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May 14, 2004

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The Passion of the Christ
Dawn of the Dead
Kill Bill, Vol. 2

Films reviewed by Tony Monchinski

One late night I turned on the TV and was watching Comedy Central’s Cops-spoof Reno 911. For ten minutes I watched the ersatz officers serve a warrant on a poor white family in a trailer park, leading to the chase and arrest of one of the family’s male members. I was laughing uproariously the whole time. Then it suddenly dawned on me: I wasn’t watching Reno 911. I was actually watching Cops. Oops! I imagine the feeling that incident left me with might have been familiar to the guy sitting across the theater from me when we viewed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. My fellow, anonymous viewer was dozing off and on throughout the film. Did he ever awake and wonder, “Hey, wait a minute? Is this the new Dawn of the Dead movie?” The speculation isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. By the end of The Passion, Jesus, I mean Jim Carviziel, is in shambles and wouldn’t look out of place staggering outside a Wisconsin shopping mall terrorizing a handful of human survivors holed up inside.
Mel Gibson is a man on a mission, and he takes liberties with his Jesus yarn.

Obviously the historical suffering and death of Christ wasn’t enough for Mad Max. Mel embellishes the sado-masochism: hey, thief on the cross next to Jesus, you want to taunt the big guy, well, here’s a crow to take out your eyes! Take that! Which Gospel is that in? The Gospel of Mel, of course. Or, during the flaying with broken glass at the hands of the Romans, was it my imagination, or did Jesus lose a nipple? Which begs the question, when Jim Carviziel is resurrected at the end of the film, his lily white skin—common for a middle Eastern Jew like Jesus, no doubt—is healed, leaving only the holes nailed through his palms; so did Jesus come back with two nipples or one? We never find out.

Okay, without further hesitation, the question everyone seems to be debating: is The Passion anti-Semitic? It is true that the bad Jews are bad Jews, and many of them are darker-skinned, swarthy-looking and I espied an oversized schnozz [nose] or two. But there are also good Jews, like Jesus himself and his disciples, or Simon, who is forced into helping Christ carry his cross, or Mary Magdalene, one-time escort (read: “professional date”, i.e. whore) turned religious convert.

And just as there are bad Jews, there are also bad Romans. The way they flay Jesus or stop on the march to Calvary to open the random can of whoop ass on the poor guy - yikes! And yes, the devil is a woman: a bald woman, gaunt and without hair, looking like she’s losing a battle with leukemia. Is Gibson guilty of misogyny, picking on the terminally ill, or both? But Satan also assumes the guise of children and a fantastical beast that chases a cowering Judas from beneath a bridge while the Jews toss Jesus off the top in an impromptu bungee-jump torture move—again, not in the Bible. I think a more trenchant criticism of The Passion is that the bad guys are really bad guys and the good guys are really pretty decent sorts, if a tad wimpy. How else do you explain watching your friend/son/religious leader get his ass kicked, crucified and killed? Final summation: The Passion will make a decent rental, and it might have special resonance if you’re John Ashcroft or one his ilk, but don’t run out and spend your ten dollars on it.

Spend them instead on director Zack Snyder’s re-envisioning and thoroughly entertaining remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. In 1978’s original Dawn, four human beings find themselves trapped in a Pittsburgh shopping mall while hordes of flesh-eating zombies stagger around outside. At one point in the original, when asked why the undead are drawn to the local shopping mall, a character answers with a straight face, “This must have been a very important place in their lives.” All goes well for the four until the arrival of a motorcycle gang.

The remake lacks the original’s motorcycles and its overt critique of consumer culture, but it also gives us sixteen people holed up in the mall instead of four. By the end of the film, their numbers are whittled down big time. The zombies get to feast and the new Dawn’s FX guy, David LeRoy Anderson (whose other work includes Men in Black) gets to shine, turning in effects that the original film’s FX man, Tom Savini, would be proud of.

Dawn is everything a horror movie should be: scary, gory and fun-fun-fun! The characters are likeable and we feel for them. Sarah Polley’s Ana (who could, at a quick glance, pass for Uma Thurman) is forced to leave her husband after he is infected and becomes a lunatic zombie in search of his next human happy meal. As the world goes to hell around her, a fortuitous car crash teams her up with Ving Rhames’s cop Kenneth. It’s been a long time since Rhames got a good acting role. Not since he was sodomized in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction has he brought such passion to a part. As a shotgun-wielding no-nonsense cop, Rhames flexes his forearms and blows zombies away. Jake Weber’s Michael is also a very believable character, unassuming and equinaminous in the face of a world turned upside down.

The zombies in this film are scary too. Director Synder obviously saw 28 Days Later, as the undead in this Dawn don’t just move, they book, as in they run—Marion Jones’ style. The movie moves quickly as well. Dawn’s chief failing is its brevity. Director Synder packs a lot into an hour and forty-some minutes, which leads to sometimes choppy editing. Imagine if he had drawn his film out to two or two and a half hours, or better yet, released it in two volumes.

Dawn of the Dead left me with more questions than it answered. No, I’m not referring to the usual fodder of most critics: what started the infection, where did it come from, and so on. Instead, I found myself hoping that with the recent spate of successful recent zombie box office features (e.g., this Dawn remake, which, by the way, knocked The Passion out of 1st place; Resident Evil; House of the Dead; 28 Days Later; etc.), maybe, just maybe, the godfather himself, George A. Romero, will find the financial backing necessary to bring his envisioned fourth zombie feature—Dead Reckoning—to the big screen. Consider, is it just a coincidence that Jesus and the Dead zombies have so much in common? In Dawn, people suffer gruesome deaths and come back to life as flesh-craving zombies. Jesus asks his disciples to eat his flesh (a “miracle” Catholics call transubstantiation), suffers a gruesome death, and, as Christians would have it, comes back to life.

All good cinema sees the viewer leaving the theater changed. I left Dawn of the Dead wondering why I felt more empathy for human beings stuck in a mall with hundreds of thousands of zombies amassed outside than I did watching Jesus Christ get tortured and killed. Furthermore, current Attorney General John Ashcroft lost his 2000 Missouri Senate seat to late Governor Mel Carnahan. At the time, Ashcroft was the incumbent and Carnahan was, well, he was dead. It was the first time a man posthumously won election to the Senate. If zombies did rise up and take over the world, would electoral politics continue as is? Things that make you go hmmm.
When Quentin Tarantino was getting started in cinema he lied on his resume and claimed he had a bit part in the original Dawn of the Dead as a zombie. With Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Tarantino dispels all doubts that Pulp Fiction was a fluke. Tarantino’s problem in a nutshell: Reservoir Dogs was followed by the masterpiece Pulp Fiction. Jackie Brown, a good film by any standards, was not in the same league as Pulp Fiction—what film really is?—and led some naysayers to write Quentin off. Well, Quentin’s back, and he’s revisiting all his favorite things on movie audiences throughout the land.

What The Passion, Dawn, and Kill Bill all have in common is the self-indulgence of their directors. Just as sure as John Ashcroft thinks dancing leads to sin and wants to police pornography (which he defines as including HBO), Gibson has a religious vision which he was willing to sink millions of his own money into for all of us to see. Zack Synder took a Romero masterpiece and reworked it, improving on it but presenting a decidedly original film. And Quentin Tarantino is serving us the equivalent of a pizza pie with everything: spaghetti western, Shaw Brothers Kung Fu extravaganza, blaxploitation flick, comic book homage and B-movie jubilee, all with extra dialogue. Where Vol. I of “Tarantino’s 4th film” was heavy on action, Vol. II piles it on thick with the dialogue. Yes, there is action, and yes, some of it will make you do a double take, like when Uma Thurman’s Bride character tears an eyeball from an opponent’s socket and grinds it under foot—barefoot, no less. But Quentin returns in Vol. II to what he is best at: story telling and dialogue.

For those who don’t know: Kill Bill follows Uma Thurman’s character, The Bride, a.k.a. Black Mamba, a.k.a. Beatrix Kiddo, on her trail of revenge. Left for dead by the hands of the elite assassination squad she once worked with, the Bride emerges from a coma in Vol. I to track down the five men and women responsible for her dire straits. Vol. I saw the dispatch of two of her foes. Vol. II picks up with the hunt for the final three.

Quentin Tarantino grew up watching TV and has single-handedly resurrected several stars from obscurity, such as John Travolta, whose success in Pulp Fiction is probably still paying for the one-time Welcome Back Cotter sweathog’s private plane so he can jet around the world to his Christian Science get-togethers. The Kill Bill films resurrect David Carradine, he of Kung Fu fame. David plays the title character, the man Uma Thurman’s Bride is sworn to kill. David’s real-life brother, Keith, is currently portraying Wild Bill Hickock on HBO’s new series, Deadwood. Enjoy it before John Ashcroft gets his self-righteous greasy little hands on it. David’s fictional brother in Vol. II is Michael Madsen, another guy who hasn’t had a good role since he played cop-torturer Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs. My favorite actor in the series is Gordon Liu, who portrays a Japanese Yakuza gangster in Vol. I and an ancient Chinese Kung Fu Master curmudgeon who despises Japanese, Americans and women equally in Vol. II.

A few words about the women of Kill Bill. Uma Thurman is a talented actress who works very well with Tarantino. It’s good to see that she broke things off in real life with philandering husband Ethan Hawke. Hawke should be lucky Thurman can distinguish fiction from fact: what if he had awoken one night, sans genitalia, John Wayne Bobbitt style, with the Bride decked out in a tight yellow jump suit brandishing a Hattori Hanzo samurai sword? Daryl Hannah, Lucy Lui and Vivica Fox are all convincing assassins, in a comic book sense. Because that’s what makes Kill Bill Volumes I and II so entertaining: neither film takes itself too seriously. The violence is comic bookish, with bodies spewing more blood then they can contain. Unlike the violence of Gibson’s The Passion, Quentin Tarantino is winking at us, telling us to take his films with a grain of salt, to just sit back and enjoy. Like Gibson, Tarantino is being equally self-indulgent: he’s making a movie he would like to see, and it’s a movie I think you will like as well.

Tony Monchinski is a student in the PhD program in political science.