nontroversy. There’s a video floating around of one of the dog actors for the film being pushed into water by its trainer during production. It got scared but was not hurt or ever in any danger. Some activist types are pushing a boycott of the movie as a result. Please. People who call that animal abuse have obviously never seen real animal abuse. I did worse than that to my pooch last weekend when she stole a piece of pizza.

It does appear to have had an effect, which it is my duty to report. For starters, the movie is a lot shorter than the 120-minute running time that’s been published. It appears something like 20 minutes have been hastily cut out. The credits also list a bunch more people as screenwriters besides Cathryn Michon, who adapted the novel by W. Bruce Cameron. And the Hollywood premier was scrapped.

OK? Got all that? Let’s get back to reviewing the movie.

This is not an especially clever or sophisticated film. Dogs do things to make us happy, dogs do things to make us sad. Life (or rather, lives) unfold with the requisite mix of joy, betrayal, tragedy and pathos.

I’m not giving anything away in saying that the story eventually returns to Ethan and Hannah, a half-century later, now played by Dennis Quaid and Peggy Lipton. We know what’s going to happen, the dog knows what’s going to happen, and it’s just a matter of waiting until the people catch up.

But doggarnit, if you don’t shed a few tears and crack a few smiles during “A Dog’s Purpose,” then there’s no hope for you.