| Gladiator | |
| I bore of gore | |
A while back I watched a film that I hated. It was approximately three hours long and it was all about a man being tortured. He was endlessly beaten while crowds watched on and cheered (except for a few who didn't like it, including his mother, who were helpless and stood back to watch the entire thing). The beatings and torture continued until the man was finally killed. I'm not exaggerating that this was the entire movie. It was a terrible, horrible movie with endless amounts of fake blood and gratuitous violence. It was called "The Passion of the Christ".
I'm not against violence in movies. Some of my favorite movies are very, very violent. I love The Usual Suspects, Die Hard, A Clockwork Orange. But even I think there is a point in a movie where violence is boring. You want to make a story about the death of Christ, fine, but how about sharing a little bit of his life, too? It got to the point where I just wanted him to die already.
Take Gladiator. It was a bloody time. Okay, I got that it was a bloody time. Weren't there other things that happened, too? Things that didn't involve the loss of limbs or heads? Things that didn't stain the dirt red accompanied with a warrior cry, cheers, or both?
It was so tediously boring that I could barely make it to the end. What? Boring? How? Because by the death of the 50 or 60th person that I never cared about to begin with, I really just stopped caring altogether. It's like they said, "let's make a film about the Gladiator." "Yeah, where he decapitates people." "Should we write a script?" "Didn't we just to that?!?!" "Green light!". It's the NASCAR version of film making... Let's just send them around in circles a few more times and then roll credits.
I'm not saying that the film world is coming to an end. But I am saying that if people don't start being a little more discerning about which films they'll go to see, we're going to end up with a lot more Transformer movies and far less Up in the Air movies. I beg you to help me to keep real films in the theatres.