Sunday 28 March 2004

Mmm. Hello. I was just trying to write a review of The Passion of the Christ. I gave up. But here I am starting again, because it's not as though I don't have an opinion - it just happens to be very nebulous. Plus, this'll mean that I can give Karen (at work) the link to this blog entry and hopefully make up for apparently ignoring her e-mail on Friday.

This is a hard review to write. In fact, it seems nigh on impossible. All I'm really happy to say about it was that it didn't make as much of an impression on me as I'd hoped it would. I rather expect that years of harrowing films and literature have helped me to become somewhat calloused, which is a pretty horrible thought. For me it was a study in loss of innocence as much as anything. I did cry at certain points, but I wouldn't attribute that purely to the film so much as to the faith I have already received and brought to bear on it.

James just called it "no-nonsense" in a text message, which is true. It is a brutal film, which is, I think, commendable - an ugly film for an ugly deed in an ugly world. It removes the possiblity of some of the grosser platitudes generally attributed to Christianity.