Look out! He's got a knife!

Splatterfest '04

So I went ahead and watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Passion of Christ back to back.

First, the good stuff. 'Saw was excellent. I'm a huge fan of the original - I reckon it's hands-down the best horror movie ever made - and I was convinced that this remake would be a travesty. It was really scary, it didn't attempt to recreate the un-recreatable moments from the original, the changes it made were mostly intelligent... I didn't like the very last scene, the framing scene, but man, the rest of it was more intense than any other recent horror movie I've seen. Good acting (someone FINALLY finds a good use for R. Lee Ermy!) and some truly disturbing gore, and the sparse humour was appropriately bleak instead of the jokey crap horror movies have been throwing at us recently.

The Passion of the Christ wasn't so good. The cinematography was lovely, the gore fx were outstanding (though the sound fx were overdone), it wasn't boring (which was my biggest worry), the acting was mostly excellent, especially James Caviezel as Jesus. The anti-semitism charges seemed pretty unjustified to me; there were as many bad Romans as bad Jews, and there were about as many good Jews as bad ones.

Especially the women. As Paul said coming out of the theatre, "I can see why the men wanted him crucified. All the women were hot for him!"

Historical accuracies abounded, and some major poetic license was taken (eg the devil, the raven). But then, that's movies for ya. Some of the storytelling was crap (it felt we were so familiar with the story that we didn't need any background, but it still felt the need to tell us some things three times) and there was a pedantic nature to its literalism. But it was okay - it didn't suck.

What really disturbs me is that some people are equating it with the Gospels, instead of treating it as just an interpretation. Here's a link to a page on the Catholic League's website.

The guts of this is brief quotes from people calling the movie sadistic and porographic, followed by this response from Catholic League president William Donohue:

“Christians need to take note of this mental goose-stepping, but they should also note that none of these savants found ‘Schindler’s List’ to be pornographic. What they find pornographic is the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. No doubt for some of them, the New Testament classifies as pornography as well. Indeed that is exactly what a Brooklyn rabbi told me to my face. At least now it’s out in the open.”

Well, shit. Schindler's List was not a movie devoted to showing anyone being relentlessly tortured, it was the story of some Jews being saved from the Holocaust, and The Passion of the Christ is not the New Testament, it is a filmic interpretation of the New Testament. Donohue isn't quite saying "Up yours Jew boy," but the only justification for the Schindler comparison seems to be that it deals with the torture and murder of Jews by the Nazis, just as the Passion deals with the torture and murder of Christ by the Romans under the behest of some Jews.

If you want a movie that really IS just Jews being tortured and murdered by the Nazis, there were plenty of them made in the '70s with titles like Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS and SS Experiment Camp and The Gestapo's Last Orgy. And they are very consciously sadistic pornography. I'm not comparing the Passion with those movies - the Passion can only really be compared with Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew - but the comparison with Schindler's List is no more valid.

So what's disturbing to me is that people will use this movie to push their own agenda, regardless of what the movie really is, or even what it was intended to be.

And as a movie it's not a patch on The Last Temptation of Christ. I could write a whole essay on that, but I'm not going to because who honestly gives a fuck what I think about that?

Posted by pearce at March 11, 2004 5:56 PM