March 22, 2004

A Guest Commentary on The Passion of the Christ [General Stuff's note: The following is an editorial written by a friend of General Stuff. When the General originally wrote about The Passion of the Christ, I made it clear I would invite an alternative opinion from a person of faith, and so I did. My opinion of the film has not changed.]     Maybe Later: A Look at The Passion of the Christ        Mel Gibson is a fine film director.  The Academy and at least several other film fans and theorists would probably agree with me.  Braveheart is my favourite film of all time. It is a compelling story of an individual who takes courage against all odds and has faith in himself to do the right thing.  It is also an extremely violent film.  With that in mind, The Passion of the Christ appears to be a similar movie to Braveheart on many levels.  Is it any coincidence that William Wallace must endure a torturous execution just as Christ must in The Passion?  Mel Gibson enjoys this type of character/story, and I argue that he does it well.  However, unlike my adoration of Braveheart, I have no current desire to see The Passion.      Despite my undying worship of Gibson’s mullet-wearing, blood-spilling 1995 hero, I do not wish to see this comparable tale of self-sacrifice. After I read extensive reviews of The Passion and talked about the film with several veterans of The Passion experience, I became more and more apprehensive about seeing the movie in all its big-screen magnificence.  I have no wish to see legs breaking; eyes eaten out by crows; and demonic visions.  I just don’t.  I do not wish to see the extreme violence in The Passion.      Perhaps I should add one more disclaimer to this decision.  When Braveheart was first released, I felt the same way about that film.  I had no desire to see hands hacked off; eyes stabbed; and throats slit.  Several years after Braveheart’s release, I actually watched the film at a friend’s home.  Perhaps the laid-back and relaxed atmosphere made it easier to watch the film?  Perhaps I was in a violent mood at the time?  For whatever reason, I watched the film, and I loved it.  I still love it.  Somehow, my reluctance to see the violence of the movie faded away, and I enjoyed Braveheart.      Perhaps someday, I will have the same experience with The Passion.  However for now, why would I put myself through the anxiety and anticipation of the imagery?  Would it be to see if the film is really as bad as people say?  Would it be to witness the aesthetics of the film over and above the gore?  These might all serve as valid reasons; but they are not important reasons to me right now.  This is my choice, and I must say that I respect this choice when it is made by others.  I can only hope that others will respect my choice now.      An interesting element in my decision to not see The Passion of the Christ is that I am a follower of Christ.  I love Christ dearly, and I strive to learn more about Him and follow His teachings. There has been an unfortunate crusade (yes, I will use this word fully aware of its meaning) to present this film as a second revelation of Scripture.  People talk about how this film transformed them, and how it is such a powerful depiction of the Christ story that it could change anyone who sees it.  Maybe it is these things.  However, it is still just a film.  It is still a group of actors reading a script; a series of petroleum and digital-based special effects; and a series of camera angles compiled into several reels of 35mm film.  Movies are powerful visualizations of stories that contain life-changing truths, but this only comes through a person’s interpretation and reception of a film.  The film itself does not contain these things.      There is an extraordinary amount of subtle pressure for Christ-followers to see The Passion and take their friends to see it.  Perhaps one day, I will do this; but for now, I will not.  I simply do not want to see the violence that Gibson has chosen to include in the film, and I do not feel that my faith will become any lesser if I refuse to see The Passion.  Perhaps I missed the portion of Scripture that says “Thou shalt pay thine $12 Canadian dollars to see thine saviour’s back flogged.”      A few people have argued that as a Christian, I should understand the severity of the Crucifixion, and that Gibson’s depiction is simply “how terrible it would have been.”  Therefore, I should see the film.  I have two responses to that.  Firstly, I need to understand how people are executed and tortured in Third World countries, but I do not think I have to see it in order to understand it.  Secondly, Gibson’s depiction of the Crucifixion is not THE image of the Crucifixion.  THE image of the Crucifixion came and went almost 2000 years ago.  Gibson’s depiction is an imitation; a reproduction based on archaeological evidence and academic conjecture.  The framing, colouring, movement, and expressions of the scene are products of Gibson’s creative imagination and the equipment involved.  What you see is not a completely accurate image of the Crucifixion.  The audience sees a creative portrait; an imagining of the Crucifixion.  Again, I do not believe that someone must see something as brutal as the Crucifixion in its entirety in order to understand the trial that Christ endured.  A simple description seems to cause enough sphincter-tightening to get the point across.      Ultimately, The Passion of the Christ is a film.  This means that it only holds so much aesthetic value and importance as the viewer gleans from it.  It could very well be a fantastic film; however, at this current moment in time, I have no wish to see its violence in order to enjoy its subject material.   11:29:32 AM    comment []

March 13, 2004

Actresses Who Should Have Made It Bigger (huh?) Well, I can't always be prattling on self-assuredly about serious stuff. In the biological bazaar of Hollywood, where an actress can earn millions of dollars for the pout of her lips or the perk of her breasts, sometimes the right hotties come along at the wrong time and in the wrong movie and for some reason the public just isn't buying what they're selling. The General would like to nominate three actresses whose relative success has occurred only after they have passed their prime (now I'm talking in purely superficial terms here), or their success has not happened to the degree warranted by their hotness. I'm saying these lovely ladies should have made it bigger. Ahem. Gretchen Mol -- Although she has appeared in relatively high profile movies such as Donnie Brasco (1997), Celebrity (1998), and Rounders (1998), I always thought her breakthrough role should have been The Thirteenth Floor (1999), an underrated sci-fi noir movie about virtual reality. Mol isn't a great actress by any means, but I felt like she came across as a sexier Meg Ryan. She's been doing TV lately. Kate Beckinsale -- She's been in films both critically lauded (Cold Comfort Farm, The Last Days of Disco) and popular (Pearl Harbor), but she never achieved superstar status. I mean, what does Julia Roberts have that Kate Beckinsale doesn't? Beckinsale is much hotter, and can play more delicate, nuanced characters (versus the broadly drawn and always bodacious characters played by the likes of Roberts and Sandra Bullock, for example). Beckinsale's breakthrough role may be her portrayal of Ava Gardner in Martin Scorscese's upcoming biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator. To this point, Beckinsale's big budget film leading roles have mostly been duds like Underworld and Serendipity. She's getting on in years (by Hollywood standards), but her new glam look (compare with her Cold Comfort days) has at least prepared her image to take the next step. Winona Ryder -- I know she's had some success in her career, but it feels like she went on a decade-long slump just as it looked like she would solidify her status as a big Hollywood star. Consider the films she did at the beginning of her career: Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands, Dracula, The Age of Innocence. Then, around 1993/1994, it's as though the wheels came off whatever gravy train she was riding: Reality Bites, Alien: Resurrection, Autumn in New York, Lost Souls. If you consider Mr. Deeds is her only box office hit in the last 10 years, then you realize her career hasn't been going so swimmingly. What happened to this talented and totally hot actress? Even when she tried to do something relevant, in the way of a would-be satire like S1mOne, she wound up picking a real dud. She was everyone's favourite grunge girl for a few years, and then it was as if there was no more place for her at the table. They're probably not analogous examples, upon reflection. But they were the ones who came to mind. Sometimes it just seems so wrong that a Tara Reid or a Sarah Michelle Gellar has a career at all, let alone a successful one. Please come back, Gretchen Mol. I miss you.   2:33:37 PM    comment []

March 7, 2004

Frank Rich Responds to Mel Gibson's "Absolution" In the past, The General has enjoyed some of NY Times columnist Frank Rich's editorials, but I was generally indifferent. As of today, Frank Rich is my hero. Why? Because he nailed that fucking hypocrite Mel Gibson. Thank God — I think. Mel Gibson has granted me absolution for my sins. As "The Passion of the Christ" approached the $100 million mark, the star appeared on "The Tonight Show," where Jay Leno asked if he would forgive me. "Absolutely," he responded, adding that his dispute with me was "not personal." Then he waxed philosophical: "You try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I think that's the message of the film." Thus we see the gospel according to Mel. If you criticize his film and the Jew-baiting by which he promoted it, you are persecuting him — all the way to the bank. If he says that he wants you killed, he wants your intestines "on a stick" and he wants to kill your dog — such was his fatwa against me in September — not only is there nothing personal about it but it's an act of love. And that is indeed the message of his film. "The Passion" is far more in love with putting Jesus' intestines on a stick than with dramatizing his godly teachings, which are relegated to a few brief, cryptic flashbacks. With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids, Mr. Gibson's film is constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music for the money shots. Of all the "Passion" critics, no one has nailed its artistic vision more precisely than Christopher Hitchens, who on "Hardball" called it a homoerotic "exercise in lurid sadomasochism" for those who "like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time." As if summarizing what The General has been saying here at The Order of the Day for the past week, Rich explains how ridiculous Gibson's persecution complex is: There is also a mighty strange inversion of reality. America is 82 percent Christian, and 60 percent of the population believes the Bible is historical fact. (The Jewish population is 2 percent.) The president of the United States has endorsed Jesus as his favorite philosopher, and Mr. Gibson's movie had almost as large an opening week as "The Lord of the Rings." The star has won his battle. He's hotter than ever in Hollywood, a town whose first commandment is that you never argue with a hit. ("If Hitler did a movie with these numbers, we'd give him his next deal," one Jewish mogul told me in a phone conversation this week.) So by what stretch of the imagination is Mr. Gibson so aggrieved that he can go on "The Tonight Show," purport to be a victim and not be laughed at by Mr. Leno or anyone else? For all his talk of "suffering" for his art, it's hard to see exactly how Mr. Gibson has suffered. His production company is even licensing necklaces ($12.99 or $16.99, take your pick) that feature replicas of the nails used in the film's Crucifixion. As I said before, the lesson of this film is not its aesthetic quality or its financial success; the lesson here is that often, maybe always, audience response matters more than the substance of a film, or book, or whatever. That is, what an audience brings to a film matters more than what the film contains. That's not a revelation to anyone. But in the case of The Passion of the Christ there is a new phenomenon: the branding of religious attitudes, the signification of religious disposition. Capitalists always ask people to "vote with their dollars," but did capitalists anticipate the ascendance of a theocratic government in the United States by this very means? Religion is good business, for capitalists and politicians alike (and, of course, the line between those two groups is practically nonexistent). Predictably enough, both the president and Mrs. Bush have publicly indicated their desire to see Mr. Gibson's film. But when even Connecticut's John Rowland, a scandal-ridden governor facing impeachment, starts to rave about "The Passion" in public ("Unbelievable!" "Breathtaking!"), as he did last weekend, it's clear that we're witnessing the birth of a phenomenon. You come away from this whole sorry story feeling that Jesus died in "The Passion of the Christ" so cynics, whether seeking bucks or votes, could inherit the earth.  Preach on, Frank.   12:14:47 PM    comment []

March 3, 2004

This Has The Potential To Be The Greatest Movie Ever http://www.thegirlnextdoormovie.com Oh, Elisha Cuthbert. How does someone so hot have such a goofy name?   5:21:21 PM    comment []

March 1, 2004

Oscar Telecast One Big Corporate-Whore-Mongering Sellout   Oscar bombs. "The Passion of The Frodo" sweeps, and more beautiful stars bravely impersonate the genuinely homely to great success. But all the crooked teeth in New Zealand can't save a dull, dull Oscar night. [Salon.com] It was a dud, wasn't it? Here you have the most contentious moment in US politics in many years, and the most anyone with a world stage at the Oscars could say was Sean Penn's allusion to the absence of WMDs in Iraq. I appreciate the bind the actors are in: if they "get political," people will say they have no business doing so; if they remain silent, people will say they missed an opportunity, or were cowards, or whatever. Still, it was a sad day to see Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, AND Sean Penn show up for the ceremonies AND not do something truly transgressive. It's as if they all came to the same conclusion in the same year: If you have to be a whore, you might as well be the best one. The one consolation was seeing Johnny Depp tell a reporter prior to the show (in not so many words) that right after the show ended he would be returning "home" (i.e., France). General Stuff doesn't want his Oscars to be staid and pleasant, friendly fare for Middle America. Fuck Middle America. The Academy Awards are the Gay New Year. They should be appalling to Middle America. They should be dripping with pinko liberal sentiment, self-righteous anger, and faux populism. I know the Academy Awards have never been a truly transgressive affair; in fact, quite the opposite. But I want them to be. I want the bi-sexual costume designers and sadomasochistic actresses and coke-snorting producers to offer their naughty little selves to the world, unashamed of their predilections. When Sean Penn accepts an Oscar, it is truly a sign that the terrorists have won.   1:03:51 PM    comment []

February 28, 2004

Aimless "Passion" Misses Theological Centrality of Crucifixion From "For One Catholic, 'Passion' Skews The Meaning of the Crucifixion" in the NY Times today: Mr. Gibson's defense is that he tells it like it is. Or like it was. But that is not precisely the case: the film's screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, has added extra-Scriptural details: the character of Claudia, Pilate's wife, is much amplified from the Gospel hint; Pilate is given a sympathetic psychological complexity that is nowhere found in the Gospels; details of Jesus' childhood have been invented for dramatic purposes. Caiphas, the high priest, is a cipher in the Scripture; in the film he is, compared with Pilate, a one-dimensional monster, a shrewd rabble-rouser who rejoices in the shedding of his enemy's blood. .... The second cause of my distress is that Mr. Gibson's portrayal of the Passion story seems to me a perversion of the meaning of the event and its context. When I spoke to Mr. Fitzgerald, he told me that for him and for Mr. Gibson, the Passion was the most important part of the Gospel and that that was why they had focused on the last hours of Jesus' life, giving short shrift to his ministry and his ideas. But if, as Mr. Fitzgerald and Mr. Gibson have done, you take the Passion out of its context, you are left with a Jesus who is much more body than spirit; you are presented not with the author of the Beatitudes or the man who healed the sick but with a carcass to be flayed. .... My problem with "The Passion of the Christ" is that I felt as if I were being continually hit over the head with a two-by-four, but I never tasted the sugar and I wasn't even given my portion of healthy feed. Once my attention was grabbed, what was it I was supposed to hear? That Jesus suffered greatly for my sins, more greatly, perhaps than I should imagine. But who is this Jesus and what is the meaning of his suffering? Theologically, the meaning of Jesus' death comes with the triumph of the Resurrection, arguably the weakest scene in the film, in which Mr. Caviezel looks not victorious but stoned. Yet St. Paul says, "If Christ has not risen, then vain is your faith." Psychologically, the power of the Passion is that it acknowledges the place of suffering, particularly unjust suffering, in human life. It is a vessel for our grief. If you listen to Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," there is very little violence in the music; the overwhelming tone is one of mournfulness and a kind of crushed sorrow. In the film, to be sure, there are shots of women weeping along the Via Dolorosa, but the dominant tone in the film is one of rage-inducing voyeurism. Mary Gordon's most recent book was "Joan of Arc" (Viking/Penguin, 2000).   12:42:21 PM    comment []

February 27, 2004

Branding Jesus Given the opening week success of The Passion of the Christ, the obvious question is: What next? Does this mean we have to suffer a bevy of biblical fantasies writ large, with exotic historical trappings like foreign languages and ultraviolence (because, let us recall, in the Christian world gory violence signifies realism, but explicit sex signifies the work of Satan)? Please, if you haven't seen the film yet, don't. You will only be encouraging them to make more of this nonsense. The relative success of The Passion of the Christ combines the two central obsessions of American life: capitalism and religion. For the producers of culture, the Christian culture in the United States has proved profitable ground. Many lucrative seeds have been sown in the music industry, with such Christian rock acts as POD, Chevelle, and Evanescence, the book industry, with the Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind series, and now in the movie industry. In part, this stems from the easily identifiable needs of this very large community; it's easier to sell stuff to a group of people with dogmatic tastes than it is to the secular crowd and its transient fads. The marketing of The Passion of the Christ must sit alongside that of Blair Witch Project as a successful experiment in a movie finding and exploiting a subculture. The Mad Mel circus has tapped the eager-to-proselytize character of evangelical communities to push its merchandise, from the film to the picture book to the souvenir iron spike necklace. It's the perfect combination of fanaticism and fandom, religion and capitalism, which both rely on the act of selling for their prosperity, as the film The Big Kahuna nicely illustrated. Frank Rich of the NY Times said, "the marketing of this film remains a masterpiece of ugliness when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit. That a movie star should fan culture wars for dollars is perhaps no surprise." For the fans of this movie, the creation of a mass media branding of Jesus (excuse the pun) gives them an opportunity to indulge both of their central passions, piety and purchasing. Consumption is, after all, a substitute for identity, a composite of signifiers that condense our multiple and heterogeneous desires into a recognizable cadre of products and services. For some, "the clothes make the man." For others, a car can convey a wildly divergent and expressive panoply of ambitions and emotions. And for the evangelical Christian, going to see The Passion of the Christ is an act of belonging to a consumer group, voting for Jesus with one's dollars, obeying the eleventh commandment: shop 'til you drop.  To this end, Christians aided in the marketing of The Passion of the Christ:  The film has touched a nerve in the U.S. evangelical Christian community, which boasts millions of members and spending power of billions of dollars. It is a group that can swing presidential elections, turn obscure books into overnight best-sellers and quite possibly make “Passion” a blockbuster. Hundreds of churches are selling advance tickets, and promoting the film from the pulpit. It used to be, priests denounced moral inquities from the pulpit.  Now, they push product. This hymn is brought to you by McDonald's. McDonald's: Jesus is luvin' it. How long before churches depend on businesses for a steady stream of parishioners? That is, how long before the relationship between commerce and religion is inverted, and commerce is the engine that drives religion? The end result of this meeting of god and mammon is that more religious films are on the way: Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, said that he knows of at least 10 biblical films now in the works, several with major studios competing for them. Paul Lauer, director of marketing for Gibson's Icon Productions, told Reuters last month that if "Passion" does as well as they hope the opening weekend, "I think there'll be a lot of powerful people in Hollywood saying, 'Somebody get me a Jesus picture.' " ... "I do expect a Noah's ark film and a Revelations film down the pike pretty quickly after this," said David Mumpower, president of Box Office Prophet.com, which forecasts and tracks movie revenue. "A Ten Commandments remake isn't outside realm of possibility." Here's the real problem with making a movie based on the Bible: Two young women leaving the theater who declined to give their names seemed nearly speechless. "It was overwhelming," said one, "the story of someone giving up their life." Another preview patron, Joan Moder of Aurora, near Chicago, said, "I think everybody should see it. You read the Bible like it's a fairy tale. It's a true story; it really happened. It gives life meaning." No. The Holocaust is something that really happened. The Bible contains historical facts, but also contains a great deal of what this woman calls "fairy tale." The Bible is not what any scholar would label "a true story." But in the world of commerce, realism goes to the movie with the best production values. People can be overwhelmed by theatrical productions, given the sense of verisimilitude by the size and slick finish of the production. History -- real history as it exists in the debris of archeological artifacts and prosaic accounts -- simply can't compete with the gut-level response of an ultraviolent spectacle from the star of Bird on a Wire.   7:58:21 PM    comment []

February 26, 2004

Mad Mel Cashes in on White Jesus, But Even Bible Says Jesus Was Black   Crowds and protests greet Passion. Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of the Christ takes $20m at US box offices in its opening day, a report says. [BBC News | Entertainment | World Edition] I'm not a religious person, but I think I have more respect for religions that discourage depictions of their godhead. It seems to me like if you were a true believer, you wouldn't want your god debased by having him, her, or it depicted in a movie, especially one as crass and opportunistic as Mad Mel's The Passion of the Christ. What happens when people depict their god is that they distort the facts; in this case, Jesus was black. Even the Bible acknowledges that. The reaction I expected this film to receive (and any sentient being expected, I'm sure) is precisely the reaction it seems to be getting: Fundamentalists emerging from theatres, their eyes filled with tears as if they have just witnessed something REAL, and not a film by the star of What Women Want. A moron from Toronto explained why he took his 6- and 10-year-old children to see this Restricted film full of brutal torture and bloodletting: "I had to show them what Christ did for them," he said later in the lobby of the Famous Players Coliseum in Scarborough. "When they see it with their own eyes, they can relate to it." Though touted by some as one of the most violent films ever made, Liscio and his wife, Glenda, felt compelled to share the experience with their children. "Other movies have senseless violence," he said. "But this is reality, this is what really happened and we had to show our kids the truth." No, you fucknut. For starters, if you wanted something that even somewhat resembles an historical account, you would have to settle for a dark-skinned Jesus. As the New Black Panther Party rightly points out: "Strangely absent from the debate is one very basic inaccuracy which has been long promoted in order to bolster white supremacy and maintain a revisionist history that is beneficial to only people of European descent," said Malik Z. Shabazz, national chairman of the New Black Panther Party in a statement Tuesday. "This purposely omitted fact is that Jesus was not a European white man. Jesus Christ was a black man - a dark skinned Hebrew Israelite from Northern Africa and even the only Biblical physical description confirms this (Rev. 1:14)," said Shabazz in a statement. If these religious fundamentalists are so concerned with the literal truth of the Bible, then why don't they believe the Bible's own description of Jesus? Or the obvious anthropological evidence of what folks living in his part of the world at that time would look like? Akbar... pointed to Revelations 1:14 and 1:15 as well as Daniel 10:6. "His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 15 And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters." (Rev. 1:14 and 1:15) "His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude." (Daniel 10:6) "Not only does this film wrongfully depict Christ as white but all the disciples and Israelites are people of European descent, which presents a historical and physical impossibility," Shabazz added. But, hey, historical and physical impossibilities is what being a "true" believer is all about! A true believer like Anita Sarkissian, cited in the Toronto Star article above... In Canada, where the film was shown on 252 screens, the numbers will be bolstered by people like Anita Sarkissian, 20, who saw the film twice yesterday and has plans to go again this weekend. "I'll keep seeing it again and again until it comes out on DVD," she said. Her mother, Salwa Sarkissian, calls it her "new Titanic," a film famous for its ability to draw repeat viewers. At least some of the Christians have a more humane response: Henry Corbeil, a self-described Christian, left the theatre shaking his head in disgust. "Terrible," he grumbled. "Shocking. Nothing but brutality. "There's no need for it." Lisa Judge agreed. "I feel depressed," she said after leaving the theatre. "He (Gibson) went overboard with the cruelty and violence, and I think Mel Gibson is a bit of a sadist." As is anyone who would sit through this crap again and again and again... until it comes out on DVD.   5:11:55 PM    comment []

February 25, 2004

The Passion of the Christ is about Passion not History -- And That's The Problem Christ film 'riddled with errors'. Scholars say Mel Gibson's film about the last 12 hours of Jesus' life contains several historical mistakes. [BBC News | Entertainment | World Edition] I'd like to explain why I will not see Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. For starters, I'd like to cite people like the ones quoted in the BBC item above: Kathleen Lewandowski, who saw it in Chicago, said: "I was gasping for breath." Fellow Chicago viewer Joan Moder said: "Everybody should see it. It gives life meaning." No, it doesn't give life meaning. It's just a film, and the stories it is based on are just stories, some of them containing historical facts. It's precisely the kind of mania exemplified by the two American viewers cited in the BBC story that worries me, bothers me, and angers me. And it's most of the reason I won't be seeing Mad Max's movie about Jesus. It's not what this movie is about that matters. What matters here is how it is going to be received by some people. I know that distinction sounds trite; but I don't think it is. A text or a film is not the sum of its parts; one must consider what the reader brings to the text as well. The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn and The Merchant of Venice, for example, carry entirely different meanings for audiences in the northern United States, the southern United States, or Nazi Germany. The Merchant of Venice was the most popular play of Nazi Germany; yet there have been only 3 productions in the last 30 years in New York City, which obviously has a large Jewish population. Even if The Passion of the Christ is a very good film, as Ebert and Roeper say, Gibson has been so active ratcheting up the fundamentalist fervor with intimations of anti-semitism and manipulations of the Vatican's PR people that the aesthetic quality of the film is a secondary consideration. By analogy, imagine that the KKK produced a great film about tolerance. You wouldn't be able to look past the fact that the film was produced by the KKK (nor should you) to see its aesthetic merits. Gibson has managed to turn familiar material into an event film. This would not have happened without the combination of two things: first, the large population of religious fundamentalists residing in the United States; and second, the atmosphere of fear and paranoia and a sense that Christianity is somehow threatened following 9/11. According to a recent poll,  60% of Americans believe the story of Noah's Ark is literally true; 61% believe the creation story in the Bible is literally true; 64% believe the story of Moses parting the Red Sea is literally true. With this abundance of religious zealotry, is it any wonder that post-9/11 paranoia can be spread throughout the United States on just the suggestion of a threat from the Muslim world? The so-called "added threat of terror" is bogus, but a nation of zealots can be convinced of anything if they will believe in the factual nature of the stories above. Enter Mel Gibson and his literal interpretation of the Bible. Not even that. He also used a 19th-century mystic as a source. Using the four Gospels as well as texts from a controversial 19th-century mystic and saint, Anne Catherine Emmerich, Gibson has fashioned a story in which Jewish high priests lead a riotous mob to Pontius Pilate's door. The regional Roman ruler makes an effort to spare Jesus, but the crowd won't let him. The rest is heated history. Critics say the Gospels contradict each other about Christ's final hours; that Emmerich emphasized the Jews' blood guilt; and that Pilate was never that nice. Claiming to make a historical film based on New Testament scriptures alone is like claiming to make a historically accurate film about WWII based on the movie Pearl Harbor. The first gospel wasn't even written until decades after the events it purports to tell. The gospels are ripe with contradictions and inaccuracies. To follow Mel Gibson for historical accuracy ignores centuries of biblical scholarship and common sense. His use of non-English languages gives the veneer of historical accuracy, and that is surely the most insidious element of this film. No, this film is not about history. It is about "passion," about a willingness to believe in something simply because it overwhelms you, not because it is true, or because it makes sense. Like the best fascist propaganda, this is a film built on visceral entertainment, bloodletting and pathos. (I don't have to see it to know this much -- just read the reviews.) A.O. Scott of the NY Times says: "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." Chuck Schwartz: "Two hours of gruesome, sadistic, stomach-turning and hard core graphically violent torture detached from any background information is not something to expose kids to, regardless of religion." Newsday:  "Mel Gibson shows once again that he's skilled at depicting violence. But you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of 'tolerance, love and forgiveness' that the producer-director-co-writer insists he's trying to communicate." Slate: "This is a two-hour-and- six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith." The New Yorker: "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 so on. I am sure fundamentalists will bathe in the blood and pathos of this spectacle, emerge from it feeling like they have encountered something genuine because they have encountered something that moved them. That's how fascist propaganda works, on the basest principles. It is unthinking and brutal. Strength is purity. Desire is weakness. Deny the body. Fight the infidels. Circle the wagons. Jesus is coming home. The ex-marine Anthony Swofford wrote a book called Jarhead. In it, he talks about how marines watched porno and war films to prepare for combat. Even anti-war films such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket gave them a kick, a necessary urge to kill before entering combat. The Passion of the Christ is porno for fundamentalists. Its details don't matter. It could be historically inaccurate, anti-semitic, whatever: The point is the visceral thrill fundamentalists will get watching the bloodletting of Jesus, because religion is a visceral thing for them. Religion is not something you think about, for the fundamentalist; it's something you feel. And on that count, Gibson's film will no doubt deliver the goods. And that's what upsets me, what concerns me. This film is not a gamble for Gibson. As USA Today notes, "Keep a few numbers in mind: In the USA, there are roughly 220 million adherents to a range of Christian faiths. There are 2 billion Christians worldwide, roughly one-third of the planet. That's a lot of movie tickets." (Although, Gibson's medieval brand of Catholicism couldn't be practiced by more than, like, 10 people, could it? The many sects of Christianity that will use this film as a recruitment tool don't seem to mind that their dogma is very different from Mel Gibson's.) This film is not a gamble for Mel Gibson: This film is a gamble for the rest of us, for the people who try to find an ethical path in life without following too many charlatans, without appealing to too many unseen truths, without basing too many of our decisions on criteria that we feel but don't understand. [Note: In the interest of fair play, and since I am not going to watch the film, I have asked a friend of mine who is a very religious person to write a review of this film. I don't know if he'll agree; but if he does, then his review will be posted on this blog. -- General Stuff]   12:35:30 AM    comment []

February 11, 2004

In Defense of Meg Ryan and In The Cut   Critics and moviegoers generally dismissed In The Cut, the 2003 noir thriller starring Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo now out on DVD. Only 33% of the critics at RottenTomatoes.com liked it, and the film scored an average grade of 4.9 out of 10 from said critics. At the box office the film made only about $5 million domestically, also according to RottenTomatoes.com. By all counts, it was a staggering failure.   The critical and financial failure of the film is all the more staggering given the presence of Jane Campion, who achieved some stature as a feminist director with The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady, and Meg Ryan, box office favourite in When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail. Throw in Nicole Kidman as producer, and some raw sex scenes involving Ryan, and you would expect at least critical or financial success, maybe even both.   In The Cut is not a bad film. It may even be a good film. The problem seems to lie in its unconventional presentation of the noir genre, which, by defying audience expectations, gave most critics (and probably most audience members) a sense that the film doesn’t know what it wants to be. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon offers a typical review of the film: What, exactly, does Campion -- who both directed and adapted the screenplay -- mean to say with "In the Cut"? I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that I laughed more than once at poor Meg Ryan as Frannie, the mild-mannered and sexually bashful New York schoolteacher who becomes entangled in a serial-murder case being investigated by Detective James Malloy, a boorish hunka man who strides purposefully through the movie in the form of Mark Ruffalo. Zacharek sees the film as broadly conceived (no pun intended) and lacking either symbolic import or gritty naturalism. That is, the film is no good at being either a modernist perusal of gender thematics or a naturalist slice of bleak chic. Zacharek writes, I struggled with "In the Cut," not because its themes were so complex, or because its images were so artful or so disturbing, but because I wondered how a movie made by an ostensibly thinking person (though I think saying even that much gives Campion way too much credit) could leave me feeling so totally lobotomized. A.O. Scott of the NY Times condensed Zacharek’s search for words into a pithy dismissal of the discordant elements here; In The Cut, he says, is an “ungainly hybrid.” Roger Ebert couldn’t even remember the word around which the film circulates: It’s “disarticulate,” Roger, not “de-articulate.”   In The Cut tries to reinvent the noir genre from a feminist perspective. The central intertext here is Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which Meg Ryan’s character Frannie Avery is teaching in what appears to be a high school English class (I say “appears” because it is unclear how old the students are, and I thought that in the book she was a college professor of linguistics). Frannie references Woolf’s use of “stream of consciousness,” a literary technique used to approximate the functioning of the unconscious mind in everyday apprehension. This method was a reaction to the realism of primarily masculine writers who preceded Woolf in the late nineteenth century.   Instead of focussing on the material details of the story’s milieu, stream of consciousness writing focuses, not surprisingly, on the characters’ conscious experience of the milieu. Woolf thought that everything one needed to know about life was contained within the experiences of a single person on a single day. It’s not what happens that matters in this type of writing, but how it is experienced. One of Frannie’s students in the film actually complains about the absence of plot in To The Lighthouse, and one has to read this comment as a metacinematic moment in which In The Cut (note the parallel construction of the title and To The Lighthouse) comments on its own problematic structure.   In The Cut actually begins with Frannie waking from a dream, and maintains through its hazy cinematography a sense of dreamstate throughout the film; at least part of the reason the film seems to be an “ungainly hybrid” is because it is not entirely composed of the conventions of linear storytelling, but instead occasionally injects the film with dreams and a subjectivity tinged with desire and death. This is not simply anyone’s dream, however: This is supposed to be the noir genre envisioned through the refraction of the feminine unconscious. The use of To The Lighthouse as an intertext suggests this reading. The fact that Frannie also goes to an actual lighthouse (a big, red phallic one) at the end of the film also suggests this reading.   In To The Lighthouse, the egocentric and analytic Mr. Ramsay is contrasted with the archetypal mother figure in Mrs. Ramsay. The combination of masculine and feminine traits resides in the artist Lily Briscoe, the character one might say is loosely the thematic equivalent of Meg Ryan’s Frannie. The contrast of masculine and feminine principles in To The Lighthouse offers a framework for understanding the feminist rewriting of the noir genre in In The Cut. Traditional film noir, (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics who noticed the trend of how dark and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following the war. It is a style of American films that first evolved in the 1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic period until about 1960. Noir refers primarily to the mood or tone of a film. The protagonists of such films “are often morally ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they are cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive and ultimately losing.” In The Cut reverses this convention by casting a woman in the lead role as a “frightened and insecure” loner. Women in film noir are usually of two types: dutiful or femme fatale. “Usually, the male protagonist in film noir has to inevitably choose (or have the fateful choice made for him) between the women -- and invariably he picks the femme fatale who destructively goads him into committing murder or some other crime of passion.” In The Cut places this choice in the character of Frannie, who must choose from a lot of creepy potential mates: a psychotic stalker and former boyfriend, played by Kevin Bacon; a foulmouthed cop who may also be the killer, played by Mark Ruffalo; and a student from Frannie’s class who writes about serial killer John Wayne Gacy. All of these men make sexual overtures.   The key reversal in In The Cut is that of the femme fatale, a role which is ostensibly played by Mark Ruffalo’s cop, since Frannie must choose from this lot of creepy dudes and she chooses the potentially most dangerous one (since he could be the killer). Frannie chooses him for many of the same reasons male protagonists in film noir choose the femme fatale: he’s sexually attractive to her in a primitive way, and part of his allure is the mystery of his identity. Critics never say, when talking about film noir of the traditional kind, “Why the hell would he choose the lethal hottie?” This reflects the masculine bias of much criticism. Male reviewers know they too would probably pursue the sexy but potentially lethal woman. Yet, many reviewers of In The Cut are dismayed by the number of seemingly poor or thoughtless decisions Frannie makes. In the real world her decisions would be unconscionably stupid; but in film noir such decisions are supposed to reflect human weakness.   “The protagonists in film noir are normally driven by their past or by human weakness to repeat former mistakes.” Frannie is driven by both. Frannie is driven by a story her mother told her about how she met Frannie’s father. The story is told in sepia-toned flashback, like a silent film of the mind. In Frannie’s dream of her mother’s courtship with her father, the two are ice skating when her father dumps his fiancé and proposes to Frannie’s mother. Later in the film, after a series of grisly murders, Frannie dreams of her father ice skating over her mother’s legs and cutting them up, then returning to cut off her head.   The dream reflects Frannie’s anxiety over the potential violence in courtship. Frannie’s expectations for her own desire and its socially accepted expressions are based on the mythology of romanticism. She and her sister obsess over finding a man and getting married. But what kind of solution is a mate, necessarily? Like other noir films that reduce human relations to their most mundane and malicious attributes, In The Cut posits men as nothing more than homicidal maniacs or sources of pleasure; but the pursuit of this pleasure is both the human necessity and the human weakness, because men are violent animals.   The problem with the common complaint that Campion paints her portrait of Frannie with such broad strokes that everything in the film becomes a caricature – that is, that men, all of them, are nothing but sexually voracious predators – is that the complaint ignores the highly subjective method of stream of consciousness storytelling. Filtered through the consciousness of Frannie Avery, perhaps all men do seem to be predators; consider the exemplars in her immediate vicinity. People always generalize based on their immediate experience, and Frannie is no different. The difference for the film noir genre as told from a woman’s perspective, however, is that it is men, not women, who perpetuate the function of the femme fatale, the character who represents the tragic consequences of our human weaknesses.   Women are told they have no value unless they are attached to a man, and yet men possess the greater potential for violence. In the conventional film noir, the man has a choice between two types of women, only one of which is dangerous. In the feminist revision, there is no safe choice, and yet the choice must be made. This is the paranoia and fatalism of In The Cut.    Perhaps the problem with a feminist rendition of film noir is in the paradoxical combination of noir’s fatalism and feminism’s liberatory politics. How can a film espouse simultaneously the belief that human beings are so inherently flawed that they destroy themselves in the end, and the belief that women can aspire to equality with men in some form of social transformation? Film noir makes everyone a victim of human fallibility. The answer to this might be: The feminist telling of film noir differs in the telling, not in the lesson of the film. Fatalism may win out in any form of film noir, but the feminist version changes what matters along the way to that self-destruction.   5:31:17 PM    comment []

February 9, 2004

Website Spoofs MPAA Hypocrisy   Anti-Piracy Campaign Gets a Laugh. A website launched by a pair of independent filmmakers pokes fun at efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America to prevent the illegal copying of Hollywood films. By Jason Silverman. [Wired News] Mirvish believes the MPAA ads are hypocritical -- the studios, he said, don't exactly have a great record of supporting the little guy. "It’s disingenuous for the MPAA to use these (blue-collar) guys to sell their point when they will fight them tooth and nail over every union contract and ship their work overseas in a heartbeat," he said. Exactly.     6:50:30 PM    comment []

January 30, 2004

Funnyman Steve Carell Set to Star in Remake of "The Office"   Actor Carell set for US Office. US actor Steve Carell is set to star as Ricky Gervais' character in the American version of The Office. [BBC News | Entertainment | World Edition] The British The Office is a classic already. Why mess with a good thing? Steve Carell is hilarious on The Daily Show, but, geez, just leave it alone, would ya? Didn't American networks try to remake Faulty Towers with John Larroquette some years ago?   4:43:40 PM    comment []

January 27, 2004

Oscar? I hardly even know her   Rings dominates Oscar nominations. The final Lord of the Rings film is favourite to sweep this year's Oscars after being given 11 nominations. [BBC News | Entertainment | World Edition] Most deserving nomination: Bill Murray for Lost in Translation. He should have been nominated for Rushmore. This time it feels like a Lifetime Achievement award. Least deserving nomination: Johnny Depp for Pirates of the Caribbean. I know it was fun to watch, but this nomination feels like The Return of Marissa Tomei.  Every year there is a nomination or two from a popular film (wasn't Ghost nominated for Best Picture?) just to ensure every last person on the planet watches the Oscars. Most offensive nomination: Finding Nemo for Best Original Screenplay. The script was the worst thing about this overrated film. Sure, it looked great, but, honestly, deep down, don't you think the story was pretty lame? Stephanie Zacharek of Salon was the only critic to acknowledge this. The "too bad these things aren't about the quality of performance" nomination: Diane Keaton, who I am guessing is some kind of industry favourite, is nominated for Something's Gotta Give, which qualifies as the worst film title ever nominated. Keaton looks like the favourite after winning the Golden Globe, although from what I've heard the girl in Whale Rider, Keisha Castle-Hughes, gives a spectacular performance. It's too bad she's so young and so non-American. Of course, Anna Paquin had the same strikes against her, and she won for The Piano. The "this guy doesn't get enough respect" nomination: Alec Baldwin for The Cooler. He's been putting in great performances for years, but he doesn't seem to be part of the Hollywood in-crowd. His performance in Glengarry GlenRoss alone should have cemented his reputation as an A-list actor. I have no idea who is favoured in this category, but Tim Robbins had a really showy role in Mystic River. Please don't let Holly Hunter win. God, I hate that woman. And Seabiscuit. Keep that shit out of the winner's circle. Capturing the Friedmans is a lock to win Best Documentary, but The Fog of War has more lessons for contemporary American foreign policy (and would therefore be the more political choice in this category).   11:57:39 AM    comment []

January 26, 2004

Golden Globes Honor "The Return of the King" and "The Office"   Rings rules at the Golden Globes. The Return of the King wins four Globe awards and there are two shock wins for British sitcom The Office. [BBC News | Entertainment | World Edition] Let's face it, Return of the King will win the Oscar for best picture because the other two films were snubbed in previous years, perhaps in anticipation of a cumulative award for the trilogy. (I mean, call them nerdy films for nerds if you want, but there's no way a piece of shit like Chicago will be remembered in five years the way The Two Towers will most certainly be remembered). Peter Jackson deserves a Best Director nod for the monumental achievement that the trilogy is. Master and Commander deserves some attention as well, but Mystic River has been completely overrated (the performances are awesome, but the story and the directing are unspectacular). The General recognizes how meaningless The Golden Globes are in the grand scheme of things, but I'm delighted nonetheless that The Office won some awards. This BBC production may be the best TV sitcom in a decade. It spits in the face of American sitcom conventions, and succeeds gloriously in satirizing the blurred distinction between "business" and "friendship" in the contemporary office. Season 1 is on DVD: I highly recommend it. Now if only all television could be like The Office and 24....   12:00:42 AM    comment []

January 25, 2004

Documenting American Life in 2003: The Fog of War, Spellbound, and Capturing the Friedmans   In the NY Times today, Frank Rich discusses Robert McNamara, subject of the compelling documentary The Fog of War, as the precursor for the era of CEO politicians. As a national role model at the dawn of Camelot, Robert McNamara was Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and, yes, Paul O'Neill before it was cool. He entered the cabinet as an exemplar of "American certitude and conviction" who could use "his rationality with facts" to intimidate bureaucratic dissenters, David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" in 1972, after Mr. McNamara had come to his bad end. Among Mr. McNamara's virtues, Mr. Halberstam wrote, was loyalty — but "perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself." McNamara may be the exemplar of the kind of bureaucratic functionalism that has hijacked our civic life in North America. In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara's background was something of a novelty. The Bush administration boasts more C.E.O.'s in top jobs than any administration in history — as well as the first president with his own Harvard M.B.A. With the "business" of government ceded to cynical opportunists such as those who populate the Bush White House, the true character of governance and citizenship are to be found not in the model of government forwarded by people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but in the nuances of documentaries such as The Fog of War, and two other successful American documentaries from 2003, Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans. The Fog of War has more to teach the general public about proper governance (via the mistakes of Vietnam-era bureaucrats like McNamara) than any State of the Union Address and its partisan jingoism. As Rich points out, the lessons of McNamara's follies in The Fog of War share many parallels with current American foreign policy: The greater debate has been over the degree to which the follies of Vietnam are now being re-enacted in Iraq. Though Mr. Morris started interviewing Mr. McNamara before 9/11 and his film never mentions current events, the implicit parallels between then and now are there for the taking. In the Johnson administration's deceptive hyping of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a provocation to war, we see the Bush administration's deceptive hyping of the supposedly imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction for the same purpose. In Mr. McNamara's stern warnings against waging war unilaterally and against trying to win the hearts and minds of a foreign land without understanding its culture first, we find historical lessons we didn't heed as we blundered into the escalating chaos of our "postwar" occupation of Iraq. Similar lessons about the nature of democracy and some of its failings in contemporary America might be taken from Spellbound, a documentary about the national spelling bee competition. Whereas The Fog of War contains lessons about the absence of empathy in US foreign policy, Spellbound examines "otherness" on the domestic front. Why do kids from various geographical regions, races, and classes enter the seemingly mechanical intellectual exercise of a spelling bee? On one level, the film (almost unknowingly, it seems at times) lays bare the American drive to turn everything into a competition, even spelling, as if to offer an intellectual analog for athletic and militaristic agones. Even in the passive pursuit of learning, Americans want to see winners and losers. Does this type of activity produce future CEO politicians, as much as the other violent competitions that characterize being American and being young? It's not clear if the filmmakers of Spellbound recognize the fine line they are walking between jingoism and satire. For Capturing the Friedmans, however, the ambiguity of the central subject matter is what creates the essential tension that drives the film. Capturing the Friedmans examines the life of a family as it unravels following the arrest of the father and one son on child molestation charges. By the end of the film the question of "did he do it?" is supplanted by issues of the process of American justice and the life of a community in a democracy. What kind of justice system does bureaucratic functionalism create? What kind of community does it create, and how do such communities deal with misplaced trust and abuse? Documentaries such as these remind us that art still has more to offer the public sphere than business and the people who populate it. Art does not reduce human beings to their exchange value, but instead gives expression to the uncertainties and possibilities of public and private life. The General salutes these documentary filmmakers for showing the frailty, uncertainty, and often erroneous character of human perception in a year in which programmatic rationality and religious zealotry were celebrated by some as strengths of character instead of the bastions of fascism that they are.     1:07:19 PM    comment []

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