Gina Girshon’s cocky smile, brasher and more indecent than the whole of Showgirls’ cavalcade of titties. Isabelle Adjani’s monstrous (and incongruously sexy) pair of ocular rims in The Tenant. Vangelis’ too lush and twice over score for Bitter Moon. One of the “pretty girls” runs into the bathroom and gives three others an odd, distracted look in Elephant, a look the other three sadly mistake for contempt. Andréas Voutsinas in Mel Brooks films (”Chess! Ah hate chess!”). Frigid young British birds staging a campus protest against free love and in support of domestic tradition are thrown into a fountain by pimple-faced boys and pushed repeatedly back into the water in Malamondo; as their stony-faced rage crumbles into helpless baby-doll weeping, Ennio Morricone sensitively scores their humiliation to the musical sound of dogs barking. DVD commentary by Yuri Tsivian or Werner Herzog. A pool, a night sky, incendiary lighting and “Cucurrucucu Paloma” in Talk to Her. An outdoor evening ballet in The Company and the arrival of a summer squall – the very essence of Altman’s gift for creeping up behind you with a setting-driven panoramic powerhouse before you even knew he was gearing up (like those moments when novelists go on for pages and pages of backdrop effluvia). Black-and-white photography that’s not quite black-and-white. Cigarettes and taxi cabs in John Cassavetes films. Joe Dallesandro’s not at all concealed disinterest in connecting with humanity in any manner whatsoever (often mistaken for sexy aloofness), which I am loath to say I identify with fully on my worst days. The insistent, wry wit of Chris Marker, and the way many use that as their “in” with his monolithic works. Alain Delon in Purple Noon: best mirror monologue ever. Kate Capshaw walks in front of the Temple of Doom title. Pondering whether or not MST3K represents a genuine love for the maladroit cinema or is the pinnacle of privileged middlebrow snobbishness, and then watching an episode and not caring one bit. Philip Glass’ “Floe” in La Chiesa, and further, Dario Argento’s oblique manner of using musical cues, to say nothing of his high-low dichotomy between Verdi, eurodisco and Megadeath. The sleek Scope cinematography of Michael Mann and John Carpenter. The seriously confused deployment of American iconography in Cohen and Lustig’s gutterpunk Uncle Sam. Angela Basset’s raw vocal cords, giving What’s Love Got to Do With It’s endless string of sob scenes more juice than they deserve. The unforced, not-there-if-you-don’t-want-it-to-be artifice of Fassbinder. “Come up to the lab, and see what’s on the slab.” Red to Kill, a little-known HK rape movie that gets away with PC-murder in the name of satire (I hope), and slashes up a retard’s kootch in the process.

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At once I’m grateful to see a poster for a Hulot movie in the background, and at other times I’m wondering whether zees feelm, she is not-a like zee Amelie ah se-kund time-ah. And then the fat old dog gets tricked into being a truck’s spare tire with a piece of caramel, which he proceeds to chew for the entire duration of a paddleboat trip across the Atlantic. As an homage to Tati, it’s grotesque and overstated. As a work of animation, it’s mostly diverting… and oddly cantankerous. I kept waiting through the end credits to see animation teams behind character names like “Officiously Chinky Biker” and “Gluttonous American Pigs.”

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So, I was talking with my good friend Jason, a seminarian who along with my mother managed to bring my politics a barely perceptible tad back from the outer reaches of Left only to turn around and then decide that he’s a big ol’ liberal, and the topic turned to Passion once again. I had and have been dreading seeing this movie (well, the prospect of rewarding Mel Gibson with a monetary contribution to his B.O. til when I haven’t so much as given offering at church for months upon months is my biggest concern — if ever I’ve felt the urge to sneak into a movie, this is the time). But once we talked a bit, and taking into account my new beat at City Pages (unbelievably kinked-out exploitation/grindhouse/Z-grade trash), I came to the conclusion that, if nothing else, I can always look to film as being the absolute apotheosis of what can legitimately be argued to be the last currently standing exploitation genre: Christian movies.

To cover my ass a bit, when I say exploitation, it is in relation to the manner that the films are presented to their audience and how they attract them, and not as much that they exploit Christianity (though I hasten to add that I’m convinced that Mel has exploited latent religious indignation and the perceived momentum behind the Religious Right to the tune of $250 million or even more). Exploitation films are characterized almost as much by their distribution and relationship between the films and their audiences as they are by what’s up on the screen. (Though as rumor has it, Passion’s sadism puts it in familiar company with Salo or The Toolbox Murders.)

Now, the usual suspects behind exploitation — sex and violence — have all more or less changed their skin in the last few decades. Violence, most obviously, has been absorbed into the mainstream so that atrocities that used to be the hallmark of only the most extreme Herschell Gordon Lewis films are now to be found in many of Oscar’s Best Picture nominees like Fargo or Gladiator. And sex has gone the opposite route, from the communion of public dive wankatoriums straight into the furthest recesses of suburban closets. Most of the -isms have begat movie after movie whose structure seems ripped off from CNN’s Crossfire. Gay films are off in a petulant optimistic denial that is admittedly a different strain of exploitation, but one that engenders blithe obsequiousness instead of nerve-gnawing grit. All of these films have become part of the common market of big studio players.

The one topic that seems more or less a no man’s land as far as mainstream American film culture is concerned is Christianity. It could be argued that the void this leaves has created an audience that needs to share a socially “taboo” experience. The Omega Code, Left Behind, The Gospel of John, and now The Passion. Films that are more often than not privately funded by consummate show-men, marketed by accentuating the most outre elements (and, Passion excepted, marketed through non-traditional grassroots avenues), playing to an audience that basically are all there to see that very specific explicitly Christian element splattered all over the screen without inhibition or tact… sounds like exploitation to me! So why aren’t I more excited?

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