by Ed
Driscoll in PJ Media
God has quite a sense of humor when
He wants to, as Box Office Guru notes
this week:
Dropping heavily in its second
weekend was the Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings which took in an
estimated $8M this weekend a drop of… 66.6% from last weekend. You can’t make
this stuff up folks. Any slight change up or down would make that percentage
change as well but still, it’s almost as if someone planned it. The cume for Exodus
now stands at $39M with a final total in the $55M range likely.
“Exodus, Stage Left,” John Podhoretz quipped in
the headline of his review of Ridley Scott’s latest film at the Weekly
Standard:
Raise your hand if you want to see
Moses portrayed as an insurgent lunatic terrorist with a bad conscience, the
pharaoh who sought the murder of all first-born Hebrew slaves as a nice and
reasonable fellow, and God as a foul-tempered 11-year-old boy with an English
accent.
All right, I see a few hands raised,
though maybe they belong to people who are still demonstrating about Ferguson.
So let me ask you this: How many of you want to see how Hollywood has taken the
story of the Hebrew departure from ancient Egypt—by far the most dramatic tale
in the world’s most enduring book—and turned it into a joyless, dull, turgid
bore?
I don’t know when I’ve seen a movie
as self-destructively misconceived as Exodus: Gods and Kings, the
director Ridley Scott’s $200-million retelling of the Moses story that has as
much chance of making $200 million at the American box office as Ted Cruz has
of winning the District of Columbia in the November 2016 election.
For one thing, Exodus: Gods and
Kings is jaw-droppingly offensive in the way it bastardizes its source
material. The God of Sh’mot, the second book of the Torah, manifests
Himself in many ways—as the burning bush, as a cloud that follows the Hebrews
on their journey, as rain and fire, even as a trumpet blast. But he most
certainly does not manifest as a human being, since the incorporeality
of the divine is a central feature of Jewish theology, the third of Maimonides’
13 principles of faith. I know Jews make up only 2 percent of the U.S.
population and are therefore not collectively a box-office consideration—but if
you’re going to make a movie out of their holy book, shouldn’t you, I don’t
know, be careful not to throw the holy book into the garbage can?
Well, yes; it’s not hard to
understand what went wrong. While the motley young Turks who replaced the old
guard in Hollywood in the 1960s had widely varied backgrounds, though with the
exception of John Milius, identical left-leaning politics, as filmmakers, they
shared one trait in common. As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders Raging Bulls,
they loved themselves plenty of genre deconstruction. On the surface, Warren
Beatty’s Bonnie & Clyde was a rerun of a 1930s Warner Brothers
gangster picture, but in the post-Hays Code 1960s, this time around, the
gangsters were the good guys, and the cops and bankers the enemy.
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper’s Easy
Rider subverted both the Roger Corman biker films of the 1960s, and John
Ford’s westerns, to create a beautifully photographed American Southwest,
albeit one filled with xenophobes terrified of two hippies on their Harley
Davidsons and their football helmeted lawyer. (A few years later, Mel Brooks’ Blazing
Saddles would really deconstruct the western and pummel it into the
ground for good.) Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown is on the surface, a
Sam Spade-style private eye film, but its environmental subtext argues that Los
Angeles should never have been built.
And in perhaps the ultimate genre
deconstruction, George Lucas’ Star Wars uses the high tech sci-fi of 2001:
A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and Forbidden Planet to recast the Vietnam War with the Communist
Vietcong as the Rebels and Richard Nixon and the US as the Evil Empire.
Etc. etc. (as Charlton Heston’s Ten
Commandments co-star Yul Brynner would say) all the way up to Brokeback
Mountain, which is yet another western genre subversion.
The problem with genre
deconstruction in a biblical film is that Blue State audiences won’t touch
religious-oriented films with a barge pole, and Red State audiences know when
they’re being gaslighted, and those who see the film during its opening weekend
quickly tell their friends to avoid yet another boilerplate Hollywood attack on
religion. While some initial leftwing critics screamed that Mel Gibson’s Passion
of the Christ was arguably torture porn and/or anti-Semitic, Red State
audiences quickly discovered through word of mouth that Mel was perhaps the
last filmmaker in Hollywood who took the notion of God and Jesus seriously. (As
Hans Fiene of the Federalist quipped last week, if Hollywood wants to
get its biblical blockbuster groove back, just “Pretend Mel Gibson is Roman Polanski.”
Besides, wasn’t the Ten
Commandments already deconstructed nearly ten years ago? At least in
mash-up mock trailer form, which looks like a lot more fun than Ridley
Scott’s dire-sounding film:
Update: “Analyst: Faith-Based Crowd ‘Burned’ By ‘Noah’ Tanked
‘Exodus,’” John Nolte adds at Big Hollywood:
Had “Exodus” delivered what the
faithful were looking for, despite “Noah,” the blockbuster might have grown
some legs and blockbusted. Instead it just busted.
Just like that, arrogant,
anti-Christian, provincial Hollywood lost the trust of the tens of millions of
Americans who made “The Passion” a cultural and financial phenomenon, and were
hungry for more.
And with the Faithfull’s trust went
hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nothing personal, Hollywood. We’re
just hating you back.
The tanking newspaper industry. The
ratings collapse of left-leaning cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. And
now these films. How many millions of dollars has corporate America burned
through or left on the table by choosing to side with the left in their culture
war against conservatives and the religious faithful in America?
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