U2Bama said:
Likewise, there is the irony/hypocrisy of those who praised Tarantino's work as "art" yet dismiss Gibson's "The Passion" as excessive violence. I personally don't have a problem with violent films, as I enjoy many cheesy horror films from the 80s, but I would suggest that some of the otherwise culturally prudish types who will accept the violence in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, SCHINDLER'S LIST and even BRAVEHEART (while renouncing others) is because these films are potrayed in a historic context. I admit that I don't keep up with Tarantino and his films, but are any of his "gratuitously violent" works based on historical events?
~U2Alabama
well, but this is the point of Tarantino. he takes violence and gore and makes you laugh at it, which is in itself an artistic move. it's waaaay to long for me to get into here, but i would say that Tarantino is excessively violent, but i dont have a problem with it because it has no pretentions about it -- it's sometimes a joke, sometimes commentary, and sometimes devoid of meaning. all these are totally appropriate within a postmodern film context, an amoral univese within which Trantino operates. it's all so ironic that the violence isn't even violence, really -- there's not much pain, not much suffering ... i think of Kill Bill, and by the end i was in hysterics as the blood spurted all over the place, gushing as if it were from a firehose, and it was all so unrealistic (and all so breathtakingly virtuosic from a filmmaking perspective) that it was impossible to take seriously. it was a cartoon, more than anything else.
i do think, then, that there are comparisons to be made not with Tarantino, but with "the passion" and "private ryan" or "black hawk down."
first, it's not just Gibson as a director, but Gibson as an actor who is obsessed with pain and suffering. think of the torture scene in the first Lethal Weapon. think of "when we were soldiers." many of Gibson's characters inhabit brutal, violent worlds where violence is often a justified response to other bad things. and as a director, and especially with braveheart -- let's not forget, the final scene is of a disembowelment and beheadding -- and to another level with "the passion," Gibson is about violence and suffering and appears highly intereted in these subjects.
which is fine. he's a director, and i do think he's rather skilled, as both a director and as an actor -- example, he was a very fine Hamlet waaay back in 1990 in the Ziferelli verison.
so this begs the question -- why make a movie on Jesus, and focus to a pornographic extent (and by pornography i mean the reduction of the human to merely flesh) on the violence of Jesus' last hours on earth, especialy when the historical justification for such extreme suffering is tendentious at best (as has been pointed out here.
again, i haven't seen the film, so i'm just trying to provoke dialogue. as someone who aspires to make films, and really grapples with issues of violence in films since i don't like violence at all though i think it can be justiifed -- for example, while i thought SPR was fine, i thought "black hawk down" was more violent than it had to be ... the suffering of the characters was equated with their masculinity, whereas in SPR the violence was characterized much more accuately, in my view, by the ferocity of the randomness and the randomness of the ferocity (the only false notes being those crappy cemetary scenes and Hanks' too noble death at the end) -- a movie like this is very interesting to me.
for the sake of argument, i'll post a reaction to the film that i found very thought provoking:
"The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life."
also, "there is something deeply disturbed about this film. Its extreme and un-Biblical fascination with human torture reflects, to my mind, not devotion to the message of the Cross but a kind of psycho-sexual obsession with extreme violence that Gibson has indulged in many of his other movies and is now trying to insinuate into Christianity itself. The film could have shown suffering and cruelty much differently. It could have led us into the profound psychological pain that Jesus and his mother and disciples must have endured by giving us some human context to empathize with them; it could have prompted the viewer to use his or her own imagination to fill in the gaps of terror, as all great art does; it could have done much more by showing us much less. But the extremity is Gibson's obvious point. I can understand why traditionalist Catholics might be grateful that there is some Hollywood representation of their faith. But they shouldn't let their gratitude blind them to the psychotic vision of this disturbed director - and the deeper, creepier, heterodox theology that he is trying to espouse."