I have been really bad about posting anything here. I was going okay for a few days and then - nothing. Crap.

Anyway, rounding up some stuff: see David Neiwert for some excellent comments on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. I have nothing to say directly about Mel's film - I haven't seen it - don't know when I will - probably will, just to talk about it properly - though I doubt it will make much difference. Gauging from the reviews I've seen, there's nothing in the film you can't get from a review - its intense violence, its radical reduction of Jesus - his life, his ministry - the accounts of his life - to a narrow, and extremely deceptive focus on his suffering and death... And - you can get, just from reading about it, knowing what it does, knowing a bit about the history of religious thought, at its least appealing - you can get, I say, that there is a huge walloping dose of psychosexual dysfinction going on. Christopher Hitchens takes time out from whatever inanity he's up to these days to call it a film for the "gay Christian sado-masochistic community" - that's sure what it sounds like. Even Roger Ebert, in the course of an inexplicably positive review calls it the most violent film he's ever seen, and says if anyone other than Jesus were on the cross or getting whipped raw like this the film would have been rated NC-17... Beautiful young men getting whipped bloody - right... I'm not the first person to note the sexual aspect of Jesus on the cross - hell - last night I saw Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls - and sure enough, there in the last segment, Ondine, in the guise of the Pope (of Greenwich Village), tells a would be penitant she should find a crucifix - having Jesus on the cross is important - kneel down and imagine what's behind the loincloth.

Of course Andy was a real Catholic, not to mention a real homosexual, not the weirdo extremist catholic closet case Mel is. He was also a great filmmaker, and Mel - Christ, who needs it?