Posted on 02/24/2004 2:12:40 PM PST by Robert Teesdale
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:03:57 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Scripture please.
That picture bothers them .. but yet they don't have a problem watching someone's head get blown off??
I'm repeating the lessons I learned from sermons in church. I will do my best to research this and get you the scriptures.
No, I'm not. I'm asking him if he has any support for his belief about the alleged hypocrisy of film reviewers.
Why don't you try a Google search for any of the negative reviewers of the Passion and refer us to reviews where they objected to the gratuitous violence in pop culture movies.
Piece o' cake -- how about three?
"So it is with Gibson's so-called Passion, defined as the "agony and suffering of Jesus during the Crucifixion." Don't be deceived - this orgy of death is just another Grand Guignol for Jesuit patsies. ... No sex. All violence. Think of "The Passion" as S&M for Christians - Sadism for those who love to inflict pain and Masochism for those who love the pain. Watching a pretend Jesus suffering a pretended agony is about as twisted as it gets."(Uri Dowbenko is the author of the book "Hoodwinked: Watching Movies With Eyes Wide Open".)
-- Uri Dowbenko's review of Mel Gibson's "Passion""'Kill Bill' is the 21st century version of the Grand Guignol, gory special effects meant to titillate and shock. And ultimately bore. Hatchet in the head. A plank full of nails in the eye. ... 'Kill Bill' is the twisted expression of an arrested emotional and mental development. It's splatter-punk pornography for 14-year old boys, who don't understand psychological warfare or mind control. ... "If you was a moron, you could almost admire it," says a Texas cop looking at the carnage of the murdered wedding party in the movie. And sure enough, Time Magazine's in house moron Richard Corliss wrote a review which gushes at Tarantino's bad boy geek persona, "There's a daring, exhilarating spirit to the fights too," he writes. "These are gory production numbers, immediate but also abstract...Even the arcs of blood have the propulsion of crimson choreography." "Immediate but also abstract?" "Propulsion of crimson choreography?" Puh-leez. Corliss is so erudite and sophisticated Bet he can't wait for the remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And Quentin Tarantino? I ain't no psycho-pathologist, baby, but this is one sick puppy.
-- Uri Dowbenko's review of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill"
Or:
"In “The Passion of the Christ,” Mel Gibson shows little interest in celebrating the electric charge of hope and redemption that Jesus Christ brought into the world. He largely ignores Jesus’ heart-stopping eloquence, his startling ethical radicalism and personal radiance—Christ as a “paragon of vitality and poetic assertion,” as John Updike described Jesus’ character in his essay “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.” Cecil B. De Mille had his version of Jesus’ life, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese had theirs, and Gibson, of course, is free to skip over the incomparable glories of Jesus’ temperament and to devote himself, as he does, to Jesus’ pain and martyrdom in the last twelve hours of his life. As a viewer, I am equally free to say that the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony—and to say so without indulging in “anti-Christian sentiment” (Gibson’s term for what his critics are spreading). ... Gibson is so thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ, and so meagrely involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus’ message of love into one of hate."Or:
-- David Denby's review of Gibson's "Passion""We know that the non-stop violence is not meant to be real....Yet Tarantino is working in a photographic medium, and the real-world associations are not so easy to shrug off....The movie is what's formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap. Saying that it's an homage to long-established genres in Hong Kong doesn't reduce its pop-nihilistic stupidity."
-- David Denby's review of Tarantino's "Kill Bill"
"With “The Passion of the Christ” Mel Gibson doesn’t redefine the religious film so much as he redefines overkill. ... Christ’s horrible and excruciating death wasn’t enough for Gibson and writing collaborator Benedict Fitzgerald. They find ways to make crucifixion even more sadistic: After nailing Jesus to the cross, the Romans drop him flat on his face a few times before driving the cross into the ground. Earlier, after the Romans have finished scourging him, Jesus looks like the result of an explosion in a butcher’s shop. The brutality begins right away. As soon as they arrest Jesus in Gethsemane, the temple guards repeatedly belt him in the face, then drop him off a bridge and dangle him from the chains that bind him. These preliminary beatings do not occur in any of the four Gospels. ... That’s when they reach for the cat o’ nine tails and filet him for perhaps the 10 bloodiest minutes in film history. Why would Jesus need to prove how tough he was to these soldiers? Was he wearing a wristband with initials that stood for “What Would Rambo Do?” ... Gibson’s dedication to violence turns bizarre. Immediately after one of the thieves being executed alongside Jesus taunts him, a crow swoops down and devours his eyes. This happens even though Jesus already has said, “Forgive them, Father, for they don’t know what they do.”... Be warned: If “The Passion” weren’t based on a Bible story, it almost certainly would be rated NC-17.(Westhoff has written a very good overview of all available prior "life of Jesus" films here: "Screen Savior: Films about Jesus have ranged from sacred to profane ... to downright silly.")
-- Jeffrey Westhoff's review of Gibson's "Passion""We should all have Quentin Tarantino's racket. He is the Madonna of the film world: He's more shallow than talented, but he excels at promoting himself while stretching the limits of how much violence and offensive language can be tolerated in mainstream entertainment. That's enough for half the cinematic world to consider him a genius. ... "Kill Bill" is also Tarantino's most meaningless work, a union of two forms of schlock that tickled his fancy during his 1970s adolescence: kung fu movies and detective shows. ... And Tarantino's idea of paying tribute to old kung fu movies is to behead or dismember a few hundred extras and have the blood spurt like Old Faithful – it's Cecil B. DeMille's version of the Black Knight fight from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," minus any sense of humor. "Kill Bill" is too gory and played too straight to work as a comedy. ... It's pity to see such great acting wasted on a character that is just the plaything of a stunted adolescent filmmaker getting paid millions to revisit his toy box."
-- Jeffrey Westhoff's review of Tarantino's "Kill Bill"
Google "Kill Bill" and compare the reviews it received with the same reviewers views of "The Passion." I can only find praise for the violence in "Kill Bill."
See my post #64.
People have forgotten just how violent the Romans were. Holywierd hasn't reminded them in many, many years.
The Roman lash was often more like a cat of nine tails - a handle with multiple whips. The whips themselves might have chunks of bone, metal and glass tied into the cords. An expert with such a device could remove most of the flesh from a man's back in a single stroke and pull. I am told that most did not survive the thirty nine lashes. That is not hard to imagine between the shock, blood loss and the damage to vital internal organs. The pain would be unimaginable to most of us. The fact that Jesus survived to carry His cross at all was a miracle.
There is one other bit of information the soldier handling the whip was looking for during the scourging. He would listen for the convicted criminal to name his accomplices. If names were named, the soldier or soldiers would lighten up on the lashes. If the prisoner refused to speak, the lash would be laid on heavier and heavier. Jesus had no accomplices, but He was covering for someone. It was you and me. He could have said, "Mike did it! It wasn't me!". He would have been absolutely right in making that statement. But His love for us held His tongue and He endured the beating in silence.
The punishment Jesus endured should have been yours and mine. Spiritually we were dead. We could not help ourselves. We could not even ask for help. The sin nature we inherited from Adam and Eve separated us from God. The punishment for sin had to be paid and we could never have finished paying the debt. As we continue the walk to the cross, we will see more of how that price was paid on our behalf.
"The Passion of the Christ is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it."
A.O. Scott, NY TIMES on Passion
"...near-pornographic violence and concerns about its potential to incite anti-Semitism..."
"The Passion of the Christ is the work of a Christian traditonalist....takes the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as literal truth."
Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter on Passion
"Gibson's obsessive need to zoom in and linger on bloodletting, although this makes it difficult to watch. It's awful..everything he knows about storytelling has been swept aside by proselytizing zeal."
Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle, on Passion
I saw the film over the weekend. There are so many scenes absent in the Gospel because the Gospels were second to Cathrine Emmerich's lurid fantasies, as source material. I felt the movie was powerful and effective, but the exaggerated scourging scenes coupled with the all too brief flashbacks were both distractions.
Pilate was sending a clear message to the Jews: you f**k with Rome and you get THIS. The Jews did not listen and within the century, the 2nd Temple was destroyed and they were scattered to the far winds of the earth. Pity they followed a hothead like BarKochba into disaster instead of biding their time and working with Rome like the other colonies. The history of the Jews would have been very very different.
While there's no doubt that some reviewers will find certain uses of violence in film to be done more successfully than others, that doesn't help support the original claim unless one can find an example of a reviewer lauding a particular use of violence in a film precisely *because* it's "gratuitous and totally pointless".
I'm not trying to. It's just that when he chooses to throw in the absolutes of "only" and "totally", it doesn't seem nitpicking to presume that he means them. I probably would have passed over his post without replying if he hadn't made it so strongly overgeneralized.
In my opinion, "Kill Bill" was gratititous and totally pointless as a whole. (I admit that I have that opinion without ever having seen it - I don't have to.)
I haven't seen it either, but I'm not about to say "I don't have to" in order to make conclusions about it. :-) Plus it's the first part of two, and the second part isn't out yet, so I'm not sure if anyone is yet in a position to judge whether the full work will be "totally pointless" or not.
In general, these particular reviewers complain "The Passion" is bad because of violent content, but the violence in "Kill Bill" is thrilling.
Violence (or any other film attribute) can be effective or ineffective depending on how well it's used, it's not just a matter of what end it's being used for, or "how much" there is.
I've read several dozen reviews of "the Passion", but I don't recall any that simply said that the film "is bad because of violent content", per se. Instead, most of the comments seem to be saying that it may have missed its mark by spending too much attention to the violence and not enough to the story, and/or that the amount (and especially the realism) of the violence is so extreme as either numb some audience members, or distract them from the narrative.
As for "Kill Bill", most reviews seem to give it a "pass" on the violence because the violence is done in an intentionally ridiculous way, and that it's a parody/homage to the violent Hong Kong films it's inspired by.
I haven't seen either film, but my point is that the reviews themselves give more complex reasons for their differing reviews than some people have given them credit for. It's not as simple as some movie critic judging things in such black-and-white terms as "violence is good" or "violence is bad".
Seems hypocritical to me.
It would only be hypocritical if the critics had declared that they always thought violence was a good thing in any film -- except this one. But in all the film reviews I've seen, the actual question is, does it work in a given film's specific context, and in the manner in which it was employed? For some films the answer will be yes, and for some it will be no.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.