Nothing could be more offensive then the movie itself. Roeper and Ebert were on tonight because of the Oscar show and timidly defended their two thumbs up. They copped out to the controversy on the pornographic violence as being healthy. We shall see.
After writing that post, I went back to the Bible and read the four gospels. Actually while Mel Gibson did add a lot to the movie that wasn't in the Bible, he got that one part right about the conversation between Jesus and Pilate.
After seeing this film - in all of its bloody and tortuous glory - I've decided it would be more aptly named
Kill Bill: The Jesus Version. Or, perhaps,
The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.
Thats what it amounts too - a venue for gratuitous violence neatly packaged as a religious/historical film.
If Gibson wanted to send a message to the masses about his Christian faith, you'd think he would make a film about the mercy, love, or moral charecter of Christ. Instead, he focuses exclusively on the last excruciating hours of his life and passes it off as something meaningfull. Bulls
hit.
If anybody still thinks it was a excercise in religious devotion alone, I suggest you
check out this site. Rest assured, Mel Gibson is praying all the way to the bank.
We all know that Hollywood has a way of duplicating success. With Passion being such a box-office hit, we can expect a flood of similar films in the near future. This obvious question being: Who would you like to see tortured for two hours next?
If they could make a
Passion of Anne Coulter, or better yet,
The Passion of Mel Gibson's Ego, I would pay too see that.
As to the whole anti-semitism debate: I have to agree that the Jewish over-reaction will instigate to more anti-Semitism than the film alone ever could.
Haven't seen it yet, but Mrs. cav got a free pass to see it in L.A., where she is now. I am looking forward to her opinion. Personally, I'll take Kevin Smith's Dogma over The Passion, from what I've heard, any day.
I agree that advocating censorship of what is already in the Bible regarding anti-Semitism is anathema. However, the several cinematic tricks like flashing on the Jews with hook noses and making them purposefully look diabolical is disingenuous and unfortunate. It is the omnipotence of the Christian church that is believed by Mr. Gibson and others that is also unfortunate. There are other religions -- get used to it. They believe just as fervently in their religions.
Dogma may be one of the most theologically accurate films ever made.
On a somewhat related topic.
************************
Divine Light?
A new book seeks God in the details of quantum physics
02/28/04
DALE SHORT, Contributing Writer
"If this light bothers you, we can sit somewhere else," Lee Baumann tells me. We've just settled onto the couch of his suburban living room, and the big picture window is blazing with late-afternoon sunshine.
"Light is fine with me," I tell him. And because light is generally no big deal, neither of us realizes the irony of the exchange.
The premise of Baumann's new book is that light is a big deal. In fact, he asks, what if light is... quite literally... God?
On first approach, the idea sounds like the kind of musing that rises with the smoke of a hookah at a late-night gathering of grad students convened in a shabby apartment to debate the mysteries of the universe.
Which is why, Baumann explains, he's spent 20 years assembling his evidence: experiments in quantum physics textbooks, and quotes from some of the great scientific minds of our time. The result is the book God at the Speed of Light: The Melding of Science and Spirituality.
The concept is spurring discussion on Internet boards and (by sheer chance, according to the author) has even infiltrated Hollywood. The director of the network TV series Joan of Arcadia credits Baumann's book as one of a handful that influenced her concept of the show: a modern takeoff on the Joan of Arc story, about a small-town teenage girl who is regularly visited by God.
How did Baumann arrive at his God-as-light theory? In a word, slowly.
"I grew up in a fundamentalist church," he says, "but in childhood I had some experiences that started me questioning the idea of a higher intelligence, and in college I questioned it even more."
Baumann is a trim, 40-ish man with graying hair and a short beard, and the cadences of his speech sound, not like a preacher, but rather a physician or teacher, both of which he happens to be. He left private practice to work as a corporate consultant in the medical field.
"By the time I began my clinical practice, I was definitely a religious skeptic. But over the years, when I'd read books about physics and about near-death experiences, I kept pulling out all these spiritual or supernatural elements, trying to classify them, which eventually led to writing the book."
In a nutshell, Baumann's argument deals with what he calls "the three omni's":
"Light has been proven to be omnipresent, which means it's everywhere in the universe at once. And as an entity for which time doesn't exist, light is omniscient because it's aware of everything in past, present and future.
"For the third part, light's omnipotence, I have to take physicists at their word because it's a very complex concept. But basically, when scientists try to measure the energy levels of electrons or atoms, they come up with infinities, which makes the equation meaningless.
"They have to perform what Stephen Hawking calls a 'mathematical trick' to eliminate the infinity aspect and let the equation work. The technique is called 're-normalization.' You can find out more about it on the Internet, but basically it means that light appears to have infinite energy.
"And of course, omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence are the same qualities that we use to describe a supreme being. Add the fact that people who undergo near-death experiences repeatedly experience the sensation of entering into a great light, and the concept is just very convincing for me. Very logical."
This is probably a good time for a brief public service message, for readers who are over 40: If you haven't kept up closely with developments in science since you finished school, your concept of how the universe works is as obsolete as the eight-track tape and the vacuum tube.
The orderly cosmos described in our old science textbooks was the brainchild of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous deviser of the theory of gravity (apple falling from tree, etc.) and father of the many universal laws that proceeded from it. Today's textbooks refer to his immensely influential view of things as "the Newtonian universe." Think of that system as a place for every galaxy, and every galaxy in its place.
But then came the 20th century, which gave us Albert Einstein and ushered in the branch of physics known as quantum mechanics. Einstein and his colleagues made literally earth-shaking discoveries that (a) brought us atomic weapons, and (b) poked Newton's theories full of black holes. The same mathematical formula that made possible Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed us a drastically revised world that, at the level of the atom, is all but incomprehensible to a logical mind.
In this new universe, order and symmetry and the neat proofs of geometry are, it turns out, not the rule but the exception. Light and matter coexist, uneasily, with pockets of anti-matter so dense they consume even light rays into their black maw.
The very unpredictability of physical events has become its own branch of science, known as "chaos theory," and detailed for the lay reader in James Gleick's popular book Chaos.
This frightening and confusing universe is not some random speculation, Baumann emphasizes, but is drawn from the known facts as the world's leading experts now understand them.
"I admit, the concepts are so far out they don't make any sense," he says. "So a little humility goes a long way, for all of us. You always have to be prepared to change your hypotheses. But the main concepts have been accepted now for decades, and this is the best knowledge we have."
The notion of light being "aware" of anything, much less the future, sounds to the skeptic like a touchy-feely, New Age invention. But it's proven scientific fact.
Baumann's book gives an overview of two historic physics experiments performed to determine the nature of light. One, the "double slit" experiment, proved that light waves behave differently when they're being studied than they do in isolation. The other, known as the "quantum eraser," went a step further, showing that light waves can actually anticipate future experiments and alter their behavior accordingly, "which, from a Newtonian standpoint," Baumann adds, "is something that could never, ever occur."
The larger implications of light's metaphysical shenanigans are even more mind-boggling. In God at the Speed of Light, Baumann introduces the concept with an analogy from physicist Nick Herbert:
One of the main quantum facts of life is that we radically change whatever we observe. Legendary King Midas never knew the feel of silk or a human hand after everything he touched turned to gold. Humans are stuck in a similar Midas-like predicament: we can't directly experience the true texture of reality because everything we touch turns to matter.
In other words, our everyday lives are technically an illusion. The objects and surfaces that we perceive as real are only the temporary intersection of our consciousness with the "true" universe, made entirely of energy.
"Which raises the question of this wooden floor," Baumann adds, tapping it with his heel. "If we weren't here looking at it, would this floor still exist? Well, it would, but it exists only as a nebulous, ill-defined mass of wave forms. It's not until some type of measurement or observation occurs, and you have what's called 'the collapse of the wave function,' that the nebulous mass of waves solidify into concrete, particulate matter."
Likewise, Baumann had no idea that the publication of his book (by the A.R.E. Press, which stands for Association for Research and Enlightenment, part of a Virginia foundation honoring the work of the famous clairvoyant Edgar Cayce) had solidified into the consciousness of a TV mogul until he was searching the Internet last fall for mentions of God at the Speed of Light.
One of the Google hits was the text of an interview with Barbara Hall, a Hollywood insider best known for her role in creating such shows as E.R., Chicago Hope, and Northern Exposure, promoting her new TV series Joan of Arcadia.
"I was totally blown over," Baumann recalls. "She named my book as one of a few that had helped inspire her to create the new series. Since then, things have just gone wild with the book's reception. It's been great."
He makes it a point to catch every episode of Joan, and so far he's impressed: "It's great family entertainment, and it has a good spiritual basis, good values. And of course, the actors are phenomenal - Mary Steenburgen, Joe Mantegna, and all the rest.
"I think there's really been a hunger for spiritual subjects since 9-11," Baumann says. "People are viewing their priorities in a new light. If they weren't questioning their lives before, they began to when they saw the scope of that tragedy. Why would a loving God allow something like this to happen?"
But Baumann's concept of God as omnipresent, familiar light which, at the moment of death, steers our true path home to the afterlife raises troubling questions of its own.
Such as: If a tunnel of light is the typical near-death experience, what do blind people see when they die?
Baumann doesn't hesitate. "There's a writer named Kevin Williams, who's compiled an extensive collection of case histories on his website neardeath.com, and it turns out that blind people see light, just as sighted people do."
So if light is God, why does too much God give us skin cancer?
This time, Baumann hesitates. "Good question. Light definitely has destructive properties, especially the ultraviolet spectrum, which is part of light," he says. "On the other hand, lasers are a form of light too, and they're used in medicine today to destroy those same kinds of cancerous growths. I don't know. It's hard for me to relate destructive qualities to a loving God."
And perhaps the biggest question of all: if light actually represents good and darkness represents evil, what about recent data that suggests the universe has far more dark material than light? Is goodness, by definition, a losing battle?
"Another excellent question," Baumann says. "I'm still struggling with that. One thing I've found fascinating is that scientists have examined regions of space that are total darkness in a total vacuum, and they've found that each cubic meter of darkness contains more than 400 million photons. They're non-visible photons, electromagnetic radiation. But they're light particles still, in total darkness.
"Could black holes be the evil of the universe? It's an interesting theory, but obviously nobody has the answer. I suspect it's just a matter of time until someone finds sound scientific answers to that. But right now, it's just speculation."
A typical audience at one of Baumann's lectures on the subject, these days, is composed of some true believers who share with him, afterward, their own near-death experiences - as well as some true skeptics, who tell him he makes some interesting points but they can't quite buy his theory.
"That's fine," he says. "They're in the same place I was, many years ago. I mean, most of these physics concepts are so unbelievable that no rational human being can accept them, the first time around. I reviewed some of these experiments thoroughly, 15 or 20 times, before I finally understood what the ramifications were.
"All I ask is that people keep an open mind."
Baumann's next book, which he's researching now, is another foray into the intersection of the scientific and the spiritual. It's a medical analysis of the trance-state "readings" done in the first half of the 20th century by Edgar Cayce, the clairvoyant whose foundation published God at the Speed of Light.
"Cayce is a fascinating figure," Baumann says, "and fortunately he was smart enough to hire a stenographer to document every trance state he was in, some 8,000 or 9,000 of them. Basically, in this self-induced hypnosis he was able to access the, for lack of a better word, collective unconscious, the source of all knowledge in the universe. He would diagnose, at a distance, people with medical conditions and prescribe treatments, some of them so futuristic that, even now, alternative medical groups are having trouble accepting them. But his success rate, at times, was phenomenal."
All of Cayce's readings are available on the Internet and CD-ROM. Baumann has actually traveled several times to the library in Virginia Beach to see the original hard copy.
"When they published my book, I barely knew who Cayce was, and now I'm really caught up in the implications of his work," Baumann says. "I'm beginning to believe there's no such thing as serendipity."
He laughs and squints out the window into the sunlight, sitting there with God smeared all across his face.
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A fascinating find, c.i.
"Dogma" is as accurate as a satire as Mel's film is to any Christian theology. Yet it would be an even more bitter pill for the faithful to swallow. Apparantly they can swallow a two hour snuff film about Jesus.
It slays me that Smith got death threats from right-wing Christians for Dogma, but they are happy to go watch Passion. It amazes me that Americans are perfectly content to watch unspeakable violence ad nauseum, but god forbid a rubber poop monster (or perhaps a breast) shows up on the screen.
I'd forgotten all about the Golgothan!
georgeob1 wrote: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.
Bingo.
georgeob1 wrote: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.
The tortured logic you attack is needed when you lack any real argument. Those condemning Gibson's film can't just come out against his right to make it or the right of others to choose to see it, and though they don't mention it they know that every complaint they have made about this movie could be made about 100 others. The reality is that many people dislike this movie because it is about Christ and created by a devout believer. Devout belief is to them something to be ridiculed, distrusted, and (I suspect) to be envied.
They complain "who is Gibson to tell me who Christ was, or to tell me this story in this way?" The answer of course is that none of you have to "listen" to Gibson's telling at all. But for some reason you seem to want to complain that OTHERS might listen. You seem to want to tell them that they shouldn't. Why? I don't get it. Get over yourselves.
It's a movie. 
You seem to want to tell who they shouldn't do what? That's right, it's only a movie -- those who have read the reviews will make up their own mind whether to see it or not. Those who haven't and go into the film blind will make their own assessment based on their own mind. I don't see where anyone here is trying to deter anyone from seeing the picture because it's about Christ and any attempt to read someone's mind is pure sophistry. Mel has publicly declared his motives and the result has put doubt in many reviewer's minds as to where his head is at. Anyone can choose to discard thoe opinions or they can also see the rationality in the critical assessment.
ILZ
The 24" nail has Isiah 53:5 written on it. Does that make it a hand or a foot nail. Oh sorry its 2 feet.
Weekend Box Office Estimates (U.S.)
Feb 27 - 29 weekend View Last Week's Actuals
Ranking: 1 - The Passion of The Christ
Distributer: NEWMARKET
Gross Cumulative: $76,200,576
Gross Release: $117,538,465
Weeks # of release: 1
Theaters: 3043
I guess there is a vast untouched market of people who want to see movies with a theme other than naked breasts, car chases, revisionist history or mocking of God.
Yes, they went to see "The Return of the King" which also won 11 Oscars. I very much doubt that the film will top off a billion dollars in box office, the sum of the three parts of LOTR. There are plenty of products out there that are not from the Hollywood machine. "Passion" is slick and good looking and bears resemblance to a typical blockbuster than, say, "City of God" which is leagues above it in quality.
The question is why so many went to see it -- I've offered reasons why and I'm sure we will see others. Ebert believe the controversy was healthy for the film industry. It is true the industry and the movie-going public have become complacent to expect the obvious at their local cineplex. They stayed away from a perfectly fine film "Master and Commander," the epitome of the genre. They are doomed to get what they expect and because of the big box office, "Passion" may qualify in that category more than it qualifies as being unique. It's violence is over-the-top but not unique because you can find the same thrill in many movies and video games if thats what you are looking for (not as eye searing as this Gibson outing, however).
I'm curious how many who seem to want to defend Gibson have actually seen the film. If you haven't, I suggest you are operating on borrowed opinions.
LW - Why is the question "why they went to see it"?
