"Rampant Slander & Blasphemy"
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What You Need To Know:
Besides getting the chronology of De Sade’s life wrong, QUILLS slanders the reputation of the real-life clergyman who always treated the Marquis with Christian kindness, despite his rebellion against Christianity. The movie also favors complete artistic freedom and contends that one must know the horrors of vice in order to know the wonders of virtue. Ironically, however, De Sade’s writings actually inspire chaos and murder among the asylum’s inmates in one awful scene. Finally, not only does QUILLS seem to side with De Sade’s blasphemous attacks on God and Jesus Christ in the story, it also contains many scenes of sexual perversion, gruesome violence and explicit nudity
Content:
(HHH, ABABAB, RHRHRH, PaPaPa, HoHo, LLL, VVV, SSS, NNN, AA, MMM) Blasphemous humanist worldview with strong anti-Christian elements, strong revisionist history slandering historical people who are dead, strong pagan libertine immorality, & some homosexual behavior; 13 obscenities, 4 profanities, several blasphemies, & sexual talk; extreme violence including gruesome images of heads chopped off by guillotine & a headless corpse, attempted rapes, forced sodomy, blood from guillotine drips on condemned woman’s face, men strapped in chair dipped repeatedly into water, man cuts his fingers to make ink from his blood, implied murder with bloody after-effects shown, arson, images of corpse, & man’s tongue cut out & displayed in a jar; depicted fornication, depicted necrophilia in a dream, depicted masturbation, depicted sodomy, attempted rapes, implied oral sex, man appears to be aroused by other man, madman wears women’s clothes, & lewd sexual references, one of which involves a Christian bishop; extensive full male nudity & upper female nudity; alcohol use & drunkenness; and, hypocrisy, debauchery, adultery, much older man takes a teenager for his wife, man uses torture to cure insane people, & angry atheist provokes Christians to destroy their faith.
More Detail:
QUILLS is a movie version of Doug Wright’s infamous play about the Marquis de Sade, the radical French writer (circa 1740 to 1814) who wrote pornographic, sado-masochistic literature. Like the scandalous author, who once described himself as “atheistic to the point of fanaticism,” the movie is a slanderous, blasphemous attack on Christianity and the Person of Jesus Christ.
The story of the film and the play bears little resemblance to the actual facts of history, especially its depiction of De Sade’s final years in an insane asylum and its depiction of the Roman Catholic clergyman who ran the asylum. In the movie, Geoffrey Rush plays De Sade, who uses a young chambermaid, played by Kate Winslet of TITANIC, to smuggle out his pornography. When the Emperor Napoleon learns of one publication, he orders his ministers to let a famous psychologist named Royer-Collard oversee Father Coulmier, the Abbé, or member of the French secular clergy, who runs the asylum. Coulmier, played by Joaquin Phoenix of GLADIATOR, decides to take away De Sade’s writing utensils, but his action begins a battle of wills that results in Coulmier’s moral and spiritual destruction and the death of the chambermaid and De Sade.
Besides getting the chronology of De Sade’s life wrong, QUILLS slanders the reputation of both Coulmier and Royer-Collard, who’s played by Michael Caine. This is very convenient, since both men are dead and cannot defend themselves. The movie also favors complete artistic freedom and contends that one must know the horrors of vice in order to know the wonders of virtue. Ironically, however, De Sade’s writings actually inspire chaos and murder among the asylum’s inmates in one awful scene. Finally, not only does QUILLS seem to side with De Sade’s blasphemous attacks on God and Jesus Christ in the story, it also contains many scenes of sexual perversion, gruesome violence and explicit nudity.
