The Facts Machine

"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"

Thursday, February 26, 2004

MEL GIBSON APPARENTLY VOTED FOR... GORE!

TFM reviews The Passion of the Christ


I had a big block of time in the middle of the day, and I used it to see Mel Gibson's vanity project The Passion of the Christ, center of all sorts of controversy in the last several months. And here's my review:

Short version: It's Kill Bill without the character development.

Short version #2: It's Christian S&M.

Slightly longer version: From the start of the 2nd hour, it's non-stop hot Jesus abuse action. And there's plenty in the first hour as well.

There are points in the movie where our hero (James "Jim" Caviezel) has taken so many lashes to all corners of his body that he is 90% blood and guts (and in a Hollywood first, visible ribs! thanks, guys!), and only 10% skin. You watch the carnage, and you have two thoughts, in order. Your first thought is, "why wont the Romans stop?" Then you recover your senses and arrive at the second thought, "why wont Mel stop?"

The Passion is a graphic, gory, violent movie, and not only that, it is consistently so, from start to finish. Given that it is a movie about a biblical character who, you know, said a lot of stuff, it is disappointing that whatever message Jesus has is drowned out by all the relentless torture and gore. When the crucifixion scene is suddenly interrupted by a flashback to a brief snippet from the Sermon on the Mount, the effect barely registers, because of how overwhelmed the audience is by the violence at that point.

Just yesterday I watched another movie known for its extensive violence, Oliver Stone's mid-90's flick Natural Born Killers. In that film there was plenty of violence, but the reasons for it were clear, and undeniably understood by the audience as playing into the larger themes of the movie. In The Passion, one gets the sense that Mel Gibson sat in a room with his staff and tried to figure out all kinds of cool, gross ways to whip, break, rip, and physically destroy a human being. It borders on sheer S&M. ("Hey guys, what if the whip gets stuck in his skin, and they have to rip it out hard, and there's a loud juicy rrrip! sound!" "Cool!")

The Passion proceeds with the assumption that its audience has a pretty good prior knowledge of the events described in the Gospels, and thus, it will not be particularly useful as a mass conversion tool. Besides, "that poor man sure went through a lot" wont win that many converts anyway.

But surely I enjoyed portions of it, right? Well yeah actually:

--The sequence involving Judas' death is very well done.

--The cinematography is outstanding, and the music, while a little much at times, is solid.

--I enjoyed Satan, even though the slow-motion walk-through-the-crowd thing he did during the whipping precisely mimics the walking done by William Wallace's dead wife in that other Gibson-directed movie.

--The single best scene in the movie is the cute flashback to a non-bloody and rather buff Jesus, doing his carpentry and flirting with his mother.

--Oh, and Monica Belucci is still very, very hot.

Other tidbits:

--Mother Mary. Damnit. She reminded me waaay too much of the mother in Monty Python's The Life of Brian. (I know, that's like saying Frodo reminds me of Link from "The Legend of Zelda", but hey)

--Among the previews before the movie was a film that starred none other than Willem DaFoe, and if you know why that's funny, then good for you!

But what of all that anti-semitism talk we've been hearing about?:

--My personal perspective is that the charges of anti-semitism are overblown. Maybe I don't have extensive enough knowledge of the details of the Gospels to be upset by anything I saw in the movie, but my sense is this: Jesus was a Jew who proposed a lot of new shit, and all the other Jews, who were down wit da old-school shit, got upset and wanted him out for primarily political reasons, and were the most vocal about it. He was a Jew in a Jewish society, so the people around him who wanted him dead had to be Jews, but conveying that in a movie isn't equivalent to being anti-semitic, not by a longshot.

I consider myself to be post-religious (like John Lennon circa 1966), and even if I were Jewish by birth (and I almost am, since my dad is Jewish), I wouldn't be upset by how someone depicted the way my people acted thousands of years ago. So maybe I'm not the best barometer for the tolerance level Gibson offers in The Passion, but it's my opinion nonetheless.

All that being said, the final word on The Passion will be on its unprecedented violence. It will work for some people (Christians, particularly hard-ass Catholics), but it will be nihilistic and sadistic to others. The movie is Christian porno, and since I'm not generally predisposed to Christian porno, I didn't get a divine woody.

But for now, let's all sit back, relax, and wait for the even gorier video game.

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