the blog quebecois

I haven't seen The Passion of the Christ and I probably won't -- I'm not a big moviegoer -- but it is certainly amusing to read critical reaction to it, which might be described as of the prissy schoolmarm variety.

Writing in The Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere called it a "lash-by-lash and nail-by-nail re-enactment" of the crucifixion. Pevere compared Gibson's film to the recently remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then labelled it "fundamentalist pornography. What graphic sex is to the use of the body in hardcore porno, graphic violence is to destruction of the body of Christ in this Passion."

The Globe and Mail's Rick Groen's echoed those remarks, saying the film is "is so obsessively and so graphically bloody-minded that it comes perilously close to the pornography of violence."

I don't know who coined that phrase, the "pornography of violence," but I'd like to have him shot.

Pevere and Groen weren't always quite so squeamish. Let's look at their take on Quentin Tarantino's splatterfest, Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Pevere:

If Tarantino, the ultimate fan turned moviemaker of the Internet era, can be held at least partially responsible for a rash of smug, slap-happy and bloody-minded action blockbusters that proliferated in the multiplex mainstream in his wake, he redeems himself with this, a relatively lo-fi bone-cruncher that restores to guilty pleasure its defamed good name: If it's blood and action and profanity and martial arts and rock 'n' roll we must have, let it be Tarantino - and not, for mercy's sake, Michael (Pearl Harbor) Bay - that provides it.

[. . .]

If Tarantino's purpose was to make a movie that not only pays homage to his beloved outlaw genres like chop-socky, vigilante thrillers and spaghetti westerns, but to convey the pure joy of watching them, he's done it. Allowing that movies are like drugs, this is crack.

Groen:

So, when the picture returns to live action and the killing field shifts to Japan, who better to play O-Ren than Lucy Liu. She's next on the Bride's hit list, setting the stage for a drawn-out climax in three stages, a trio of eye-popping fight scenes, each one separately choreographed and shot and scored, culminating in a set piece as lovely as it is surprising -- in the delicate winter of a Japanese garden, death comes draped in snow and drenched in silence.

Yes, the gore is ubiquitous -- sometimes graphic, usually stylized, occasionally comic. But, thanks to the graceful pacing, it never feels assaultive. In fact, complete with that peaceful coda, the film's achievement is nothing less than symphonic.

One man's pornography another's lyrical ballet, eh?

I think they desperately wanted to hang the anti-semitic tag on this movie, but that turned out to be subjective at best,

"Pilate is too nice! Caiaphus is too mean! The mob looks too angry!"

so they fuss and pout about the brutality of it all.

Geez, Mel, you should have played it for laughs. They'd be crowning you as an auteur by now.