Word: pious
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Lies My Father Told Me. My friends all cried during this Canadian "I remember Grandpa" tale by Jan Kadar, set in a Jewish ghetto. Gramps rode the streets in a horse-drawn wagon, selling and buying rags, clothes, and bottles, and teaching his grandson, the narrator, to be simple, pious, etc. I found it lumpy and mediocre, with one of the most puerile scores ever written, but the atmosphere is pleasant, and you might sniffle a little when they take away Grandpa's horse and it kills him. Nasty, bad people...
That the church has been a pious fraud for centuries is no secret. What can more cogently point to its abnegation of moral authority than a serious consideration among the clergy of whether homosexuals can, apparently in good conscience, aspire to the pulpit? Why not prostitutes, too? After all, some of them may be "Christian believers...
...director's clear-eyed approach is further enhanced by the sharp acting of his cast. In the film's dominant performance, Voight shows Luke's pious arrogance as well as his tenderness; if the character were too sweet, he would be as gooey as Gershwin's Porgy. Fonda, though unconvincing in Sally's pre-liberation scenes, ultimately brings her character's horrifying internal conflicts to the surface...
...projects, King is far the better. Written and directed by the pious Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools), it makes a decent attempt to explain the meaning of a remarkable man's life. Audiences too young to remember the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s may find King a revelation. The struggles of Montgomery and Birmingham, of Selma and Chicago are all re-enacted with corrosive force. So, too, are the many efforts to block King's progress, whether by thugs or Southern sheriffs or J. Edgar Hoover. Against this tumultuous background...
...pilgrims of the spirit can avoid sounding cheaply pious or painfully oversincere. Dillard's literary salvation is tier sense of wonder and intensity. Sometimes she is ostentatious, as in her description of the Pacific coastline, "the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam." But at their best, Dillard's sentences have a clean, penetrating edge. "The higher Christian churches," she writes, "come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism. . . as though they knew what they were doing ... If God were to blast such a service to bits...