REPRINTED FROM OLD BLOG..WE NEVER CLOSE
…Stephen Spielberg and Mel Gibson are consummate filmmakers, both wildly talented and dedicated to their art.
That said, money must be made. These two professionals know that violence and sex mean box office and box office means money. And they know what their core audience likes too. Men and boys 15 to 24 like sex and violence, pretty much in that order. Romance and ”happily ever after,” well, that’s fluff for girls, and these stories rarely send viewers reeling from the theatre.
In my opinion, Spielberg and Gibson choose violence because they don’t like to do sex, and yet they still are in business to make money. Where’s the sex in a Spielberg movie? Occasional fantasy, yes, I’ll give you that. But violence prevails.(And for some, it is a substitute for sex.) In the case of “Saving Private Ryan,” a reviewer for the New York Times said the violence in the first fifteen minutes of the film approached pornography. At one point, Spielberg even invented a violent scene in which a German soldier whispers in the ear of an American as he slowly slips a knife between the man’s ribs. I heard the director was proud enough of this scene to actually brag about it.
Mel Gibson’s last two movies—The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto
would have made Vlad The Impaler proud. Even Caligula would agree that Mel was no slouch when it came to exquisite agony and loads of yummy blood. Although I am happy to read that Mel’s current appeasement of the Gods of the Movies—young males—failed to appease like the former. Of course, “The Passion of the Christ” drew Christians of all stripes as well as pubescents which contributed to box office.
The unbearable torture of Jesus Christ in Mel’s “The Passion” causes some of us to wonder about the God that Christians worship.
.
11:53:33 AM 
|
