redwards13 Reviews

The Passion of the Christ (2004)

How does this movie WORK on us?

[4/10 · 11 February 2007]

Like all action movies, Passion of The Christ works using violence and the creation and release of tension, although not in the usual way.

The usual way relies on ratcheting up tension in the audience and then releasing it in a way that has dramatic elegance (symmetry, catharsis etc.). The resolution of the modern movie's conflict lies in the first 20-30 pages of the script. The turning point in the first 20-30 pages signal a departure from normalcy, and we are returned to modified normalcy in the last 10 pages or so. The modern movie depicts its imbalance in all kinds of ways, and the action movie, from which Passion gets at least a fair amount of its DNA, usually relies on some form of brutality. In the war movie it's often atrocities by an unfeeling enemy and in Charles Bronson movies it's usually some poor underaged girl getting kidnapped and raped, but it's all doing the same big dumb thing: providing the emotional fuel necessary to make us embrace the violence that's going to set things right.

At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to be clever, I turn now to Wikipedia:

"The Latin phrase (deus ex machina) originated with Greek and Roman theater, when a mechane would lower actors playing a god or gods on stage to resolve a hopeless situation. The phrase is often translated as "god from the machine", where the machine referred to is the crane device employed in the task."

Now, we modern people (modern meaning post-Aristotle) typically think of deus ex machina as a cheap, unsatisfying way to solve dramatic situations. But if it's so cheap and crappy, how did it once become so popular?

One answer is that if faith in and surrender to the deus in question are perceived by the audience as the only real and true ways to solve problems, deus ex machina starts to look a lot less cheap and crappy. Theater becomes a devotional ritual rather than a humanistic one. The surrender of one's ego-centric desires to faith in a higher power is an alternative way to release the anxiety created by conflict in the narrative. Most Christians believe that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is fundamental to salvation, and Passion relies on this belief to solve its dramatic problems. Anger at the injustice done to Jesus is relieved by knowing that He is reborn, and that his rebirth not only solves all of His problems, but ours as well. Looking at the movie this way, it's easy to understand why so many people found the charges of anti-semitism to be beside the point: we don't leave the theater angry at the Jews because the problems of the movie have been solved without revenge. So although I found myself shaking my head and thinking, "those stupid Jews" a bunch of times (come on, admit it, so did you), I really don't think the movie's trying to stir up hatred. In the end I just felt sorry for the Jews, and is stirring up condescension really such a crime?

That aside, Passion stirs up all kinds of other emotions through its extreme violence, and it's fair to examine the way it does this and to ask whether what it's doing is ethical and honest. The scenes of Jesus being tortured and humiliated are excruciating to watch. We watch them bracing ourselves at the blows that tear his flesh, at the extreme violence done to his body. We are filled with anxiety, and the movie uses this anxiety to bully us into accepting the resolution to its story: it freaks us out as much as it possibly can and gives our emotional pressure a singular escape route. People believe in Jesus as the savior for all kinds of reasons, but the least compelling one, and the only one that Passion's narrative thrust relies on, is that He was tortured to death. This is manipulative and cheap, partly because it's exploiting pre-existing assumptions that the audience presumably finds meaningful and important to add backbone to an unreflective narrative roller-coaster, but mostly because it's relying on the creation and alleviation of anxiety and repulsion to do this. How can there be any meaning in a journey that gets all its fuel from fear and repulsion? I don't see how its ray of hope at the end -- shining on an immaculate, naked Jim Caviezel with a CGI stigmata -- could seem satisfying to anyone who doesn't feel like being bullied into believing something, whether they already believe it or not.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

Bland, Predictable, and...

[5/10 · 4 August 2004]

This movie simply isn't very good. First, its characters... the movie sets up rules that govern the way the characters are supposed to behave, and then arbitrarily violates them. It's hard to explain this without getting into specifics, but when you're dealing with "brainwashing," and characters who can partially resist their brainwashing, i think you'd have to develop the characters enough so that you'd understand how they come to the points where they can or can't resist their programming. Without that (or characters who're developed AT ALL), the only real reason anyone does anything in the second half of this movie is out of dramatic necessity (bad reason). The obvious reason for its popularity must be a superficially anti- corporate tone and lukewarm media commentary. And don't get me wrong, I'm a raving lefty. I hate the corporate vultures picking our political candidates a lot more than the next guy, probably. But there's nothing really insightful or clever about The Manchurian Candidate's treatment of the media or the motives of corporate political influence... it's just set dressing. And despite the solid performances and a lot of nice elements, it never comes together as a whole, in terms of resolving its characters' conflicts or in terms of developing any off its halfhearted social commentaries... so in the end, it meets its dramatic obligations by throwing a comforter over the bunched up mess of sheets and telling its parents that it made the bed. A disappointment.

The Strange Case of Señor Computer (2000)

Very funny and surprisingly... deep

[9/10 · 4 March 2004]

From the line about hunting down chickens with helicopter gunships, this movie had me. I am still laughing at it and it's been hours since I saw it. Its minimal production add to its charm in my opinion (and by putting its constructedness front and center, getting that out of the way, it draws you into the movie more quickly than a slick production would), but that isn't the real point.

The way the robot is used as a -- "device" is putting it too clinically, but -- device to explore the desires and absurdity of humans is done really elegantly. I found it very emotionally powerful, but it has a light touch. It's often expected that a movie will have such a powerful emotional, cathartic effect that it will be contained and resolved by the time the movie's over, but this movie never spells out its emotional core. It doesn't have to. There are undercurrents of desire for acceptance and contact that run behind its very, very funny center, and then step forward quite gently at the end. It's a remarkable movie.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Requiem for your self-respect

[1/10 · 24 October 2002]

Remember the anti-drug commercial where a girl points to an egg, says, "this is your brain," and then screams, "this is your brain on drugs!" as she smashes the egg with a skillet and proceeds to demolish the entire kitchen, screaming, "and this is what drugs do to your family, this is what they do to your future..." and so on?

If you can imagine that commercial going on for two hours, done with great visual style and editing, with acting that ranges from excellent (Ellen Burstyn) to terrible, you can skip this movie. While Requiem for a Dream sells itself as an important movie about important subject matter, it does nothing to explain why REAL PEOPLE do drugs. Its characters are not people. They suffer without reflection on their own states, while the filmmaker attempts to bombard you with visual symbols explaining what they want and feel. While one could interpret the device used to explain why the Burstyn character continues her downward spiral, the game show, as a meaningful symbol for individuals' desires for acceptance and recognition, I don't think it is one. It is a gimmick that condescends to the character by making her desire for acceptance pathetic and silly. The movie tells you what to think about her inner motivations by staging them in a highly subjective way.

This way of revealing character is consistent throughout the movie. Characters are without interior lives, or at least their interior lives are not revealed. At the same time, the movie uses symbols (the game show, the television, etc...) to suggest the reasons for their desires. While real people do drugs for complex reasons which are hard to unravel, these characters are living in a movie-world symbolism which suggests familiar, "important" reasons for their behavior that tie into the most materialistic, shallow aspects of our society. And of course the shallow, cheap aspects of our culture are harmful to us all, and we recognize them in the movie. So despite their lack of depth, is not hard for us to relate to these characters, and maybe even feel sorry for them, since they exist only as empty vessels into which we may pour our own self-pity.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

Don't blame the movie.

[10/10 · 12 October 2002]

I'd like an explanation of what makes people think this movie is pretentious. Because it never pretends to be anything other than what it is, which is a simple, sweet love story.

You didn't think it was funny, fine. You prefer to perceive everything you see in movies as having an unambiguous meaning, that's your prerogative. And if you don't like the fact that the movie asks you to experience it in the moment (the visuals are telling you to do that, not just acting pretty) without trying to figure out where the next poo joke's coming from, that's fine. Go watch something else. But don't blame the fact that you were expecting some hackish Sandler vehicle on anyone but yourself. (Not that there's anything wrong with hackish Sandler vehicles.)