A tremendous depiction of evil," is the way William Peter Blatty, author of the best-selling novel The Exorcist, describes Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a film whose astonishing box-office success — it is now the highest grossing R-rated film ever and has just broken into the domestic all-time top-ten list — has surprised its fans and baffled its critics. Because it is an unprecedented film in so many ways, film critics and cultural pundits, at least those who have not mindlessly dismissed it as a snuff film, have been groping to put The Passion in some sort of comparative context.
On account of the controversy it has aroused, the film has been compared to Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, but the reception of that film matched critical acclaim with box-office indifference, thus making it the inverse image of The Passion. Classic Hollywood religious films, even those that are not afflicted with what Gibson calls "bad hair" and "bad music," provide no benchmark whatsoever. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman had to go all the way back to Gone with the Wind (1938) to find comparable pre-release buzz about a Hollywood film. But that was not an R-rated religious film with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin...more here
No comments:
Post a Comment