T/S: Which Flick Had More Gratuitous Violence -- Kill Bill (1&2), Sin City, or Passion of the Christ?

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Which of these three filmic efforts of the last 365 days do you consider to have the most gratuitous violence? blood-dripping gore? viscera hitting the camera lens like a rather poorly-planned money shot?

did any of the graphic onscreen representations of human inhumanity made your stomach turn more? did all three have scenes that struck you as so over-the-top that you burst out laughing in the theater?

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:10 (twenty years ago)

yes, i know that it takes a bit to try to compare the three different flicks, but i consider them all to be delivering(pandering?) to their target audiences. folks came to see blood, and by gar! it's blood they'll get!

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:12 (twenty years ago)

hmm in purely quantitive terms im willing to bet it was the passion even though i havent seen sin city.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:12 (twenty years ago)

and i'll say, before running away from this thread since i will be hugely outnumbered, that i found the passion to be more interesting and possibly better than KB.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:18 (twenty years ago)

also, which flick had the most seemingly-unconscious sadism involve in its portrayal of violence?

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:20 (twenty years ago)

It's not how much blood, but how it's used.

See: Anatomy of Hell

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:23 (twenty years ago)

Depends on whether you buy the religious justification for the violence in Passion more than you buy the stylistic justification for it in KB and SC.

― sunburned and snowblind (kenan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:24 (twenty years ago)

i had reservations about the violence in both KB and The Passion after seeing them. but i think in the end it was just my general squeamishness in both cases.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:25 (twenty years ago)

that's true. it also struck me that all three filmmakers took great pains to get the "exact" look & feel for their films. be it dialogue in aramaic, having a Pei Mei character, or a '57 Chevy Bel-Aire...

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:26 (twenty years ago)

(xpost)

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:26 (twenty years ago)

but he's asking YOU, kenan! me, i haven't seen the passion and won't see Sin City until tomorrow night so I can't comment. But I will. Tomorrow. xpost

― Ian John50n (orion), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:27 (twenty years ago)

also, i haven't seen The Passion either.

...truth be told, i never plan to.

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:28 (twenty years ago)

i guess i just didnt notice the cartoonish quality of KB, and i cant really understand my initial reaction anymore. it's just gleeful and funny really. the passion uses "realistic" violence on the other hand, but i think it's mostly justified.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:30 (twenty years ago)

in other words, i think violence serves theological, philosophical, and thematic purposes in the passion. so i cant just see it as exploitative.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:31 (twenty years ago)

but he's asking YOU, kenan!

I haven't seen more than clips of the passion -- I saw the controversial glass-tipped-whip scene on the net. It was pretty fucking gruesome. And not being religious or understanding even the basics of why this suffering is "good", I guess I would rank it as worse then a dog eating Elija Wood's bloody stumps.

Kill Bill is the least offensive of these three to me, just because the violence is *so* cartoonish. It's not even supposed to be "gritty."

― sunburned and snowblind (kenan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:31 (twenty years ago)

in other words, i think violence serves theological, philosophical, and thematic purposes in the passion. so i cant just see it as exploitative.

hmm. interesting point. why does one preclude the other, tho?

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:36 (twenty years ago)

you're right i think. it doesn't.

― ryan (ryan), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 03:46 (twenty years ago)

Man On Fire

― milozauckerman (miloaukerman), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 04:09 (twenty years ago)

milo otm.

― j blount (papa la bas), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 04:43 (twenty years ago)

doesn't count! no cheating!

― kingfish van pickles (Kingfish), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 04:47 (twenty years ago)

If you're talking "gratuitous," then definitely "Kill Bill." The violence in "Passion" isn't gratuitous, since it's intrinsic to the story. The violence in "Sin City" is administered typically as vengeance and self-defense, but in most cases the killers know the victims. But "Kill Bill" - or at least its conclusion, in part 1 - has Uma chopping down dozens of anonymous, dialogue-less ninjas or whatever, for no discernable purpose (that I remember).

― Josh in Chicago (Josh in Chicago), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 12:09 (twenty years ago)

(That said, "Man on Fire" is all gratuitous, and perhaps the most infuriating of the batch as well.)

― Josh in Chicago (Josh in Chicago), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 12:10 (twenty years ago)

(but also the most colourful)

― fe zaffe (fezaffe), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 12:17 (twenty years ago)

gratuitousness isn't about the 'why it happened' so much as the 'what was shown'. it seems to me a bit comical to question whether uma really *needed* to waste all those guards. it's kind of a convention of that kind of film. the point about 'the passion' is not that the story requires all that violence -- sure it does, as much as 'kill bill' does -- but that the violence is so minutely observed. is *that* really necessary? perhaps so: it's meant to 'put you through it'. but i would have thought the xtian emphasis on masochism was no more healthy than tony scott's old testament sense of revenge.

― N_RQ, Tuesday, 5 April 2005 12:31 (twenty years ago)

Except Tony Scott's revenge was a manipulative tease, because the girl Denzel was avenging was alive all along!!!

― Josh in Chicago (Josh in Chicago), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 17:24 (twenty years ago)

Enrique OTM

― Remy (x Jeremy), Tuesday, 5 April 2005 17:35 (twenty years ago)

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