Christians are compelled to like Mel's effort (they don't even have to love it). They can rationalize the brutal horror which gets into the area of being pornographic. They basically have to. However, the review in the
Christian Science Monitor does not agree:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0225/p13s01-almo.html
A bleak advocacy film is a more accurate description than "favorable."
LW - I concede your central point as I understand it: some will like this film, some will not.
The proof of the pudding will be how many return to see it again. I can't help believe that there is a fascination with the brutality on the level of stopping to see what has happened in a traffic accident. Everyone will have to search their own minds to objectively decide what they have derived from the movie. I don't need Mel to dissect the Bible for me. One of my closest friends is an Episcopalean Priest.
Haven't seen the film and don't have strong feelings about it one way or another. However the handwringing here about the violence just doesn't ring true - one does not hear all that about any of the many other films that show far worse, or, for that matter, about any of the videogames that are sold by the hundreds of thousands to children.
No one "needs" Mel Gibson to retell the story of the death of Christ or any other aspect of the bible. On can see the film or not as he or she chooses. None of the critics here have offered a believable (to me) explanation for the intensity of their criticism.
David Denby (New Yorker) on Gibson movie
This review covered my concerns pretty well.
Yup. For many on the far right, the the suffereing of the Christos is symbolic of the "suffering" they feel they experience from those who are "against them," namely blacks, Jews, Muslims, the "Elite," etc..... This film captures the "us against them" mentality quite well. At the end of the movie, when Jesus marches from the tombs to the beating of martial drums, there were several "yeah's" and 'right on's" remniscent of the cheers of a football fan out to "kick some ass."
There are no movies that are worse, plain and simple. This is the cruelest, bloodiest and and most sadomasochistic film ever to hit the screen. That argument holds about as much water as a sieve. Mel's intended message gets sidetracked or he wouldn't feel it necessary to explain it. His interviews are nothing but rationalisations on the defensive. The only offensive is the film itself.
(He's tipping over the edge of playing the martyr himself).
Hte only thing that might be comparable is underground japanese torture porn.
Lightwizard wrote:There are no movies that are worse, plain and simple. This is the cruelest, bloodiest and and most sadomasochistic film ever to hit the screen. That argument holds about as much water as a sieve. Mel's intended message gets sidetracked or he wouldn't feel it necessary to explain it. His interviews are nothing but rationalisations on the defensive. The only offensive is the film itself.
Haven't seen it so I can't tell. Your explanation does not inspire any confidence in the objectivity of your motives. Do you literally have the ability to identify the "... cruelist, bloodiest.... "etc. ? To some degree of course that could be the point of the story. What motivates your fury?
The effect of the movie reminds me somewhat of "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein" where the 3-D horror blood-and-guts (literally) effects are really played for laughs. I found myself in several sequences holding back laughing at the Mel's manipulations instead of crying.
Objectivity of my motives? What's that suppose to mean?
If you are talking about how the brutality is presented, it makes an excessively violent video game (your comparison) look like a picnic. It's, again, Mel's license to overkill.
Someone wrote in the inquiring photographer Gibson's next film will be Auschwitz the Jewish spa. Written by Mel and papa Hatton.
au, you're being funny.
That would be a good assignment for Mel (although he doesn't take assignments, he would like to be in control). He could show that the Holocaust horrors depicted in Spielberg's "Schindler's List" are exagerrated by showing Jews being coddled and massaged, fed the best Kosher food and made to work in soda fountains.
Ive got some titles for Mel's old movies considering the cranking up of the violence in "Passion:"
"Misunderstood Max"
"Dainty Weapon"
Andrew Sullivan, the conservative pundit's reaction to the film:
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Well, I went last night to see the movie everyone is talking about. I'm writing this not long after leaving the theater so these are my raw and immediate impressions - not a fully considered review. I was of course deeply moved in parts. If you are a person of the Christian faith, it is impossible not to be moved by a rendition of the passion of the Savior that is not a travesty. The very story itself, embedded in the soul and the memory, stirs the emotions and prayers and meditations of a lifetime. To see it rendered in a believable setting in languages that, however inaccurate, give you an impression of being there, is arresting. It brings this simple but awe-inspiring story to life in a way very difficult to approximate in the written or spoken word. You can see why Passion plays were once performed. The Gospels do end in extraordinary drama, pathos, plot, agony. Portraying them vividly may, we can hope, bring some people to read the Gospels and even to explore further what the redemptive message of Jesus really is.
PURE PORNOGRAPHY: At the same time, the movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it. It doesn't even evoke emotion in the audience. It is designed to prompt the crudest human pity and emotional blackmail - which it obviously does. But then it seems to me designed to evoke a sick kind of fascination. Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before. And you have to ask yourself: why? The suffering of Christ is bad and gruesome enough without exaggerating it to this insane degree. Theologically, the point is not that Jesus suffered more than any human being ever has on a physical level. It is that his suffering was profound and voluntary and the culmination of a life and a teaching that Gibson essentially omits. One more example. Toward the end, unsatisfied with showing a man flayed alive, nailed gruesomely to a cross, one eye shut from being smashed in, blood covering his entire body, Gibson has a large crow perch on the neighboring cross and peck another man's eyes out. Why? Because the porn needed yet another money shot.
GUTTING THE MESSAGE: Moreover, the suffering is rendered almost hollow by a dramatic void. Gibson has provided no context so that we can understand better who Jesus is - just a series of cartoon flashbacks. We cannot empathize with Mary fully or with Peter or John - because they too are mere props for the violence. The central message of Jesus - of love and compassion and forgiveness - is reduced to sound-bites. Occasionally, such as when the message of the sermon on the mount is juxtaposed with the crucifixion, the effect is almost profound - because there has been an actual connection between who Jesus was and what happened to him. But this is the exception to the rule. Watching the movie, you can see how a truly powerful rendition could have been made - by tripling the flashbacks and context, by providing a biography of Jesus, by showing us why he endured what he endured. Instead, all that context, all that meaning, has been removed for endless sickening gratuitous violence.
PILATE, THE SAINT: Is it anti-Semitic? The question has to be placed in the context of the Gospels and it is hard to reproduce the story without risking such inferences. But in my view, Gibson goes much further than what might be forgivable. The first scene in which Caiphas appears has him relaying to Judas how much money he has agreed to hand over in return for Jesus. The Jew - fussing over money again! There are a few actors in those scenes who look like classic hook-nosed Jews of Nazi imagery, hissing and plotting and fulminating against the Christ. For good measure, Gibson has the Jewish priestly elite beat Jesus up as well, before they hand him over to the Romans; and he has Jesus telling Pilate that he is not responsible - the Jewish elite is. Pilate and his wife are portrayed as saints forced by politics and the Jewish elders to kill a man they know is innocent. Again, this reflects part of the Gospels, but Gibson goes further. He presents Pilate's wife as actually finding Mary, providing towels to wipe up Jesus' blood, arguing for Jesus' release. Yes, the Roman torturers are obviously evil; yes, a few Jews dissent; and, of course, all the disciples are Jewish. I wouldn't say that this movie is motivated by anti-Semitism. It's motivated by psychotic sadism. But Gibson does nothing to mitigate the dangerous anti-Semitic elements of the story and goes some way toward exaggerating and highlighting them. To my mind, that is categorically unforgivable. Anti-Semitism is the original sin of Christianity. Far from expiating it, this movie clearly enjoys taunting those Catholics as well as Jews who are determined to confront that legacy. In that sense alone, it is a deeply immoral work of art.
The bit with the Marys wiping up the blood was so far from the realm of historicity I ejaculated out loud "You must be joking!" No second temple period Jew would have had anything to do with blood, especially on the Sabbath!
The other extreme example of gore for its own sake was the Longinus scene. I've placed chest tubes in people with severe thoracic trauma, and that amount of blood expressed from someone who has already lost a great deal of their blood volume is just impossible. It also leads to doubts about the "resurrection," since if he can expell so much blood under pressure, he isn't dead!
I just got back from the movie and I found it moving despite the violence in which I did hide my eyes. I think the movie would really only appeal to those who are Christians and who already believe in Jesus and his death and suffering in the first place. There were lots of parts that were not particular Biblical, but then most religious movies are not. I liked the flashbacks most of all, they were put in at just the right moments espeally the one when Jesus was on the cross and they flashed back to the Lords supper. I gotta admit, the kissing of Jesus's feet while he was on the cross was a bit much and not even biblical. I wouldn't mind seeing it again, chances are I will buy the movie when it comes out. But then again I am a Christian and a true believer so it would naturally appeal to me even the gory parts because the violence is part of the story and not to include it would not do the story justice. Jesus did suffer in the Bible, maybe not quite like it is portrayed in the movie, but it gets the message across.
There was one part where I thought Mel Gibson might of crossed the line a tad. Where he had Jesus having a conversation with Pilate and saying something to the effect that those who sent him to him were more guilty than Pilate was. Jesus hardly says anything when questioned right before his crucifixion in the Bible much less carries on a conversation affixing more blame to one group vs. another. So I guess I can see why some would think it is anti-semite because of that one line. There I think Mel Gibson added his own feelings rather than portraying Jesus.
Talking about that is a little sensitive in this day and age. But I have to admit that I don't understand why there is such contention over it. I mean if we say that the Germans guided by Hitler persecuted the Jews does that make us anti-Germans? Does that mean that we hate the Germans that live today or even hated the Germans that lived then? If we say that the white southerners kept slaves, does that make us anti-southerners? I am not saying that I believe that the Romans had no part in Jesus's death, they did according to the Bible, but the Jewish high priests did too and why would it make me an anti-semite if I say that? I don't hold against the Jews today nor do I even hold it against the Jews of the time. I can even understand it. They honestly felt that Jesus was a blashphemer for claiming to be the Son of God and by their laws they did what they felt was right. (Besides it was preordained.) I can more understand why the hight priest did what they did a lot more than I can understand why the Germans did what they did. But why does saying that make me an anti-semite? Why would the Pope in the 1960 something say that they believe that the Jews had no part in Jesus's death?
I guess because I just got back from seeing the movie I had all this on my mind. Sorry if I offended anyone I didn't mean to. I just find it puzzling.
