Movies – The Passion of Christ and Last Samurai
Still catching up on my blogging… *sigh*
On 12 March I went to see the Mel Gibson movie: The Passion of Christ. It is one of those films one should have seen – rather than one to ‘enjoy’ (shallow word anyhow). It is certainly not light entertainment. But while it has been slammed as overly violent, I’d have to say that the violence is appropriate to the context of the story and the time and culture in which it is set. In many ways the violence depicted in the film is not much worse that that shown in footage of tribal fighting in the Pacific islands in which people are hacked to death with grass knives (machetes). (And by making that comparison I am not trying to perpetuate an image of islanders as in any sense backward, rather, I am trying to suggest that in areas where traditional pre-modern lifestyles are lived, life operates by different and sometimes quite brutal rules). Back to the movie. There are subtleties that are shown very well, such as the Roman guard whose ear is bitten off, being healed by Christ – and the moral ambiguity shown in that guard being torn then between duty and recognition of injustice. Similarly the doubts cast by the local Roman administrator in Gallilee are well depicted. And the makeup is very good, making this film difficult to watch in parts.
…so much so that we had to go and see another movie: The Last Samurai. This film was slammed by the critics as shallow – and in my view unjustly so. The film is about a rapidly changing society and the tension between tradition and innovation. While Japan is rushing headlong into industrialisation, there is a generational issue between modern=good/tradition=bad and the struggle to keep what is good about traditions like honour and identity, as Japan seeks to shift its identity from that of a rural agrarian society into a modern western industrial state. In all this there is a struggle between the craft of the warrior and the mechanisation of the military – skill versus technology. It was surely only later that the Samurai were able to reinvent themselves as the new industrialists.
Cheers
Jerry
