Posted on 02/25/2005 11:22:14 AM PST by jbemis
THE BEST PICTURE
BY JAMES BEMIS
When this year’s Academy Award nominees were announced, many were shocked Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST was not nominated for a single major award. The movie, which chronicled Jesus’ last twelve hours, took the cinematic world by storm.
BREAKING AN UNSPOKEN TABOO
Because the movie was filmed in Latin and Aramaic with no big-name stars, Hollywood insiders figured producer and director Gibson was throwing away his $30 million investment. However, upon general release in February 2004, it was obvious something extraordinary had occurred: THE PASSION was not only a box office smash but the film succeeded brilliantly as cinema.
Gibson expertly puts us at Ground Zero of the last twelve hours in Christ’s life. In his wisdom, the director played it straight, letting the gripping Passion narrative unfold just as it has been passed down through the ages – thankfully, there’s hardly a modern touch found anywhere in the film.
In taking Christianity seriously, however, “The Passion” broke Hollywood’s unspoken taboo. Controversy raged about whether the film was “anti-Semitic.” But whether people loved or hated the film, most agreed it was extraordinarily powerful cinema. The question was not if the film would be nominated for major awards, but how many.
Then came January 26’s startling news: THE PASSION was nominated for three minor awards but no major ones. Few imagined Hollywood’s bias against Christianity was so big – and its elite so small – that THE PASSION would be virtually snubbed when the Academy Award nominations were announced. Was 2004 such a stellar year for the movies that a great cinematic achievement like THE PASSION could be ignored?
THE SECOND-RATE COMPETITION
Hardly. The five films nominated for 2004’s Best Picture are – at best – second-rate, forgettable as last week’s leftovers. RAY, for instance, is simply a mediocre bio-pic of the sort – albeit seamier – Hollywood used to churn out by the dozens: THE GLENN MILLER STORY, THE BENNY GOODMAN STORY, THE GENE KRUPA STORY, THE EDDY DUCHIN STORY, etc. (None of these – including RAY – holds a candle to “YANKEE DOODLE DANDY,” though.) You never forget you’re watching a movie about Ray Charles: Despite all the acting accolades, Jamie Foxx seems far too delicate and insubstantial for the role of a tough, complex giant like Ray Charles. As one who loves Charles’ music, I wanted to like the movie but found it trite and unmoving. Most viewers would better understand “The Genius” by listening to a greatest hits CD rather than watching this anemic film.
It says much about the corrupted state of our culture that Clint Eastwood’s MILLION DOLLAR BABY is considered mainstream. The story involves the freakish sport of female boxing, an activity that would be unthinkable in a civilized society. None of the athletes exhibit even the faintest hint of feminine virtue, but instead talk, act and think like undersized men with mammeries. Worse, the film smiles upon the “mercy killing” of an invalid by the nominally Catholic “hero.” The message: Once you’ve lost the ability to earn big bucks pulverizing women in a boxing ring, then life just ain’t worth living. This is deep thinking, Hollywood-style.
Finally, director Eastwood can’t resist taking cheap shots at the Catholic Church. As in last year’s MYSTIC RIVER, a priest is disparaged: This time, he’s made to appear immature and so ignorant he can’t explain the doctrine of the Trinity or the Immaculate Conception to a pesky parishioner. In short, MILLION DOLLAR BABY is a thoroughly repulsive film.
Martin Scorsese’s THE AVIATOR is similar to Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose: so overblown it hardly gets airborne. This leaden biography of Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is a cartoonish, indulgent, almost amateurish production. DiCaprio’s hair looks like it was dyed with shoe polish. In the second lead role, Cate Blanchett’s caricature of Katherine Hepburn is uproariously incompetent. Like every movie Scorsese has made since 1980’s great RAGING BULL, this film is too long, too loud, and too lumbering. Nothing in it rings true. Put another way, THE AVIATOR, as they say, must be seen to be disbelieved.
Critically acclaimed SIDEWAYS reveals more about its admirers than it does about human nature. The story revels in degradation - of marriage, friendship, courtship, family, etc. You name it, SIDEWAYS demeans it. Ostensibly about two friends on a week-long wine tasting binge before one’s wedding, the wretched SIDEWAYS is a sort of upscale PORKY’S, replete with foul language, naked fat slobs, animal-like carnality and juvenile high-jinks by two thoroughly unlikable male leads. If this is the “cultural landmark” many are saying, conservatives must ask whether American society has much left worth conserving.
FINDING NEVERLAND, a story about “Peter Pan” creator J. M. Barrie, is a thin but rewarding film, featuring an excellent performance by Johnny Depp – the first role I’ve seen in which he doesn’t grossly overact. Another highlight is the extraordinary performance by Freddie Highmore as a member of the family that inspires Barrie to write “Peter Pan.” NEVERLAND is an enjoyable and touching movie, but ultimately is rather insubstantial.
RELISHING RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY
By any artistic standard, THE PASSION is far superior to any of the films nominated as Best Picture. Why the cold-shoulder? First, part of the wailing over the movie was veiled envy from an embarrassed Hollywood establishment, those makers of infantile comedies and seductive trivialities who saw what a real filmmaker could do. Watching THE PASSION is an unforgettable experience: It demonstrates the heights that cinema is capable of but rarely achieves, especially these days.
Second, THE PASSION’S snubbing puts the lie to the Hollywood establishment’s reputed “tolerance.” In fact, a hostile blacklisting of Gibson and other Christians now occurring is far more hideous than anything happening during the supposed “Dark Ages” of the McCarthy blacklisting era because it is done out of religious intolerance. Over the years, observers have noted how Hollywood executives relish producing films that undermine, demean, and ridicule the Christian faith. This year the mask is ripped off and we see the bared fangs of religious bigotry in all its grisly and vivid ugliness. In a year when a great film like THE PASSION so obviously should have been honored, Tinseltown’s elites instead chose five forgettable films as the finest they had to offer. Faced with an opportunity to rise above their prejudices for a change, the Academy – to its everlasting shame - took a flyer.
The 2004 Academy Awards forever will be remembered as when the year’s best picture wasn’t nominated as Best Picture.
And tell me about those persons who were denied participation in Hollywood because they are Christian? (and please, PLEASE, spare us the tired rant about Mel and his distribution deal - he made a movie in Aramaic and didn't want to put subtitles in - I'm sure you would agree that his faith does not ENTITLE him to a distributor?)
He doesn't. Nobody cares what Hollywood blacklists. The Passion will be racking up big bucks from now till the end of time. What's interesting is the extent of Hollywood's self-defeating bigotry--and the steady decline of its influence. The party's almost over--but they haven't noticed that people are starting to put on their coats to go home.
What kind of creativity did the POTC exhibit? All Gibson did was take a passage from the Bible and put it on the screen.
1. "why don't you tell me about all of the highly acclaimed anti-Christian (and, please remember, I said "anti-Christian", as opposed to "not taking positions which ultima ratio would endorse as pro-Christian") films that came out of Hollywood this year?"
This year? How about "The Da Vinci Code" which slams the Gospels? How about last year's "Magdalene Sisters" about evil nuns? Nor do we need overt anti-Christianity to tell the story. Writers and directers are usually much more subtle. I wish I had a dollar for every Christian nutcase who appears as a character for filmgoers to ridicule or despise.
2. "tell me about those persons who were denied participation in Hollywood because they are Christian?"
When have I ever made this claim? I would never say something so crude. Hollywood doesn't overtly blacklist Christians per se, anymore than it blacklists conservatives. But anybody who wishes to work in Tinseltown already knows he or she must keep their Christianity and conservatism under wraps. It's a given. Jim Caviezel was a fluke--so is Mel Gibson--and you and I know it. It's dishonest to pretend otherwise.
You're kidding, right?
From a creative point of view, it is no more original than any other recreation of a historical event.
You said bigotry. Before you start calling others dishonest, you ought to be able to back up your own charges.
Then you know nothing about movies and what it takes to translate words onto the screen in visual terms. For instance, the film had to have a location. Where do you find a Jerusalem of the first century? Do you build it on a back lot? How much of Christ's past life should intrude on the Passion itself as flashbacks to relieve the tension that inevitably builds--and how should these scenes be intercut? Gibson wanted his film to look like a Caravaggio painting--what cinematographer had the talent to achieve this look? What about the decision to have the actors use Aramaic, instead of English? Gibson knew that actors going around speaking English would lessen virisimilitude--it was a brilliant touch and put the film in a unique category, making it accessible to every country in exactly the same way. He used the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane and had it echo the Garden of Eden, Genesis, chapter 3, in which the Temptor tempts Eve and then Adam. Gibson plays off this comparison and has Jesus stomp on the head of a serpent--as God had promised Adam and Eve that enmity would be placed between their seed and the seed of the serpent, thus heralding the film's theme of triumph over the Fall of Adam and Christ's victory over Satan--taking a theologically abstract idea and making it amazingly vivid and cinematic. And on and on--I've only scratched the surface, really--Gibson took 30 million dollars and made a film that looked like at least a hundred million. That in itself was remarkable.
The Academy awards?? Wassat?
I think the movie uses Latin Vulgate -- Suona come italiano, esso non?
If you don't think the Hollywood left is bigoted, you're living in a dream world. It loathes Christianity--and shows its disdain over and over. And by the way, I haven't ranted--and I've said nothing at all about the publishing industry. We were discussing Hollywood, remember? I argued a point of view using some examples.
"The bottom line is not money but some sort of demonic compulsion that drives these people to lash out against Jesus Christ, against Christians, and against anyone who holds to a sincere belief in God, in spite of the fact that it is going to cost them tens of millions of dollars to do it. They are driven to 'make a statement' regardless of the consequences." (Michael Medved. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. 1992)
"For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster." (p. 64. Hollywood vs. America.)
"The movie industry has ignored the success of films that look favorably on faith with the same sort of self-destructive stubbornness that has led to its continued sponsorship of antireligious-message movies." (p. 76. Medved. Ibid.)
"The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards." (p. 89. Medved. Ibid.)
"Asking Hollywood to begin to show some restraint and balance in its antireligious fury is not the same as suggesting that the industry must transform itself into an agency for advancing the Word of God." (p. 90. Medved. Ibid.)
"Hollywood's persistent hostility to religious values is not just peculiar, it is positively pathological." (p. 71. Medved. Ibid.)
"The sad fact is that today homosexual activists have far more clout with Hollywood than do conservative Christians." (Joseph Farah. Anti-Christian Bigotry in Hollywood. p. 12)
"In their book, Watching America, the Lichters and Rothman turned to Hollywood and interviewed the writers and producers of prime-time entertainment. They discovered: 75% place themselves on the left politically; 97% are pro-choice; 80% believe homosexuality is morally acceptable; and only 7% attend any sort of religious service regularly." (Chuck Colson. A Dance with Deception. p. 18)
"The majority of secular films are antichrist, as evidenced by their use of profanity, their consistent negative portrayal of Christians – especially ministers – and their obvious rejection of the ethics that Christ taught." (David Mains. The Rise of the Religion of Antichristism. p. 38)
"It is no coincidence that Hollywood, which routinely ridicules or marginalizes Christianity, donates heavily to organizations like the ACLU or People for the American Way." (Robert H. Knight. The Age of Consent. p. xvii)
"Christians are the only group Hollywood can offend with impunity, the only creed it actually goes out of its way to insult. Clerics, from fundamentalists preachers to Catholic monks, are routinely represented as hypocrites, hucksters, sadists, and lechers. The tenets of Christianity are regularly held up to ridicule." (Don Feder. A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America.)
"No other group is so consistently maligned on prime-time television (than traditional Christians). These defamatory portrayals betray a deep-seated hostility." (Don Feder. A Jewish Conservative. P. 134.)
"Hostility within CBS to 'Christy's' openly Christian message made the difference in the decision to cancel, (Ken) Wales (the producer) told a conference on Religion and Prime Time Television in June 1995." (Robert H. Knight. The Age of Consent. p. 112)
"It is far easier to get a film made about a demonic Christian than to get one made about a sane Christian." (Robert Knight. Ibid. p. 131)
Scorsese quit making interesting films years and years ago. And what is his infatuation with DeCrapio? What was that last stinker they made? Something in New York? I think 12 people saw it.
Fortunately books come in all persuasions--conservative or liberal, Christian or anti-Christian--movies don't. Movies are pretty much an exclusive club. Even a superstar like Gibson couldn't get his film produced or distributed by Hollywood--even with his record of smash hits and with the award-winning Braveheart behind him. Something else was at play--B-I-G-O-T-R-Y. Not to speak of stupidity.
Goodfellas had to end that way, it's a movie based on the story of Henry Hill, a Mafia turncoat...
At least, I believe it's based entirely on Hill's life!
Ed
Surely you're not so fatuous as to believe that none of the vitriol aimed at Gibson was religious based. Either Jeffrey Katzenberg or David Geffen (he wouldn't speak for attribution) said of Gibson, "It doesn't matter what I say. It'll matter what I do. I will do something. I won't hire him. I won't support anything he's part of. Personally that's all I can do." See link below:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1085512/posts
Blacklisting, anyone?
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