Thanks to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, we appear to have developed a new midweek release cycle just prior to Good Friday. This year, The Reaping is leading the pack — an R-rated “spiritual” thriller that leverages Old Testament worldviews and the ten plagues of Egypt, all in a contemporary setting. But there’s little chance that this R-rated exercise is aimed at the church-going crowd on Easter weekend as there’s nothing in the way of Christian rebirth on display. Greg Wright calls the film “distasteful” due to “its warm and fuzzily incendiary embrace of vengeful and divine retribution.” In the end, he says, “you might want get through Lenten-type abstentions before screening this picture… The thematic elements–which the MPAA oddly fails to mention–should be rated NC-17. This is a film mostly for adults who think they know better.”
Similarly, Paul Verhoeven’s latest film, Black Book, is a hard-R look at Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation. While Mike Smith finds “value in being continually reminded of the holocaust,” even conceding that Black Book serves “that purpose well,” he still warns that the film’s sexual content warrants leaving “your children under age 34 at home.”
But it’s not just college-age males who benefit from the midweek Spring Break releases; the kiddies get a treat, too. Ice Cube’s sequel Are We Done Yet? hits theatres and seems targeted at fifth-graders, according to Mike Smith. He calls it a film “that parents have to tolerate so their three-year-old can watch animals do funny things to people,” and advises us to wait for the DVD release so parents can “use it to mesmerize the kids so the babysitter can do his or her homework… while Mom and Dad go watch a real movie.”
Perhaps tomorrow’s weekend releases have a little something for less narrow audiences.
