ITT: movies non-Christians genuinely can't apppreciate

ITT: movies non-Christians genuinely can't apppreciate

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I can't enjoy this Scorsese movie unless I believe in magic and wizards? Why not?

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You can appreciate it on an aesthetic level, but the film is unambiguously pro-Christian. If you're hostile or indifferent to Christianity you can't really jive with its themes.

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BvS?

I'm not a Christian and i still enjoyed it, it's Kurosawa-tier. It's definitely one of his best films.

nah it's turrible. it's basically the same scene redone 10 times in a row. There is only so much icon stepping you can put into one movie.

But each one of those stepping scenes was accompanied with a new torture/death scene

If you were bothered merely by the repetition of those sequences (even when they weren't very repetitive at all) instead of looking at what they meant in the entirety of the story, then yeah maybe try not to watch any more films ok buddy? They must hurt your brain, i feel kinda bad for you

The liberal reaction to this has been infuriating. The movie bent over backwards in presenting the Japanese perspective, but they're still upset that the movie was made by a Christian who genuinely believes in Christianity. They're so knee deep in anti-imperialism that they wanted the Jesuits to be the villains of the movie.

This masterpiece will never win Best Picture, but anti-Catholic mediocrity like Spotlight does.

Also the obvious point that a lack of belief in the supernatural means you can't appreciate a film that deals with concerns about the supernatural the same way.

Definitely interested in seeing this. Beyond the subject matter, how does it stack against Scorsese's other works as far as filmmaking goes?

You can enjoy most of the film as a meditation on the concept of belief itself, but then the ending will piss you off. Silence is a Christian movie, rather than a movie about Christians.

Crises and Faith and Filmmaking

>Silly Assassin’s Creed gets religion more than the ponderous and punishing Silence does. Martin Scorsese’s Silence almost offers a perfect allegory for godlessness in the age of Gawker and BuzzFeed. Set in the 17th century, the film depicts Japan’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converts. It follows two young Portuguese Jesuits, Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), on a search for their mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who is missing in Japan and rumored to have renounced his faith. The first images portray the crucifixion of several Japanese Christians at oceanside hot springs (“hells”). These multiple Gethsemanes seem to be surreal hallucinations revealing the cost of faith; they unmistakably evoke recent ISIS atrocities. It looks as if Scorsese is conveying a Catholic’s nightmare of what can go wrong in a secular world. This opening is powerful but also disorienting.

>As the story moves further away from contemporary political parallels and into the esoteric history of Christians in 17th-century Japan, the cool-tempered, drawn-out series of interrogations and torments is bewildering. Based on a novel by Shusaku Endo and a 1971 film by Masahiro Shinoda, Silence could easily have been titled “Quest,” but Scorsese’s stress on the noncommunication between man and God gives the title “Silence” a particularly disturbing meaning. (The silence is symbolized in part by Father Ferreira’s absence from his former students, which leads to an ironic plot twist.) There’s a sense of career isolation here, despite the usual hype about this film having been decades in gestation. (How many “passion projects” can a Hollywood mogul like Scorsese claim?) Silence reveals Scorsese’s difficulty in maintaining faith and tradition in a world gone mad — the constant Catholic condition — yet this personal and social dilemma gets drowned out by his ponderous religiosity and his movie-brat distractions.

Am I the only one who thought it would be perfect if they had cast someone not Andrew Garfield in the lead?

>Agony by agony, Silence imitates the classic films about religious intolerance and spiritual doubt: Father Rodrigues and Father Garupe hide in tall ferns from avenging warlords, evoking Sternberg’s Anatahan (1953); their witnessing of enslavement recollects Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954); their surprise at the Japanese converts’ devotion recalls Borzage’s The Big Fisherman (1959); Rodrigues’s questioning by a devious old samurai (Issey Ogata) is a twist on Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951); a recurring Judas figure representing abject mankind brings to mind Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert (1965); an icon of enduring faith references Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987); even Neeson’s appearance unfortunately brings to mind Batman Begins (2005). Yet none of these references ultimately increases our understanding of today’s spiritual and cultural crisis; these scenes are inscrutable, as though a movie buff were citing a mixed-up catechism. After the genuine internal journey of Mean Streets (1973), which looked at Roman Catholicism among urban American hooligans, Scorsese never again showed suffering; he hid his personal dilemma behind violent macho bravado. (Raging Bull’s religious overtones were portentous and irrelevant to the film’s egotistical flourishes.) This time, Scorsese tries an obscure religious perspective, using a more composed, dignified, “classical” style, which makes this a religious movie without the fervor of either a penitent or a convert. There’s one great shot in which Rodrigo Prieto’s camera tilts up from a boat in churning seas to the sun in clouds, but even this is an image of confusion.

Adam Driver should've been the lead. He has a 17th century face.

>This film about spirituality and faith suffers from the lack of both. Scorsese wallows in all manner of cruel attacks against faith — unlike Hacksaw Ridge and unlike Sansho the Bailiff. When he repeatedly subjects Father Rodrigues (and the audience) to the blasphemy of stepping on a Christ icon, it feels like self-flagellation, at odds with the effort to defy contemporary Hollywood nihilism. Father Rodrigues respects Japan’s “hidden Christians” for believing “the promise that their suffering would not end in nothingness but in salvation,” yet Scorsese shows that faith in words only. Instead, one landscape nearly reproduces the sinister cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy album; perhaps Scorsese has never heard Morrissey’s “I Have Forgiven Jesus.” Silence takes a juvenile approach to what Ingmar Bergman already explored in his Sixties “Silence of God” trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963). Those films, famous at one time on the long-gone art-movie circuit, depicted the spiritual agony of Christians in the modern, secular world. But Scorsese, belonging to the draft-dodging generation of movie-brat auteurs (Coppola, Spielberg, DePalma), seems to have lost touch with the cultural basis of Bergman’s spiritual questioning, as well as Fellini’s, Rossellini’s, and the subversive Buñuel’s.

that's stupid

the movie questions faith the whole way through, constantly wondering what is right and what is valuable about devotion, etc

if you think the movie is just saying "Go Christianity" then you missed the point.

I generally enjoy reading reviews that offer a different perspective from mine; when I like a movie I sometimes go to rotten tomatoes and search for the rotten reviews. Even as someone who appreciates alternate perspectives, I've never understood Armond White. His reviews don't really seem to have a particular thesis or voice. It's just meandering references to other movies.

you're trying real hard here, and I appreciate it, but this bait isn't that good.

Then movies comes down pretty heavily on one side by the end

Not the guy posting that but I think White's perspective is valuable. Ironically, given his hatred of SJWs, he actually comes from a rather similar perspective, just on the opposite side of the spectrum. He turns movies into vessels for political ideologies and either attacks them or uplifts them on that basis, sometimes completely exclusively. I think it is a necessary form of political writing, especially given his rather savage intellect, but I do think he goes through a lot of intellectual gymnastics in order to praise or reject certain movies.

His recent rejection of Manchester-by-the-Sea in favour of Patriots Day because the latter depicts the daily routines of the Bostonian working class in a more precise, detailed manner is just ludicrous to me.

spoil me here. Hows the ending piss off a non christian like me?

Both the lead character and the person he's looking for supposedly gives up their faith and renounce God in the spirit of cooperation, and the movie makes you believe that they've genuinely lost their faith by the end, but in reality they haven't. The movie ends with one of the priests, now dead, secretly holding a cross put in his hands by his Japanese wife, and there's a text eulogy to the dead martyrs of Japan. The movie also has a scene where God literally speaks to one of the characters, although it could've been a hallucination.

This.

This will likely end up being the best film of the year when people look back, but critics and Hollywood doesn't care. They'd rather celebrate stuff like Moonlight or Spotlight.

I haven't seen Silence yet, I am very excited for it though.

Is it better than Manchester-by-the-Sea? It's still my fave of last year.

Also Moonlight is pretty good. Overhyped but it's not on a level with the trash that is Spotlight.

The ending affirms the protagonist's faith, rather than leaving it ambiguous like the book does. He died genuinely believing, as opposed to allowing for the interpretation that God's silence and the unanswered suffering of the Japanese Christians made him skeptical.

Im not a christian and enjoyed it immensily. Good shit

It's not that he only capable of viewing films through the prism of his ideology, it's that he doesn't convey his views in a coherent and interesting manner. Half the time I'm left wondering why exactly he did or didn't like something, which is the exact opposite of what a review should leave you thinking.

Only part I didn't understand was Garfield implored the tortured Japanese to apostatize, and yet doing so meant eternal damnation in hell. I'd imagine a Jesuit priest of all people would understand the nature of suffering experienced on earth and its relation to eternal life, so I'm not quite sure why he didn't just give them strength in their martyrdom.

I liked the conflict not being about maintaining one's faith while being threatened by death but rather what faith means in a hostile culture. If outward actions are not an indication of faith (see people loudly praying in the temple) then outward actions might also not be indicative of a lack of faith, such as stepping on the image of Christ.

Despite the qualm I had with a priest holding so much stock in earthly life even though Catholicism is all about preparing for the afterlife, I still thought the questions raised were interesting ones, and I've continued to think about the movie since seeing it.

Doesn't Christianity make a distinction between outwardly renouncing the faith and doing so in your heart? The ending of the movie proves that his character saw a distinction between pretending to be an apostate and actually being one.

>Silence takes a juvenile approach to what Ingmar Bergman already explored in his Sixties “Silence of God” trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Silence (1963). Those films, famous at one time on the long-gone art-movie circuit, depicted the spiritual agony of Christians in the modern, secular world. But Scorsese, belonging to the draft-dodging generation of movie-brat auteurs (Coppola, Spielberg, DePalma), seems to have lost touch with the cultural basis of Bergman’s spiritual questioning, as well as Fellini’s, Rossellini’s, and the subversive Buñuel’s