Well. This one may be big. My parents have reported that local priests are hyping up the big Mel Gibson debut tomorrow, and theaters all over the area are going to be packed, with many shows sold out already, here on Tuesday evening.

The advance reviews are sauntering in, with quite a bit of diversity. Ebert 'n Roeper were quite positive, while Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News called it both "A compendium of tortures that would horrify the regulars at an S&M club" and "The most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II" and duly notes that the violence in the film rises to the level of outright fetish... OUCH! But she is not alone in such musing: Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post also drops the F-bomb, and notes that "...it is overwrought, sadistic way beyond the point of overkill, and oddly, spiritually dry given its subject. But then, unlike the great Passions of the past, it is a product of a distinctly perverted sensibility." And Richard Corliss of Time simply declares it the first in a new genre: "the religious splatter-art film"

From the reviews I've read, it seems that the key fault with the film is the gore. But there are different ways of approaching such criticism. Some critics say that the violence is too much, that it will drive the viewer away; I consider myself to be particularly resilient, even welcoming with graphic onscreen violence (in certain ways), so there's little deterrent for me here. More interesting is the criticism that the oceans of blood drown any sort of spiritual message, that the film boils down to "Jesus really really really got hurt a lot for our sins" without any focus at all on the message of Christianity, beyond how much punishment was dished out onto the savior. Which leads into the final, most extreme criticism, that the film is sheer exploitation, a grand guignol shock-show with the shield of religion thrown up to deflect criticisms. Critics speak of something like 80 onscreen lashes during the scourging, of chunks of skin dropping onto the ground...

What is certain, is that I'm interested in seeing it, so at least on a hype level the film is a rousing success...

You can check out many reviews as they drift in here; a lot of them are from random web sites... it's interesting to note that, as of now, the web critics seem to be much more supportive of the film than the 'established' critics:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ThePassionoftheChrist-1129941/

I'm trying to decide if I should heed Christopher Hitchens' call for a boycott of this film. This supposed "controversy" was clearly calculated. It's a movie-marketer's wet-dream and movie-goers are simply playing into that. In an article he says that, yes, the film is unambiguously anti-Semitic in a naive, unreconstructed way. A simplistic little ahistorical fantasy. Even worse, it's apparently not even very good as a pure film--alternately boring and self-infatuated. I imagine Jesus is saying "Oy vey! Can't they ever get it right?".


Hoberman's wry, but deeply cynical review:

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/hoberman.php

"At last, the pain pageant ends—the heavens open, the earth quakes, and Satan's wig flies off."

LOL!!! If the Boy George Satan actually has a wig that flies off, I am voting this film "Best of the 21st Century" NO MATTER WHAT!!!

Newsflash: A Roman scourging would rip big chunks out of people's backs. Graphic descriptions of what it might have been like to see Jesus get the 39 strokes (because 40 might kill you) have been part of Good Friday sermons for centuries.

A graphic depiction of the act fits quite well with a portrayal of Christ's suffering for the sins of mankind. You're supposed to be uncomfortable and squeamish during the scourging because Jesus didn't deserve to be punished that way.

I haven't read the linked reviews yet, but heck... The Bible presents some pretty unflattering depictions of Jews and most of it was written by Jewish people (or at least assumed to be Jewish based on centuries of literary traditions).

The old testament is full of hedonism, murder, rape, drunken binges, improper religious practices, guys either getting raped or at risk of being raped...

Abraham the patriarch told lies a couple of times to try to save his skin and then got into trouble when people without the same cultural background misunderstood his scams. Jacob was something of a con artist/trickster figure. David sent a guy off to his death so he could bang the guy's wife, and it certainly didn't take long for Solomon to go from being the guy who built the first temple in Jerusalem to being a swingin' polytheist with a huge harem.

And that's not even getting into the Gospel accounts of various people who refused to believe Jesus was the Messiah and/or actively worked against him in some capacity--viewing him as some kind of trouble maker or worse and acting accordingly. The Bible describes many of Jesus' converts abandoning him, rabbis trying to discredit him, etc.

It sounds to me like Mel was going for scriptural accuracy.

Now, maybe he got carried away... but the reality of life in first century Jerusalem would have been a lot more grim 'n gritty and hard for modern audiences to relate to than your average Bible movie where Max Von Sydow (or Jeffrey Hunter or somebody) plays a very sanitized and European Jesus of Nazareth and everybody looks like they came out of a Renaissance-era religious painting.

To be fair, jkudging from the past filmography of Mel Gibson, it's fairly obvious the man's a bit of a roughie. I don't think he could make a film that does not in any wa feature extreme violence or disfiguring wounds of some sort.

I just saw it and thought it was pretty good. Definitely disturbing, and not in a "Kill Bill" way (which I didn't find disturbing in the least). It's a real tearjerker, too. Half the audience was crying in the bathrooms (and I only saw the men's room). To be fair, there were a lot of people there who got advance screening tickets through a church group (a friend in that group got me the tickets).

I think it was well-done enough that it wasn't a cheap emotional ploy, either - a poorly made film with the same exact story would've come across to me as schmaltzy or pandering. It really did capture the feeling of being right there and seeing these events unfold.

It definitely was a unique experience (and I'm not coming from a religious perspective at all, despite having a very lightly Catholic upbringing - I'm pretty agnostic most of the time, as anyone who's argued relgion with me on these boards might know) on a gut emotional level, which makes it hard to look at with a more detached critical eye for review purposes. I have a feeling I'll see it as mostly positive, though.

Ed

Exactly. I mean, think about it - the Bible was written by mostly Jews, and most of the characters in it are Jews. Stories need bad guys, so naturally the bad guys, like the good guys, are often Jews. This movie is as anti-semetic as X-Men is anti-mutant because they're a bunch of mutants who fight other mutants (well, it IS a comicon board)...

And about the violence being called "over the top" - I find it ridiculous as well. It's not like Kill Bill, where it's depicting the kind of violence that could never really happen - this is a direct adaptation of story with actual historical context. Even if there were no such guy as Jesus, this bad stuff happened to other people, too.

It's no more gratuitous than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. If you can get someone who was on that beach to talk about it, it's pretty damn accurate - and it seems gratuitous is the opposite of accurate.

Ed

"Religious splatter-art film" is what made me first want to see it and it's what's going to draw me in now. Miike would've done it better, though. The content itself is funny enough, in which everyone is determined to act the way they acted in order to bring about the preordained violence, to which we're supposed to feel responsible. That's so illogical that thinking has to be left in the car. I haven't heard any of the film's defenders adequately address the anti-semitic gloss reported by people who've seen the film.

The same thought occurred to me regarding IRREVERSIBLE. What, it's necessary to show the violence of war, but not rape or a bar fight or, in the present case, a crucifixion?

The best thing about this film is that the "moral majority" now has to sound like the defenders of various controversial art that they've attacked for so many years. I can't wait to hear what that idiot Medved has to say about the R-rating. God bless Mel for that.

Well... Medved's Jewish if I'm not mistaken, so he probably won't defend the movie.