This is a film not worth watching in so many ways I cannot even express some of them here. I find myself becoming angrier and angrier the more distance I get from the film. I find myself not even wanting to type this now. I feel used.

But, there is no question that this film is THE American life of Christ. It is so pathologically imbued with violence that it made me physically sick. It is repulsive, repugnant and shameless. It is pornography in ever sense of the word. Only one other movie has moved me to such vomitous levels of disgust: Reservoir Dogs. It is mercilessly sadistic, gory and nothing but a lousy caricature of who Christ really was. (Yeah, I am lapsed Catholic. So sue me.)

Besides, it's a lousy movie--better yet, lousy filmmaking. The characters are stale, superficial and uni-dimensional. Mary Magdalene is a hotty. Mary is so, well, Maryish. She only has one look throughout the entire film. And Jesus is so Anglo-Saxon looking--rugged good looks. Yeah! Americans like that. There is no context to the story and the only content is thick gobs of oozing, crimson blood.

But, as I said before, it is so quintessentially American. It's a film the fundamentalists can rally around. A perfect vision of persecution for little minds. And it is a harbinger.

The film is horribly, horribly anti-Semitic and I guarantee you it is but a first. This one is going to makes oodles of money and we all know Americans love a winner. As Leon Wiesseltier sadly says:"The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film." Which is also the same reaction my wife had.

Of course it was the violence that insulted (assaulted?) me most. And Melanie is right to avoid the movie. It isn't for the faint of heart.

Finally (because I really just don't want to write about this anymore, even though I said I would) I am in agreement with Andrew Sullivan (yikes!) when he says this: In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino. There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it. It doesn't even evoke emotion in the audience. It is designed to prompt the crudest human pity and emotional blackmail - which it obviously does. But then it seems to me designed to evoke a sick kind of fascination. Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before.

Don't even bother seeing it. I wish I hadn't.

UPDATE: David Denby has a very solid review of the film, here. Jeanne D'Arc has some subtle and powerful remarks here. I've received a few kind emails (thanks) but most of them have been pretty nasty. (I'm not surprised.) I'm deliberating whether to respond or not. We'll see. In the meantime, feel free to comment here.