Warner Bros. Pictures

"The Blind Side."

"The Blind Side" was removed from the shelves of one of the nation’s leading Christian retail chains after a pastor complained of profanity and a racial slur used in the film, and the decision has sparked debate within the community.

Even though the Oscar-winning movie has been off the shelves at LifeWay Christian Stores for more than a month, writers are still weighing in, and more often than not they are ridiculing the decision.

On Friday, for example, televangelist Rod Parsley wrote that LifeWay was sending an “ominous” and “unbiblical message” that Christians “must be sheltered from the world’s realities.”

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"The Blind Side," of course, is based on the true story of Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy, a white, well-to-do Christian couple who adopted Michael Oher, an oversized black teenager from a Memphis ghetto. Oher became a star college football player at Ole Miss and now plays in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens.

The film earned Sandra Bullock an Oscar for best actress and raked in $256 million at the domestic box office, and Hollywood has made a few attempts at emulating its success, as with "Soul Surfer," about a surfer who credits her Christian faith for her comeback after a shark chews her arm off. The TriStar Pictures film with an $18 million production budget brought in $44 million at the domestic box office.

It was widely understood that Christians were near-universal in their embrace of "The Blind Side" and their hope was that it would encourage copycat product from Hollywood, though LifeWay‘s decision throws some water on that notion.

The 165 LifeWay stores are operated by LifeWay Christian Resources, a non-profit entity that had been criticized for more than a year by Rodney Baker, a Florida pastor who objected to some of the language in the PG 13-rated "Blind Side."

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As the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting approached last month, where the SBC was set to make The Rev. Fred Luter the first black president in its history, Baker pressed for a resolution that “expresses dissatisfaction with 'The Blind Side' and any product that contains explicit profanity, God’s name in vain, and racial slur.”

LifeWay, which had resisted complaints by Baker in the past, decided to defuse the issue by yanking the movie from its store shelves. While vague in the statement it emailed to The Hollywood Reporter, it seemed that LifeWay was mostly motivated by the negative depiction of some of the black characters in "Blind Side," as well the single use of a racial slur.

“After selling the movie for nearly two years, LifeWay decided last month to stop carrying it because of the likelihood it would be the focus of debate and division at our annual denominational meeting,” LifeWay said. “We were electing the Southern Baptist Convention’s first African-American president and did not want to distract from that historic moment.”

Warner Home Video forwarded THR's request for comment to a Time Warner corporate spokesperson, who did not respond.

After Luter was elected in June 19, he told the Christian Post that he supported Baker’s efforts and LifeWay’s decision to pull the DVD from its stores and its website, where a search for "The Blind Side" today instead delivers a description of Oher’s book, "I Beat the Odds."

And despite Luter’s defense of LifeWay, the controversy remains lively.

Christian author Eric Metaxas, who has written scripts for "Veggie Tales," wrote this month that he was “kind of upset” at LifeWay.

“I think it’s insane,” he wrote. “For outsiders looking in, the moral of the story is that ‘there is no pleasing Christians. They always seem to be looking for something to be mad about.’”

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Later, John Stonestreet of The Point Radio, warned that LIfeWay’s actions could discourage talented filmmakers from telling meaningful Christian stories.

“As Christians, we too often dismiss good art and accept mediocre substitutes just because they’re labeled ‘Christian.’ We’ve created for ourselves a kind of ‘artistic ghetto,’ and are willing to preserve it even at the cost of quality,” Stonestreet said.

At the Christian Post, columnist Jim Denison asked: “If Christians shouldn’t see 'The Blind Side,'  what movies depicting life in our culture should we see? If Christian publications have uniformly endorsed the movie, why are Southern Baptists deciding three years after its release to make this an issue?”

Not all the online feedback was negative, though. The Berean Library, a site that claims to identify false teaching in Christian bookstores, praised the decision, claiming that "Blind Side" was blasphemous and not deserving of a spot on LifeWay’s limited shelf space.

“Seeing its weak, watered-down, warm and fuzzy, you-can-be-a-success-in-life teaching about the gospel faith was a bummer,” a blogger wrote of Blind Side. “Hopefully, the true gospel is living in this family’s life. However, I did not get that impression from the movie.”

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François Duhamel / AP

Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) plots an elaborate scheme to try and understand his father's 9/11 death in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."

REVIEW

Emotional fluency and literary pretense go hand in hand in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," an affecting, well-acted tale of 9/11 trauma and a boy's effort to piece things together after his father's death. A self-conscious prestige project with weighty thematic elements, a tony literary pedigree and top-tier actors, director Stephen Daldry's fourth film is dominated by the performance of a 13-year-old with no previous acting experience, Thomas Horn, who enables his character's pinball intellect and inchoate emotions to pulse through every scene. While the subject matter will keep some prospective viewers away, many who do come will be emotionally wrenched by the treatment of loss and the interplay between parents and child, indicating good commercial prospects in most markets.

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“The worst day” is how young Oskar Schell (Horn) understandably refers to 9/11, the day his jeweler father perished in one of the twin towers while there for a meeting. As seen in multiple flashbacks, Oskar and his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) shared an unusually close relationship, with the dad concocting all manner of intellectually challenging games and propositions his son happily took up. His mother (Sandra Bullock) played no part in this and their distance from one another has not diminished in the year since his death, the vivid memory of which is preserved by a series of six progressively agitated phone messages from Thomas on the fateful morning that his son continues to play.

On the basis of his first two novels, "Everything Is Illuminated" and this one, which was published in 2005, Jonathan Safran Foer is a word wizard partial to bulgingly significant material and highly contrived narrative constructs of a sort that would never occur to a writer plotting an original screenplay. In this case, said invention is an odyssey on foot Oskar embarks upon throughout all the boroughs of New York to track down every individual with the last name “Black” (472 of them in all), for the reason that he found a key among his father's possessions with that name attached to it. He is convinced that, if he can find the matching lock, he will find or learn something of great significance about his father.

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This trek is something one can more readily accept on the page than onscreen, especially as in a book you don't actually have to listen to Oskar carrying a tambourine everywhere he goes or see him wearing an Israeli gas mask in the subway. Fortunately, at a certain point he begins to be accompanied by a mysterious old man who has recently moved into a room across the way at the apartment of his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell). The man, known only as The Renter (Max von Sydow), doesn't speak, and instead writes down anything he has to communicate on slips of paper. Oskar does manage to learn that the rangy old fellow was born in Germany and that his parents died in the bombing of Dresden, but the man won't address the reason for his silence. Oskar reasonably suspects The Renter is his grandfather but proof is not forthcoming.

The pair's road trip to the nooks, crannies and far-flung outposts of New York City represents the film's highlight. From Queens to Staten Island and everywhere in between, parts of the city are seen that represent the astounding range and variety of its inhabitants. None of them, of course, knows anything about the key, but the odd relationship between the two temporary companions is a delight, as Oskar rattles on about this and that and The Renter reacts with everything from bemusement to angry annoyance. Best of all, von Sydow is absolutely wonderful, with the great veteran actor clearly relishing this very unusual role as he darts, skulks and, in a stealthy way, mugs across town. Without saying a thing, he dominates the middle part of the movie.

The other adult actor who's terrific here is Jeffrey Wright, as the figure who unsuspectingly awaits Oskar toward the end of his journey. Portraying a man harboring his own pain and disappointments, Wright has one long scene of incredible emotional delicacy and transparency in which he once again proves his position among the very top American actors.

Screenwriter Eric Roth and Daldry shuffle the chronological and emotional deck, slipping in past moments between father and son as well as incremental revelations of what Thomas experienced the morning of 9/11, all the while building to flashback revelations by the mother that, again, are harder to believe when depicted on film than when merely described in a book. More important, however, is the the crescendo of feeling the filmmakers have deftly engineered, a wave of such cumulative weight that, when it breaks, it will wipe a lot of viewers out. Whatever reservations one might have about various elements of the story, it's clear that such an effective climax can only have been achieved through the very skillful balancing and timing of elements by the writer, director and editor.

Through it all, the dominating presence is Horn as Oskar. A non-professional discovered when he won "Kids Jeopardy" on television (he has also been a repeated finalist in the National Geographic Geography Bee), Horn has torrents of complicated, verbose, highly charged dialogue to reel off, is paired with a host of extremely accomplished actors, is in virtually every scene and must be entirely convincing as a bright, driven, emotionally convulsed kid who is likely on the outer edges of the spectrum of either austism or Asperger's Syndrome. For all these reasons, it is entirely possible that some will find him annoyingly precocious. Given his real-life accomplishments, it's likely Horn is just as articulate and intellectually advanced as Oskar is supposed to be and is therefore a perfect fit for the role. Whatever the case, it's an exceptional natural performance, entirely convincing and exhilarating to experience.

The elimination of the Schell family's Jewish background, reportedly a result of casting decisions, feels unnatural, given their history and the context. Some repeated images of the father's likely fate on 9/11 are also jarring.

Top-billed but filling what are actually supporting roles, Hanks gives the father an eccentric side that aptly complements his son's personality, while Bullock necessarily cuts an opaque figure as the disconnected mother until very close to the end. Viola Davis is very good in her brief role as one of the “Blacks” Oskar encounters on his rounds.

Production-wise, the film is immaculate, from Chris Menges' lustrous cinematography and K.K. Barrett's spot-on production design to Alexandre Desplat's multi-flavored score.

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