Cheap shot but it amused me [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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Wandered into the kitchen just in time to hear (didn't catch the DJ's name, but it should've been WRNR unless the tuner drifted again): "I have a confession. I went to see that new movie, Passion of the Christ, and I gotta say: the book was better."

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There are 25 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Heh. Before the movie came out, The One I Live With was saying that he couldn't wait for someone to review the movie with "It was okay, but the book was SO MUCH better!"

of course, everything I've been hearing is the movie really sucks donkey loads. content aside, it's apparently just....well, bad.

From what I've been hearing from people who've seen it, just about anything related to the topic is better. Y'know, like plays put on by the church fifth-grade class, or Jack Chic tracts, or whatever. One review described it as a two-hour snuff film. A friend told me that it is more violent than the original (X-rated) version of A Clockwork Orange -- which I have seen.

I expressed interest in seeing this movie so I'd be able to comment on it at LUMSFS and someone else said something to the effect of "I am SO ripping that movie to DVD for you if you don't go see it" :)

I suppose that widespread practice of this would be the best form of revenge (albeit an illegal one)

Interesting. I read an article about a bunch of random clergy who weighed in on not being very happy about it. It mentioned that a couple said they were curious about it but had no plans to buy tickets to see it. Which gets you to church showings or ripped dvds..

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Hi dglenn - it's Tamlin! I'm so happy you have a LiveJournal...and I just had to respond to this post; it was a topic of discussion at my job today.

Two of my coworkers - interestingly enough, both smart people - were talking about the assertion that this film is so much more historically accurate than other representations of Christ's life and death. Um, how is one interpretation of the Bible necessarily more historically accurate than the last? I've read second-hand that actually this film has a lot of *in*accuracies (see my mini-rant on this below).

Not to mention the violence, which is the major reason I'm not likely to see this film, especially not in the theatres. Maybe the violence is accurate. Cat o'nine tails *do* rip flesh off of the person being beaten. But...I really don't need to see that. I'm a believer in free speech and the right to see that kind of stuff, but with my core spiritual essence being essentially Christian (with some nature-based religion in there somewhere), it sounds like this movie would make me shudder in disgust.

I'll save my "seeing a disturbing movie" energy for when I finally get up the nerve to watch Schindler's List...I really want to find someone who will watch it with me. I've had a longtime wanting to understand how the Holocaust was able to happen, so many people dying right under so many other people's eyes...I want to understand especially as we're losing our Holocaust survivors to old age. Certainly seeing that movie would be much more worthwhile to me than seeing an apparent bastardization of the Bible!

The fact that Mel Gibson's father is apparently a Holocaust revisionist (Dad told me this; I need to ask him his source) makes me twitchy, too...though I don't know what type of input Mel's father had into the film. But as I mentioned above, do I hear correctly that the film essentially blames the Jewish people of Christ's time for Christ's crucifixion? Um, last I read the Bible, wasn't it the Romans who wanted him gone? Hasn't the fallacy that "the Jews killed Christ" been one of the major bases for antisemitism throughout the ages? Have we moved beyond the ballads of the middle-ages that were written around that sentiment?

Obviously not. :(

I'll stop ranting now.

If I see this movie at all, it'll be on DVD so I can fast-forward through the gratuitious squickiness. If that reduces it to a 15-minute movie, well, at least I won't be out the 9 bucks and two hours of my life. (Actually, given the tactics used to promote it, I will not see it in a way that could contribute to it being labelled a blockbuster. I'll borrow a DVD from someone who already owns it. I'd even consider a ripped copy, which I never do, if I actually knew how to procure one.)

I probably won't bother to see it, though. The reviewer who called it a two-hour snuff film seems to have hit the nail on the head (if you'll pardon the expression). This movie is not about the message of Christianity; it is about blood and gore in slow-motion, made knowing that it'll rile up some viewers against the people they hold responsible (aided by inaccurate depictions of the Romans in the movie), and I just can't believe that's an accident. While I don't think this film is going to do the massive harm that some fear it will, I can already see that it has caused some small damage in Jewish-Catholic relations, which had been going along pretty well since Nostra Aetate. It'll all blow over, but it's sad that we have to go through it for a movie that doesn't even tell the real message of the religion it supposedly supports. Or, at least, I choose to believe that most traditional Catholics do not believe that violence and hatred are the messages of their faith.

I hope you find someone to watch Schindler's List with. I actually watched it alone and was fine, but I don't know you. It's intense, but in a way very different from Gibson's movie.

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He's the movie critic for Dark Cinema. He watches a lot of violent, gory movies. Here, in part, is what he said:

Well here`s a new genre that should get everybody hopping in the 21st Century!

SPLATTER JESUS.

It never ceases to amaze me how some practitioners of the Christian faith, who espouse so much kindness and love, are often so enamored in utterly violent imagery. ... So in that vein of Fangoria-style fundamentalism, comes a new flick from bible-thumpin` Mel Gibson. ... It`s called PASSION OF THE CHRIST and it`s all about hurting the Jesus. ... It deals less with what Jesus had to say and more with ... people getting nails shoved through their body. Poor Jesus just wails and whimpers and cries and loves and mopes and shuffles as he gets whipped and tortured and brutalized into a bloody heap of weeping, sorrow-drenched messiah goo.

I suppose all the horrible bleeding agony and despair is not without complete meaning. We`re all suppose to feel BAD, cause this poor Jesus guy is really nice and he`s important to some people and he`s suffering this brutal, unrelenting, hideous torture. And I felt bad watching it. But no less, no worse for the girl puking her entrails out in Gates of Hell. I`m not into the Jesus. I respect ... Christianity. ... I just wish this Jesus guy inspired as much out of Mel Gibson as he does out of my family.

Cause frankly? PASSION OF THE CHRIST is about as shallow as AZUMI and KILL BILL ... It is a PASSION PLAY, so naturally it`s all about emotional reactions. Mel Gibson ... claimed to have done oceans of research and for the life of me? I can`t see it in the film. Historically the entire film is completely wrong, right down to the clothes ... and the accents of the actors.
...

And I feel it`s slightly racist. For those people out there, rolling their eyes at the reporters in the media who have watched this film and claimed it was anti Jew? Well roll with this suckers. The original Gospels were written with the intent of converting people away from the Jewish faith ... Everything written on Jesus was done so 70 years after his death and the death of all his prophets and buddies. ...

Thing is, this is the 21st Century. Divide and conquer is a pretty lame, low-brow tactic, and blaming Jewish people directly for the death of the Son of God, ... is a pretty manipulative thing to do.

Every choice Mel makes reflects the agenda with which he approached the material. The true historical Pilate was universally agreed to be an astoundingly cruel and disturbed maniac. ... If Gibson has done any basic rudimentary research then he would know this ... So why then does Gibson choose instead to portray Pilate as a conflicted, deep and torn leader? ... Poor, innocent Pilate forced to kill the noble Jesus ... Aaawwww, what a misunderstood and tortured figure of history!

Give me a break.

And don`t tell me that Mel had to use that version cause it was in the books, cause each of the Gospels offers up a different version of the events. ... No, you see Mel Gibson CHOSE to blatantly misrepresent the truth of his own ideology. ...

I think this movie is not ... even about Jesus, it`s about special effects, hubris and being pretentious. ... The film is shot in the original language of the time and Mel didn`t want there to be subtitles (me thinks to hide his lack of writing skill), so that the film could appear "totally authentic". Now isn`t that a hoot? In Mel`s original vision you weren`t even suppose to understand what anyone was saying. You were just suppose to sit back and take in a good Jesus Whipping. But gosh, one would think that if Mel wanted to be a little more authentic, he would have (a) told the truth about Pilate and (b) made some of these guys who are constantly running around in the basking sun to be...oh I dunno...tanned? Not pale white? But then again being pale white makes the blood stand out more...and making Pilate a good guy lets you hate Jewish people. So y`know..DRAMATIC EFFECT!

But ultimately there is one good thing about this movie. It shows that we live in a society that goes into seizures ... over an exposed breast, and yet will simultaneously tighten up with tears and ... piety over a 100 minute non-stop orgy of hideously brutal graphic violence.

I like the phrase "splatter jesus flick" I must make sure I use it twenty five times in conversation in order to retain it in my vocabulary :)

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Someone I know has been referring to it as "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre"

I do keep hearing that it's NOT about the life of jebus or his message - JUST about his death.

I also keep hearing (on the radio, even) that there are a lot of churches buying out shows to give tickets away in an effort to convert them. As gory and violent as the movie sounds (and rated R) I have to wonder if they even watched it before deciding to buy the tickets.

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"Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" comes from a reviewer; if you care, I'll track down which one. I stumbled across it and quoted it in a comment to somebody else's journal ... probably

silmaril's journal, I think.)

As for being just about His death, well to be fair that's all it tried to be, all it ever claimed to be, and even exactly what the title says it is: our modern meaning for the word "passion" derives from an older meaning that meant "suffering", and in this context it means exactly what this movie portrays. So that's not a valid complaint about the job they did making the movie/telling the story (but it is a valid complaint about which movie they decided to make, which part of the story they decided to tell).

As others have pointed out, there's a long history of "passion plays"; at the same time (again, as others have pointed out), trying to use this to convert people instead of a telling of the larger story that makes this ending meaningful in the first place, is a bizarre choice. (And (again, not my own observation or research), denying the inflammatory nature of the movie given the historical correspondence between passion plays and anti-Semitic violence, is suspicious at best.)

I think that the churches giving away tickets aren't thinking "gory and violent" so much as "realistic and spectacular" -- think "shock and awe". But I still find it really odd to use just the ending, without the message part of the story, to try to win converts. For somebody who already believes, I can see an excruciatingly graphic depiction driving home just how much He suffered for us to give us the gift of Salvation (in other words, the movie is a reminder that it wasn't, "Oh okay, the point in the story when I die now -- see y'all in a couple of days, and have a nice weekend!", that instead it involved real suffering, torture). I can't see someone who doesn't already believe, reacting to a couple hours of brutality inflicted on a character they don't already have that personal attachment to, saying, "Gee, all that gore and pain has opened my eyes to how much God loves us!" or something.

So I think the Christians who say things like, "I dare anyone to watch this and not believe," are mistaking their feelings of having their existing belief emphasized and personalized, for the acquisition of new faith. Sloppy thinking. Grrrr.

Me, I'm already a believer but I'm not sure I really want to sit through this movie based on what I've heard. Further thoughts on the reasons for that might venture into TMI-land, but I may get around to organizing them into words eventually anyhow.

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I think anyone who says "the book was better" should be required to prove that he actually read it. ;)

"εν αρχη εστιν ο λογος, και ο λογος εστιν προς τον θεον, και ο λογος εστιν τον θεον ..."

Do they have to say which book they read, or do othey have to be able to compare all four? <<innocent look>>

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printing greek charaters I mean. such an ability would have been useful about a week ago wrt printing hiragana & katakana

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In this case I did it the hard way:

εν αρχη εστιν

and so on. I think

madbodger mentioned something about being able to conveniently type Greek in Mac OS X in "Unicode mode"; I haven't found a good way to do that under Windows yet, and until I started seeing the results of it, I was nervous about Unicode/browser interactions.

I can cut-and-paste Greek under Windows, but until I do a "view source" on this comment, I won't be sure exactly which encoding it uses when I do that. In this case, I picked the verse I happen to have memorized in Greek (John 1:1) so I just typed it in, with all the ampersands and semicolons.

And now the copy/paste test: "εν αρχη εστιν ο λογος, [...]"

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Oh my. "View source" reveals that ... Vi For Windows does not have a bloody clue what to do with Unicode. It shows up as a bunch of box/line-drawing characters. I wonder whether Notepad can cope...

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ϝαυ
did you or the interpreter know to pick the proper sigmas?
hmm doesn't seem to work for me

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It worked for you, for two out of three letters. I see the alpha and upsilon. You picked an awfully obscure one to start with (hadn't the digamma fallen out of use by Homer's time?). Admittedly it'd be nice if the HTML tokens were that thorough, but I'm not surprised they left that one out. (I wonder whether there's a Unicode value for it.)

You have to specify σ for an internal sigma or &sigmaf; for a terminal sigma.

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Well I was trying to type "wow" and υαυ just didn't seem to cut it and trying the digamma was just an additonal test I could do at the same time. Now I wonder if there are other easter egg characters one can print with &, such as thorn þ

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Thorn and eth, IIRC, but not yogh. (In fact, when I was attempting to typeset a song, I either couldn't yogh in Unicode at all or I couldn't find it in the fonts I have; I forget which. I wound up using '3' in place of it.

Note BTW that these tokens are case sensitive: you can write an uppercase &Thorn;orn with &Thorn; -- similarly for the Greek letters.

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Huh. In the comment where I say it works, it fails. Odd and upsetting. :-(

þ Þ ð Ð σ Σ

Hmm.

Got it: For the OE/ME/Danish characters you capitalize the entire token:
Þ -- but for the Greek you only capitalize the first letter: Σ (an onfortunate inconsistency. *pout*)

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using google(html &epsilon &alpha þ), I found this printer friendly link: http://www.creationguide.com/characters/index.html It seems to me to support most west european writing and math (including set notation). I noticed that there is a sequence for the euro "&euro" € so they must be updating this list of special characters from time to time :) Thanx for showing off your html skills and explaining them afterwards ^_^

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it worked, this feature seems rather low level so I suspect it's a feature of HTML 1 or 2 mebbe. I will have to see if googling will turn up an exhaustive listing. ^_^

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Oh, any book that could reasonably be said to contain the origin story for the movie. Once in awhile that means multiple texts, especially for historical events.

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Hmm. I think that to be allowed to say "better than the movie", any of the four[1] would work then, unless they're also picking on it for historical accuracy.

[1] I'm not knowledgable about the apocrypha. Are there any apocryphal gospels, or are the apocrypha all letters and/or prophesy?

What an odd combination of serious and silly there is in my head right now.

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