Wired Mesh

The Passion: Reviewlutions

This review is going into the Pulse for next Wednesday's issue, which means I normally wouldn't post it for another couple of weeks. But the recent discussions of The Passion have been both heated and helpful, and I'd like to continue the dialogue.

It took me a while to write this piece; I spent a lot of last night and this morning discussing the movie with friends. I was able to clarify most of my thoughts on a midnight trip to Wal-Mart for a space heater (Rye-Dawg was cold and shivery). I welcome any constructive criticism on this one; I may not take it, but I want to consider as many points of view as possible before publishing this review.

Bloody Mel
Gibson’s Passion is a devout, distinctly Medieval meditation on Jesus’ suffering

By Aaron Mesh

The Cincinnati Enquirer reported last year on a Traditionalist Catholic church in the suburbs that had erected a statue, four feet tall, of Jesus covered in wounds. Hardly an inch of the “Scourged Christ” figure was without a deep red gash – each suggesting that a chunk of skin and flesh had been ripped away, revealing muscle and bone. Parishioners were encouraged to meditate upon these lesions as an act of adoration and remembrance. “It's a real jumping board to prayer and inspiration,” said the church’s pastor. “When we look at it, it makes us see the price of our sins.”

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a movie that was enormously controversial long before it arrived in theaters last week, is the cinematic distillation of just such Scourged Christ statuary. It is an extended meditation on the physical suffering of Jesus, designed to generate feelings of worship and fearful gratitude. And when I say extended, I mean it: the vast majority of the film’s two hours is spent observing, in intimate detail, the shredding of the flesh from the Messiah’s body. The film’s central sequence is of Roman soldiers using whips with shards of bone to rip into the back of Jesus, played by Jim Cazaviel. The scene lasts for nearly 15 minutes, and there’s a palpable feeling of relief when Christ is finally allowed to collapse onto his back on the cobblestone floor of the courtyard. And then the soldiers start tearing into his chest.

It is no surprise, then, that critics have overwhelmingly recoiled from The Passion, decrying it as an exercise in sadomasochistic barbarism with no higher purpose. What they don’t realize is that in Gibson’s Traditionalist outlook watching this torture is a higher purpose, a spiritually elevating, cleansing experience. Such doctrine is alien to most of Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity, so it’s understandable that it would be exceptionally shocking to viewers with the barest religious background. The mainstream critical incredulity at The Passion’s violence doesn’t reveal a gap between the sacred and the secular in America so much as it shows the chasm between Medieval and modern mentalities.

The Passion is more foreign a film than anything in the Bijou’s Independent Film Series; it arrives not from another country but from another time. Despite the use of Latin and Aramaic, however, the mood hails less from first-century Jerusalem than from 14-century Europe. Gibson’s Medieval sensibility extends to a fascination with the grotesque: the movie opens in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is struggling a bit with his Father, but much more with a pale, androgynous, smirking devil. The traitorous Judas is pursued by a pack of demon children with distended, engorged faces (they look like Gollum before the Atkins diet) who abandon him beside a putrefying donkey corpse, where he hangs himself. And when one of the thieves crucified beside Jesus curses him, a great black raven arrives to peck out the blasphemer’s eyes. This is the Gospel by way of the Brothers Grimm.

I have a friend who loathes the Lord of the Rings movies for taking characters who in Tolkien’s fiction are symbolically fixed and making them into dynamic, changing figures. The Middle Ages attitude of The Passion achieves the opposite: it turns vibrant, complex humans into static icons for audience adoration. The story begins in medias res; any background of who the characters are must be scrounged from brief flashbacks. (As a tool for Christian evangelism, which is how the movie has often been marketed, it’s hard to imagine The Passion sparking mass conversions. Most post-viewing discussions will have to start with identifying exactly who that Jesus fellow was.) This is not clumsy filmmaking on Gibson’s part: his intention is clearly not to tell a coherent story but to inspire adoration of the corpus. The tone of the film is sacramental, as if Gibson believes (as did the Medieval viewers of mystery plays) that watching Christ’s torment is, in and of itself, a transcendent means of grace. When Gibson says in interviews that God is using him to make this movie, I think this is what he’s talking about. The Passion is his administration of the cup of celluloid.

How affecting this is will depend on how much you buy into Gibson’s offering. The film has moments of real power, particularly as Christ screams forgiveness in his greatest moments of extremis, and it’s impossible to create a version of this story that isn’t at least a little heartrending. But The Passion’s overall affect is to demonstrate the limitations of pure image. A little of the scourging sequence goes a long way, and a lot of it means that, by the time soldiers dislocate Jesus’ shoulder to fit him on the cross, much of any audience will have surrendered to utter catatonia.

But the most violent sequences, while numbing, are also the most dramatically effective, since the weighty content matches the histrionic, melodramatic tone that Gibson uses for all two hours without respite. For all the controversy it has inspired, I don’t think The Passion of the Christ is a very good movie. It has all the over-the-top romanticism and broad acting of Gibson’s Braveheart, without the vigilant character construction. All the actors perform to the balcony, and Gibson matches them with plenty of slow motion and thundering jump cuts. The only performer who makes a full emotional connection with the audience is Maia Morgenstern as Jesus’ mother Mary – her psychological agony is fully believable, and if viewers weren’t going in with preconceived beliefs, it’s quite possible the film would inspire more Marian devotion than anything else.

The lack of recognizable human performances is where the much-bandied charge of anti-Semitism holds the most water, with Jewish high priest Caiphas (Mattia Sbragia) howling unsubtitled curses upon his people in exchange for the blood of the Galilean. But the movie betrays no particular antipathy toward Jews, many of whom show compassion to Christ as the movie follows the traditional 14 Stations of the Cross to Calvary. The real bias of the movie is anti-heathen in a way that again echoes the Middle Ages. Those who love Jesus are saintly, and those who kill him – Jews and Gentiles – are unmitigated scum, all with a ravenous appetite for cruelty.

And for Christians, this degrading and polarizing of human characters should come as the greatest disappointment in The Passion of the Christ. For those of us who believe that the story of Jesus matters, his life is not merely physical suffering on our behalf, but a redemption that revolutionizes our very natures, that brings the life of God back into humanity. It is this gift that makes Christianity more beautiful than the theistic cowering that Barry Graham described in a recent issue of the Pulse. But while the Christ of The Passion shows forgiveness to his tormentors, Gibson has no interest in showing them any grace. His Passion has no compassion.

And Now, a Quick Ploy to Lighten the Mood Around Here

Seeing as the Academy Awards show is four days after The Passion's opening, wouldn't it be something if Billy Crystal made his Sunday night entrance dressed as Caiaphas?

Or not.

Roger, Jesus and Me

Scott Cunningham showed me Roger Ebert’s review of The Passion of the Christ this afternoon, and wondered why I seem so hesitant, even downright hostile, to the movie. I knew if I were to reply honestly, it would be a post of its own, and here we are.

Scott,

Ebert’s review is fantastic – his opinion and Denby’s are now the two critical poles that I will take with me into the theater. I’m particularly impressed by Ebert’s full understanding of Christian theology:

“The libel that the Jews "killed Christ" involves a willful misreading of testament and teaching: Jesus was made man and came to Earth in order to suffer and die in reparation for our sins. No race, no man, no priest, no governor, no executioner killed Jesus; he died by God's will to fulfill his purpose, and with our sins we all killed him. That some Christian churches have historically been guilty of the sin of anti-Semitism is undeniable, but in committing it they violated their own beliefs.”

This is amazing, stunning writing from a mainstream film critic, and if nothing else, I will be grateful to Mel Gibson for inspiring such prose.

But I think that I may respectfully disagree with Ebert on his precept that “I prefer to evaluate a film on the basis of what it intends to do, not on what I think it should have done.” There are times that a film’s intentions are base, disgusting or simply misguided, and I think part of a critic’s task is to, with a reasonable degree of humility, raise objections to those intentions. And although I think some of the critical rants against The Passion of the Christ are objections to the very subject material – “who wants to see a movie about Jesus’ death?” – others, including Denby, have raised an objection to the manner in which that subject is portrayed. They think that the torture of Jesus, dichomized from his message, his ministry, or any clear theological context, serves only as an attempt to viscerally shock the faithful into obedience or scar the skeptical into the Kingdom of Heaven. And they feel that such violent entertainment in fact obscures the message of Christ – that we are to love our neighbors. (Of course, these critics ignore the highly pertinent fact that to love our neighbors, we need the new life that Christ’s atonement provides. But they still may be right that the decontexualized violence splatters a puddle of blood over the sacrifice’s meaning.)

And here, Scott, is where I think you’ve misunderstood my admittedly vague comments about The Passion in recent days. I’m not arguing that film is an intrinsically unworthy medium for communicating spiritual truths and sacred stories. I’m not that much of a TR. I’m not even ready to argue that Mel’s movie is pulling the wrong emphasis from the Gospels. (But I’m getting close to that point. I think it’s possible, Scott, that you’ve never felt emotionally involved in the suffering of Christ while reading the Gospel narratives because you’re not supposed to. Perhaps the writers avoided wallowing in gory details because they felt that such carnage was incidental to the sense of holy awe that should be inspired by Jesus’ willingness to die – by the immensity of his love, not his torture. The beauty of Christ’s gift to us is the story written in the Gospel narratives; the nastiness of his death seems to me like an emphasis from certain ascetic sects that have endured, particularly among Catholics, to this day. But I’m still not certain I’m right in holding this opinion. Thoughts are welcome.)

What I am saying is that this movie scares me. It makes me feel unsettled. There are a variety of reasons for this. One is my concern, as noted in both paragraphs above, that the film will simply emphasize Christ’s sufferings and nearly entirely ignore his teachings and the gift of abundant life he gave the world in his resurrection. (Ebert notes as much: “That his film is superficial in terms of the surrounding message -- that we get only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus -- is, I suppose, not the point.”) Another is that the film’s portrayal of Jews will have so little nuance that it will cause many to see the crucifixion as an act of deicide by the Jewish people. But while I still hold to the concerns about Passion plays mentioned in my post from last summer, I think Gibson’s movie has, at least to some extent, avoided many of these pitfalls. (“We acknowledge, then, that The Passion is rabidly anti-Sanhedrin — opposed, as Jesus and other Jews were, to the Establishment of the time,” writes Time Magazine’s Richard Corliss. “But to charge the film with being anti-Semitic is like saying those who oppose the Bush Administration's Iraq policy are anti-American.”)

But I guess this movie scares me most on a personal level. I was telling a friend last night that I fear this movie will cause a massive division between many of the things that I hold dear – that Jews will see it as an attack while Christians will view it as a flawless celebration of their Savior; that intellectual leftists will criticize it as a violent sado-masochistic celebration of religious extremism while conservatives will claim that it is a perfect picture of their unironic beliefs. In other words, I’m afraid that this movie is threatening to crack a divide right down the middle of the line that divides liberals and conservatives, skeptics and true believers. And I worry that as a believer in Jesus who also cares about careful critical analysis, the Jewish people, and embracing the broadest possible swath of opinions. In other words, I worry that Jerusalem and Athens are going to war, and I have roots in both cities. (Maybe I shouldn’t, but that’s a longer argument.)

Part of my personal worries about this movie are based in a similar, sneaking conviction that it will force me to re-evaluate some of my loyalties, and see how well they match with my loyalty to Jesus. But I am also concerned, Scott, that this movie won’t have the same effect on me that you hope it will have for you. I grew up in the Pentecostal movement: I was weaned on Passion plays, youth group dramas and radio specials, all trying to either scare or guilt trip me into heaven. These pieces of media haunt me; they scuttle about my soul near the center of my faith, making me feel like a dirty son of a bitch because I drank too much last weekend. So I’m not looking forward to what sounds like another three hours of such impressions; I don’t know how I’ll be able to maintain my critical faculties in the face of such subconscious guilt. And maybe I’m even more scared because I fear that I won’t feel anything at all. And I wonder what that will mean for my faith, if this movie feels like a crock to me.

So those are my thoughts. I’d love to hear your reactions. There shouldn’t be much need for any ad hominems this time; I seem to have used them pretty nicely on myself. I am half-Jewish, after all.

But Did You Know that Jeff Styles Sits on His Couch Every Night Eating Moosetracks and Watching The English Patient?

At the online urging of Bill, I wandered out to the top of the Erlanger parking garage at 11:30 to sit in the Big Purple Van O'Love and listen to Pulse editors Zach & Michael pitch the mag on Talk Radio WGOW 102.3.

You know, it's never a great sign when someone mentions your name right after the phrase, "Speaking of being pretentious...", which is what WGOW deejay Jeff Styles did about halfway through the broadcast. As I sat in the van smoking, I discovered that Styles took umbrage with my listing Eraserhead as a personal top ten movie. "Nobody likes Eraserhead," he said. "He should just fess up. You know he goes home at night and watches a movie with some T&A in it."

This might be a good time to mention that I've actually never seen Eraserhead, and that my only mention of it in the Pulse was while reporting the favorite movies of a local filmmaker. (Also, it should be noted that liking David Lynch and enjoying T&A aren't incompatable pleasures. I'm not saying they're my pleasures, at least not on the record. I'm just noting.) But I suppose any publicity is good publicity. So, here's to ya, Jeff. Maybe we can catch a showing of Eurotrip this week.

Blown Away

The closer we get to opening day, the less I want to review The Passion of the Christ for the Pulse. I fear that any review I could write would be more about me than about the movie, and that I'm going to alienate people if I don't absolutely adore the film. Strange how excited I was about this movie when I first heard Gibson was making it, and how I'm just gloomily dreading it now.

Meanwhile, here's my review of Monster, the best -- and most gut-wrenching -- film I've seen in 2004. Both those designations may shift after Wednesday. Certainly the gut-wrenching part will.

Charlize Theron takes empathy to new levels in Patty Jenkins’ film

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the February 11-17 issue of the Pulse

“I am a man,” the classical poet Terence wrote; “nothing human is alien to me.” This is a fine and gracious sentiment, and for most of us it is a complete crock of crap. So many of the joys and sufferings of our fellows are completely foreign to us; we can, perhaps, talk with intellectual precision about starvation in Ethiopia or prostitution on the back roads of Florida, but only because we don’t have any instinct for the feeling of such experience, which is beyond words. So we pretend that our own experiences are universal, that the world feels as we do – and the movies we watch do their darndest to strengthen our illusions, providing us with acting icons so vague that we can project our own emotions onto the screen. When we cry in movies, usually we are empathizing with ourselves.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster will not allow us that that luxury. In telling the true story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a central Florida prostitute who shot seven of her clients, Jenkins works with actress Charlize Theron to create a character so individual – and so foreign to most of our own backgrounds – that we can do nothing but watch as humanity becomes a little less alien. The result is a brutal sucker-punch of a movie, a record of sin and madness that takes its audience on a direct journey to the center of a ruined soul. It shook me like little I’ve seen on a screen. A full day later, I still don’t know how to write about this movie.

Most films about serial killers objectify them as demonic, leering madmen or romanticize them as Bonnie and Clyde-style vigilantes. Jenkins and Theron instead create a character with no precedent: a woman so detached from human contact that her every action is an awkward parody of common behavior. There is no easy empathy here. Wuornos’ childhood abuse is alluded to, but sparingly, and her rants against men feel false, like desperate justifications. So the first half-hour of Monster verges dangerously close to exploitation: Theron’s Wuornos is so abnormal, with her butch bravado and sudden outbursts of rage, that she seems like some circus freak on display to horrify us. But Theron reveals a strange humanity in Wuornos, a capacity for love and kindness, that while diseased and warped, is still understandable. Wuornos falls in love with a young lesbian fleeing her family (Christina Ricci), and Theron allows the fanitest stirrings of motherly affection and sudden revusion at her own life to play across Wuornos’ worn face like a brief Florida thunderstorm. These emotions are never made explicit, and Wuornos herself seems barely able to comprehend them; she can only lash out with her limited street vocabulary and a long-nosed pistol.

So as Wuornos begins her crime spree, we see a complete human being committing the worst possible acts. I don’t want to describe these scenes in too much detail: the crimes are so simultaneously incomprehensible and strangely reasonable, Jenkins’ compassion for both killer and victim so complete, that these moments should be seen without any preconceptions. Or perhaps not: there are some people who shouldn’t see this movie at all, who will be unable to endure the spiritual agony of the violence. My companion at the movie gripped my elbow during the murders, like some people do during chase scenes in thrillers, and for once I was grateful, needing the physical contact to give me some distance from the terrible agony on the screen. Jenkins’ direction gives no quarter: the only way to transcend the horror of Wuornos’ life is to walk out of the theater.

The last time I can remember experiencing the same disturbing access to sin and madness was in high school, reading Crime and Punishment. Indeed, Monster feels like a contemporary, rural update of Dostoyevsky’s novel, with the same downward trajectory of murder and distracted rationalization, but without the Russian theologian’s belief in suffering as a means of grace. The only redemption Jenkins and Theron can offer Aileen Wuornos is to present her to us whole, and ask for our acknowledgement that while she may be alien to us, she is still human.

Denby: Cruciatus in Crucem, Mel

At the risk of turning into Your Official Home for Christians Made Vaguely Queasy by This Mel Gibson Movie, I offer the first review of The Passion of the Christ from a reviewer who, you know, watches movies for a living. It's David Denby of the New Yorker. Does he like it? Not so much.

"Gibson, of course, is free to skip over the incomparable glories of Jesus’ temperament and to devote himself, as he does, to Jesus’ pain and martyrdom in the last twelve hours of his life. As a viewer, I am equally free to say that the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony."

The review is least compelling when Denby starts flirting with higher criticism of the Gospels in his second segment. We've been here before. But stick with it; the last section of the review has an insightful critique into The Passion's place in the history of atonement art, and how Gibson has reduced Christ's life and redemption to a tableau of pain. Which, come to think of it, is just what the Romans were trying to do.

"Crucifixion, as the Romans used it, was meant to make a spectacle out of degradation and suffering—to humiliate the victim through the apparatus of torture. By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. And by casting James Caviezel, an actor without charisma here, and then feasting on his physical destruction, he has turned Jesus back into a mere body. The depictions in “The Passion,” one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema, are akin to the bloody Pop representation of Jesus found in, say, a roadside shrine in Mexico, where the addition of an Aztec sacrificial flourish makes the passion a little more passionate. Such are the traps of literal-mindedness."

Oh, I'm Sorry... Was That Like a Secret Pudding?

I'm not entirely sure how this happened, or whose idea this was, but I am nevertheless pleased to present the Punch-Drunk Love computer game, in which you must use your grocery cart to collect boxes of Healthy Choice Pudding while avoiding Mormon brothers with baseball bats. Shelley Duvall serenades you while you do this. Addictive, really. We can only wait for the Magnolia game, in which you must dodge falling frogs in order to find your SOB father and tell him that he can't die, the old coc... OK, never mind.

(Link from the fine people -- well, one person -- at Drew's Blog-a-Rama.)

This is Not a Joke, So Please Stop Smiling

Angst-ridden neo-folkie consumers of Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes, rejoice. The new Wilco album now has a title -- A Ghost is Born -- and a release date: June 8.

The next few months are so full of exciting releases -- this album, the Magnetic Fields LP, a Palace Music anthology, the Iron and Wine sophomore release -- that I'm starting a temporary category on my main index to keep track of them all. (Feel free to let me know about albums I should add to the list.) I'll also be stopping by Chad's Records with increasing regularity, which is information of less benefit to you unless you are currently stalking me.

Hoosiers on Ice

Josiah and I don't have our usual cinematic haggling in the Pulse this week; look for our review of 50 First Dates in a paper rack near you next Wednesday. (To pique your interest, let me just note that I write something so abrasive that Josiah calls me not just a hipster, not just a cynic, but a "hipster-cynic.") Meanwhile, enjoy last week's co-review on that fine icecapade of a movie, Miracle.

The Commies put their skates on one foot at a time, just like we do

By Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh
Published in the February 11-17 issue of the Pulse

Aaron: Wasn't it Tolstoy who said that all happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? I suspect that the same truth applies to sports teams: the successful ones all follow the same basic path of training and victory, while the losers tread a far more interesting road. I'll bet you could make an absolutely riveting movie about this year's Minnesota Vikings, who managed to miss the NFL playoffs after a 6-0 start to the season; the conversations in that locker room can only be imagined. Instead we get Miracle, a film that looks back at the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team, the one that shocked the Soviet machine at the Lake Placid games. The movie is basically Hoosiers on ice, with the same demanding coach looking for his own redemption, the same cast of fresh-faced athletes working harder at the fundamental than they ever imagined, the same tiny team upseting the powerhouse. (As a college buddy of mine cracked, it's Hosers.) The story is well-told, simple and direct, but I had a hard time getting past the sports movie deja vu.

Josiah: I suppose the cliché elements of the film had less effect on me because I usually do my best to avoid those movies. I watched Remember the Titans and quickly forgot it. I steered clear of Radio like I do handicap parking spaces, and I think I once watched a movie called Varsity Blues starring some kid from Dawson's Creek. The only thing I can recall from it is a whipped cream bikini and Jon Voight looking angry.

But the sports movies I see and remember are rare, but permanent: Hoosiers, Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, and lets not forget the greatest of all sports movies, The Bad News Bears. We've been overdue for a good sports movie, and I think Miracle fit the bill wonderfully. It was a well-scripted, well-directed, well-acted film, and best of all it was a true story about Americans beating Commie Russians.

There' numerous reasons why Miracle is simply Cold-War nostalgic storytelling, but in a time when America's enemies are so often faceless, nameless, and hiding in the shadows it's good to hear a story about a time when evil had a face and wore a red jersey.

Aaron: I think we'll agree that Kurt Russell is both the most original and best presence in the film; his portrayal of coach Herb Brooks is interesting because it's so uncompromisingly Midwestern, like a Lake Wobegon resident who decided to leave town to yell at guys on skates. Brooks is taciturn and impermeable, and the movie flirts intriguingly with the idea that he's a bit of a sadist, driving his players on endless sprints across the ice until they can barely breathe. As Brooks, Russell is prone to utter apparently meaningless slogans ("The legs feed the wolf, gentlemen") in his Minnesotan "ya, ya betcha" accent; you can understand completely why his players adored him and were mystified by him in equal parts.

The movie is really about Brooks more than anything else; director Gavin O'Connor seems to know his hero is a bit of a square in his plaid pants and 1950's haircut, and surrounds him with an equally square movie, dedicated to the ideals of training and teamwork. At times, the complete lack of ironic detachment works perfectly, and it put me in the proper frame of mind to root for the home team. But the movie so fully believes Brooks' maxims about hard work that it spends the majority of the narrative watching the team practice, and how many times can you watch people skate around a rink?

Josiah: I'd watch probably another twenty or thirty times as long as it’s filmed smart, encourages us to keep rooting for the underdogs, and we beat the commies in the end.

Mesh, I think you're seeing the paradigm for the film in Brooks, but I'm not sure that where it rests. Where I think it rests is in how the 1980 Winter Olympic hockey game between the U.S. and Russia was a moment of hope and triumph during the heart of the Cold War and during a troubling time of economic hardship in The United States.

I think the film was trying to point out that Brooks' dedication to hard work and discipline, and his players’ camaraderie, spirit, and willingness to believe could not just take them to victory, but could be a model for a troubled nation. That's what I think the film was trying to pull off and that's why some viewers could see it as clichéd.

I, on the other hand, grew up hearing about that game from my Dad, and seeing the story told well on the big screen made for an all-around memorable filmgoing experience. I mean, when was the last time you felt like cheering at the end of a movie?

Aaron: After All the Real Girls, actually. But I’m an odd guy.

Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh are two St. Elmoites who often stand outside the Bijou arguing about movies. They’re sort of like Ebert and Roeper, only without viable career prospects or functioning thumbs. Look for their film discussions each Wednesday in the Pulse.

But On the Upside, He Trims His Horns Hygienically Every Night Before Bed

In which we learn that Abraham Foxman really hates The Passion of the Christ because he wants to kill babies and encourage buggery.

This is going to be an ugly, ugly month.

My Mind is Filled with Radio Cures

If you should happen to be listening to WUTC at 3:00 p.m. today, you will get to hear an exciting Richard Winham interview with one editor and two publishers of the Pulse. You will learn a lot. If you are very lucky, you might even hear my name mentioned.

Beach Bums

And so I have finally gotten around to posting last week's Pulse debate between Josiah and I about The Big Bounce. I should have posted this yesterday, but I ended up spending most of the day at Lupi's Pizza having various meetings. (None of these conferences had anything to do with either of my jobs, ROC or Pulse, come to think of it. Maybe I should work on prioritizing.) So sorry about that. I should also apologize in advance for Josiah's fascination with extended cannabis metaphors in this review, and for my massively ill-fated attempt to fit in an Eugene O'Neill reference.

Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman slouch their way through “The Big Bounce”

By Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh
Published in the February 4-10 issue of the Pulse

Josiah: I have the sneaking suspicion that The Big Bounce, directed by George Armitage and based on the novel by Elmore Leonard, is going to be one of those cult movies you either love or hate. On one side you'll find the cadre of Leonardites, fans with posters of J-Lo & George Clooney in "Out of Sight" on their walls, swearing up and down to the brilliance of Leonard's dialogue. On the other side you'll find me, confused as to what all the hubbub is about and feeling like I just got picked last in kickball.

My early experiences with Leonard's on-screen translations notwithstanding, The Big Bounce has all the makings of a great, great movie. You've got a win-win formula with Owen Wilson has your slacker lead, Gary Sinise as a real-estate mogul villain, and an ensemble supporting cast of Morgan Freeman, Vinnie Jones, Charlie Sheen, and finally bikini-clad Sara Foster adding in some sexual shenanigans. Toss them all together in Hawaii in a plot-twisting roll reversal comedic crime drama, and you should have a rip-roaring good time.

Unfortunately for nearly all of the 84 minutes I spent watching the film I was quite bored. It's as if the entire cast and crew realized they had a winning setup and just failed to, well, try. I had no idea an entire film could be so lazy.

Aaron: Oh my, is it lazy. I don't think we could capture the mood of this movie in a conversation unless we let every sentence go unfinish...

It's not just that the plot never builds to a proper climax; each individual scene actually feels like a setup that unhurriedly trails off. There are no drugs in The Big Bounce that I can recall, but there's a hazy stoner vibe that is usually alien to Leonard's tight crime stories. The movie feels like it was directed on a very mellow buzz, one that kept the director from bothering to finish shots.

But I got a weird sort of contact high from the enterprise; the film's general insouciance charmed me. So many movies these days are hyperactive clones, pitching tantrums on the floor of the theater and screaming at you to enjoy their overblown chase montages and hackneyed sex jokes. The Big Bounce avoids these clichés -- not because it's original in any way, but because it's too indolent to bother. Maybe it says something about the state of American cinema that I was grateful for the break.

Josiah: But paying $7.50 for "The Big Bounce" is like being passed a bowl that's already been cashed. It's bad enough that there wasn't anything there to hit, but that old friends like Wilson and Freeman would be so rude as to pass me such a hollow shell of a film, it's enough to make a guy reconsider is cinematic allegiances. It kind of hurt my feelings. I trusted these guys and I ended up I feeling betrayed.

Aaron: But there are just some movies where you quickly realize that nothing of import is going to happen, so you just settle back to enjoy the scenery. In this case, I appreciated the way Wilson's shambling crook wears the same bloodstained shirt for several scenes, as if he figures the faded red fabric will hide any evidence of violence. I liked the way that Charlie Sheen's unseen wife has a personalized, profoundly annoying car horn that signals her presence. I liked Sheen, who looks more like a doppelganger of his father every day. And how can you complain about a film that features a game of dominoes between Wilson, Freeman, Harry Dean Stanton and Willie Nelson? I just wished the movie had spent more time at that dominoes game, and less time bothering with scraps of plot.

Josiah: I can complain because the film itself never seems to take the time to actually enjoy what it has going on. It's got the wonderful makings of a great movie, and then just, well, doesn't do anything with it at all. Like you said, who wouldn't want to be at a game of dominoes with all those cats? Unfortunately, the movie doesn't let the audience enjoy it any more than it seems to let its cast members. Before you know it you're off on some silly murder plot-twisting blandness more disturbing for it's apparent lack of relevance than for any sense of shock or gore or emotional...well, never mind. Who cares? That seems to be the whole ethos of the film. Who cares?

I'm looking forward to Miracle next week. At least we get to see American Capitalist hockey players beat up on Russian Communist hockey players. That's compelling, right?

Aaron: Hold on a second, Iceman! I think you’re misdiagnosing the problems with The Big Bounce. It gives its actors plenty of time to enjoy what they’re doing, it just never takes them anywhere interesting – until the last ten minutes, when improbable violence breaks out of nowhere, like Uzis at a child’s birthday party. Hey, I understand why you hated it. I just developed a certain fondness for a movie with such determined will to underachieve, to ignore expectations.

But you’re right: next week brings us bold, brave Americans on skates, as well as the start of the Independent Film Series. January is over, and we’re finally getting some good movies. At least, here’s hoping.

Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh are two St. Elmoites who often stand outside the Bijou arguing about movies. They’re sort of like Ebert and Roeper, only without viable career prospects or functioning thumbs. Look for their film discussions each Wednesday in the Pulse.

The Aroma of Lumber Soon Beckons Her Back

Aaron Belz, who in the early '90s used to roam the halls of Covenant College scribbling poems for the Thorn, has now been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He has written a lovely sestina about toothpaste, colorful hats and the regrets inherent to capitalist industry -- and it now sits in the same sestina index as poems by renowned authors such as Rick Moody. Gives a guy hope, really.

It's a Much Better Idea than the Christmas Microwave Swap, Anyway

So I've been quietly salivating over Ry-A-Rama's new iPod for the past few days. I stare at it late at night, wanting to grab it for my 1 a.m. smoke break, but knowing that Ryan, who is not a smoker, would notice the smell of nicotine and hate me. Very much. So I don't touch it, but I admire its sleek white design. It is a sexy piece of machinery: the Stepford Phonograph, if you will.

Anyway, the Village Voice has a great article on the newest alternative to the mix tape: the iSwap. Izzy Grinspan suggests that this Valentine's Day, lovers should switch their iPods for a day, and get to know each other through music. "The iPod records what songs have been played both most recently and most often, so it quickly becomes a record of the owner's internal aural landscape. Listening to someone else's iPod is thus an intimate, almost invasive activity. On the scale of personal exposure, it's not exactly trading diaries, but it's much more revealing than a mix tape... Intentionally or not, Apple's MP3 player realizes its true potential as a personal device only when it's shared."

Happy V-Day, technophiles.

A Mountain of Beans

In light of the mildly hostile discussion of Cold Mountain taking place here, I thought it might be fun to drag up a nugget from the Pulse movie vaults. It explains why I, at least, was no great fan of the film. Not that anybody asked, but it's a dull, gray day, and it's good to have distractions.

Remember, tomorrow you can come here to read Josiah's drug reference-laden insights on The Big Bounce, assuming you haven't been industrious and already read them in the "Isaac Wardell issue" of the Pulse.

“Cold Mountain” tries too hard to justify good lovin’ in bad times

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the January 7-13 issue of the Pulse

“The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” Humphrey Bogart declared to Ingrid Bergman at the climax of “Casablanca,” and Hollywood has been busy ever since making wartime romances that willfully ignore this noble sentiment. “Cold Mountain” is the latest endeavor to construct a grand peak out of this hill of beans; its romantic leads Inman (Jude Law) and Ada (Nicole Kidman) are so consumed by sexual yearning that they, and director Anthony Minghella, regularly forget that there’s a war on. The conflict in question is the Civil War, but this matters little: with the exception of a few banjo pickers and some cheery Confederates hooting about killing Yankees, there is nothing in the film’s two and a half hours that feels distinctive of any particular time and place. (The film is set in the Appalachians but was shot in Romania, a sure sign that free trade is destroying job opportunities for American mountain ranges.) Minghella and his actors are so concerned with telling a Transcendent Tale of Love that they can’t be bothered with such small matters as secession and slavery.

My quarrel with “Cold Mountain” is not a philosophical one. There is something a bit myopic about the idea that the passion of two good-looking people is more important than any turmoil that surrounds them, but to dismiss “Cold Mountain” on these grounds would mean rejecting not only the entire tradition of wartime films, but also every literary work from, say, the High Medieval era. No, my problem with the film is that it lacks the courage of its own narcissistic convictions. It tries too hard, laboring to show that the love shared by Inman and Ada is precious and unspeakably important, and that pretension squeezes any life out of the characters. They aren’t individuals, simply symbols of chivalric ardor. Law and Kidman both convey the urgency of their passion by putting on their Serious Frowny Faces; they look like little children at a distant relative’s funeral, trying hard not to laugh. And Minghella ratchets up the solemnity by adding scenes with an oracular wishing well, foreshadowing the characters’ fates in a way that you simply shouldn’t do unless your name is Herman Melville.

So when Inman and Ada do finally meet their destinies, it’s two vaguely drawn, grimly acted people coming to an end that we’ve been told over and over is going to happen, and that we have been reminded with equal frequency is quite meaningful. I’ve ridden amusement park rides that offered a less controlled experience.

The awful, stifling atmosphere of the movie might be a direct result of how good its first 15 minutes are. Minghella produces an overpowering recreation of the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg, as Union forces plant explosives under Confederate trenches. The resulting explosion is awful, in both senses of the word: the fireball is both a brilliant cinematic spectacle and a sickening force of death. (In one shocking image, a soldier’s clothes are ripped from his body by the same wall of flame that peels his flesh.) The scene grows even more stunning when thousands of Union soldiers pour into the hole cut by their dynamite and are just as suddenly trapped below Greycoats shooting down from the rim of the smoking crater. The harsh harmonies of the Sacred Harp Singers burst onto the soundtrack, and the impact is overwhelming, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to horrible life.

The scene certainly seems to overwhelm Mighella, who spends the rest of the film trying to justify Inman and Ada’s affection in the midst of such brutality. Inman abandons the Army after the battle, and wanders through a series of the most blatant star cameo appearances since “The Muppet Movie.” Back on the home front, Ada waits mournfully and Kidman twitches her face a lot to let us know that she is very sad. (She is joined in running the family farm by Renee Zellweger, who overacts as a hillbilly but is so relaxed doing so that her character eventually becomes the only emotionally affecting presence in the movie.)

And above it all, Minghella uses heavy-handed music and voiceovers to remind us that while war is clearly hell, true love is heaven. He eventually resorts to a sex scene straight out of an Enrique Iglesias video, with swift cuts, candlelight and brief flashes of Kidman’s Southern territories. It is a laughable sequence, almost too awful to be offensive, and it’s a desperate attempt to use sensuality to justify the hill of beans that Ada and Inman’s love looks like compared to the opening horrors of battle. Here’s looking at you, id.

Radio Free Mesh

And in a note of self-promotion, if you should happen to be near a radio tonight around 8, turn the dial to 88.1, WUTC. The local NPR station has asked me, as Pulse movie editor, to begin a 12-week gig reviewing the films in the Bijou Theater's Independent Film Series. So today I'm taking in a 1 p.m. showing of House of Sand and Fog, which I suspect will be depressing, and then I'm compiling some notes about said depression in the late afternoon. And at 8 p.m. I'll go on the air with Joshua Daniels, to talk about Ben Kingsley and what have you. Lord willing, I won't talk too fast, stutter or say something vulgar. I'm pretty excited about this: I even have a natty illuminated pen to take notes in the theater, the sort of thing that might make Rob Gordon unhappy, but pleases me to no end.

Update: If you live outside of WUTC's signal, you can catch Joshua Daniels' show here.

Can't Wait to See How They Celebrate Valentine's Day

My sister, completing her first week at New College in Sarasota, forwards the following announcement from one of the school's feminist advocacy groups:

Just a last minute reminder. Tonight is Vagina Craft Night. This is the first event leading up to this year's Vagina Monologues, which will take place Feb. 12, 13, and 14 at 7 pm in Sainer. Tonight we will be meeting in the Gender and Diversity Center at 7 pm to do crafty vaginal things. All are certainly welcome, whether you have a vagina or not. See you there!!

Oh boy! Crafts!

“I’m Ashton Kutcher, and I’m Insane!”

So Josiah and I have been co-writing film reviews for the Pulse (I'm now the movie editor, although I have no idea how official that position is, or if it will ever pay anything.) The movie discussions, along with my other Pulse stories, hit the streets every Wednesday. But for those of you who don't live in Chattanooga, or are just too lazy to drive to Greyfriar's, I'll be publishing each movie debate with a one-week delay. As for my feature stories, well, you'll just have to go find a Pulse. This is simply a free sample. (Actually, the paper is free too, but I'm sticking to my metaphor.) Anyway, here's our review of The Butterfly Effect.

“The Butterfly Effect” is America’s number one movie. Poor, poor America.

By Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh

Aaron: "The Butterfly Effect" opened this weekend atop the box office, which means that quite a few people, myself among them, have now munched popcorn while watching pet immolation. The movie opens with a quotation about the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings in China and starts a monsoon or something, a quote that is attributed at the bottom of the screen to "Chaos Theory." I don't know if Mr. Theory personally approved this film, but the first 25 minutes or so are certainly chaotic, and really horrible to watch: besides the dog being burned alive, there are scenes of a mail bomb blowing a mother and infant to bits, a father trying to strangle his prepubescent son with handcuffs, and another father using his own tiny daughter as an actress in a child porn movie. The movie is shocking, but not in the way it's supposed to be: I think directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber are trying for basic thriller frights, but I felt the same revulsion that I experienced watching footage of bloody car wrecks in my high school driver's ed class. Let me be clear from the start: This movie offended me. It exploited the worst, most appalling aspects of existence for cheap thrills; it's as if Ashton Kutcher's first drama were trying to punk the whole human race.

Kutcher doesn't even appear on screen until half an hour into the movie; when he arrives, riding a bicycle and trying to look troubled, it's as if Dopey the dwarf wandered onto the set of David Fincher's "Seven." He plays the grown-up version of the child that watched or experienced all the suffering of the first act; it's a wonder he doesn't spend his waking hours curled in the fetal position. He tries to recover his blacked-out formative memories, and discovers that he can, for no apparent reason, travel back in time and change those events from within. Of course, every time he changes the past, he rearranges the future. Unfortunately, he can't change the screenplay, which has him bouncing from one ludicrous reality to another.

So what do you think: Am I being too harsh here? And does Kutcher show any signs of acting chops?

Josiah: I'll be honest with you Aaron, I was pleasantly surprised to see Kutcher pull off an acting role that didn't involve a constant stream of juvenile stoner humor, not that I have a problem with juvenile stoner humor. Early on in the film I did find myself laughing at Kutcher for playing that particular role – but I think that was because I've so typecast him as Kelso from That 70's Show or, well, Ashton Kutcher from MTV's Punk'd. Couple this with the fact that the first twenty minutes of the film was something approaching respectful filmmaking, attempting to deal with childhood psychological trauma. So suddenly thrusting Kutcher in as the adult version of the lead was a tough pill to swallow. I kept waiting for him to yell "I'M ASHTON KUTCHER, AND I'M INSANE!" or something along those lines.

But halfway through the film I forgot I was watching Kutcher and found myself involved with the story. Whether this is because of Kutcher’s sudden ability to approximate acting or because of some other reason is difficult to tell. The movie is jarringly shot. It assaults your senses and sensibilities with a constant stream of horror-story images from prison rape to pedophilia. What surprised me so much wasn't Kutcher's ability to competently pull off interaction with these scenarios, but the scenarios themselves being served to the audience without ever taking the time to earn their emotional impact. That's a problem of script and directing, not Kutcher's. I don't think I've seen so much sensationalized violence and emotional horror served up in a complete moral vacuum since “Bad Boys II.” I'm not talking about counting swear words here, I'm talking about painful life events having an actual effect on the people involved. In Butterfly Effect, the only effect they seemed to have was to jar and shock the audience. That just feels somehow wrong.

Aaron: It seems like a stretch to say Kutcher "pulls off" this role. In all fairness to him, Laurence Olivier couldn't have made "The Butterfly Effect" convincing, but Kutcher actually takes implausible scenes and makes them completely unbelievable. He's called upon to look disoriented a lot, but he mugs so shamelessly that he seems less to be considering his newest circumstances and more often trying to remember what movie he's in.

Don't misunderstand me: I like Ashton Kutcher. He's a pleasant comedic actor. But if he wanted to segue into dramatic projects, why oh why couldn't he have chosen something light in tone, something that would have let him play to his natural gifts, something not so dang ugly? “The Butterfly Effect” is a dark, cynical machine of a movie, a thrill ride whose gears are oiled with realistic human suffering. Dude, where’s my soul?

Josiah: Fair enough. I think though that your problem with the film isn't that Kutcher is implausible in his character's role, it's that you feel the entire film is implausible, hence any triumph on Kutcher's part would be polishing the brass on the Titanic. I don't feel quite that strongly about it: I love a good sci-fi yarn as much as the next techie, just without all the shameless exploitation “The Butterfly Effect” contained.

As for Kutcher, I'll be interested to see what role he picks next. It's an absurd stretch to compare them, but for the sake of annoying many, let me point out that Tom Hanks started out doing cross-dressing comedy. Who knows where Kutcher will end up?

Josiah Roe and Aaron Mesh are two St. Elmoites who often stand outside the Bijou arguing about movies. They’re sort of like Ebert and Roeper, only without viable career prospects or functioning thumbs. Look for their film discussions each Wednesday in the Pulse.

At Dusk When Work is Over, We'll Continue the Debate

Steadfast Anglo-Canadian correspondent Julian has sent me a link to an interview with New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, a piece that I had completely forgotten about even though I was reading it religiously about a year ago. I reached the height of my Lane devotion last spring, reading Nodody's Perfect, his anthology of reviews and essays, while I wrote my Senior Integration Paper at Covenant College. I had a little picture of Lane taped to my writing carrel in the school library, along with snapshots of Walker Percy, Michael Chabon and Gwyneth Paltrow (long story, that). I still like to think that the completion of that paper was due in equal parts to the muse of Lane and the lubrication of Pabst Blue Ribbons from Josiah's refrigerator.

I'm still moved by the power of Lane's argument for what he calls "cultural duty," the responsibilty of people to have the broadest possible understanding of the world around them, particularly the world of literature and arts. It makes so much of the Christian talk of "cultural engagement" seem like the half-hearted tripe that it is.

"What was so quaint about it all was that at its best it didn't feel like a duty. There is a piece about Matthew Arnold, and for him it really was a duty and you could sometimes find him straining to maintain pleasure in it. And it was interesting to find out that he wasn't as solemn as his writings would suggest. Later on, when movies came along, it was one of the rare times when duty was a pleasure. It has to be if is to be commonly shared. The Arnoldian influence lasted a very long time right up to [F.R.] Leavis really. Leavis was probably the last person who thought you were not adequately equipped, not only to pronounce on life but to entangle yourself with life, to take life head on unless you were armed with all literature could teach you. That seems to many people now, absurd. Certainly delivered with some absurd prejudices and with an almost laughable lack of humor. And yet, like much of what seemed excessive, it's worthy of some respect now...If you go back and read New Bearings in English Poetry, to him these things were events. It's like reading Axel's Castle, [Edmund] Wilson thought these things were general events which should matter to people and he thought they would alter the angle at which we looked upon the world and read the world. Talk about quaint, that must now seem..."

Meanwhile, WUTC is playing Belle and Sebastian's Piazza, New York Catcher, and I'm starting to feel somewhat melancholy. Par for the course, I suppose.

Ingenious

It is a distinct pleasure to announce that the Magnetic Fields are finally set to release a new album, their first since 69 Love Songs. The album is titled i, and all 14 songs will start with that letter. Oh, Stephin Merritt, you clever boy, you.

In other, profoundly less important news, people can't stop talking about Janet Jackson flashing the American populace Sunday night. After careful consideration, I have decided that women should never wear hubcaps on their nipples. And that's all I have to say about that.