He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  18 October 2004 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
I finally got round to watching Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ the other night. Considered simply as another Hollywood film, I would give it 4 out of 10. The direction and script were pedestrian and unimaginative. The acting, by a multinational Mediterranean cast hampered by unfamiliarity of speaking Latin and Aramaic (in theory at least, a good decision), was stilted and relied heavily on the Meaningful Glance School, where the camera dwells on a motionless frowning face to express emotions that both the script and the actor fail to provide. The editing was competent - certainly more so than Spiderman I, which sticks in my memory as the worst in Hollywood in recent years. As for the film's accuracy... The Pope is reputed to have said "It is as it was" after viewing the film. Well, the Pope doesn't know what he's talking about. The prolonged brutality and violence that Gibson insists on showing us may have been close to reality, but little else was. From the opening scene, where Jesus and the disciples are shown in an unnaturally misty blue Garden of Gethsemane, to the final moments on the cross where Jesus is covered in paint that is bears no resemblance to the blood, mucus and mutilated flesh it was supposed to portray (and, incidentally, his teeth remain unbroken despite hours of severe beating from every angle, what we see is not the reality of first-century Jerusalem but merely another made-in-the-USA film with an airbrushed view of history. In such films, it is not surprising that the priests all wear new, perfectly made robes, that the leading actors are all good-looking, that the extras are all well-fed, that the streets are void of dung and stray animals, that all the men have access to modern razors and so on and so on and so on. And its spiritual content? Some believers may find their faith reinforced by the film, but for the rest of us, there was little spirituality. There was no sense that Jim Caviezel's Jesus was a man who truly represented God or who was opening our eyes to a new understanding of the divine; all we offered us were pleasant metaphors related to disciples of apparently limited intelligence or capacity for speech. Occasionally and disturbingly, however, we saw in Jesus shadows of David Koresh, Jim Jones, Oral Roberts and any of the hundreds of well- and lesser-known leaders of cults that ultimately destroy their followers' lives. And those were the moments when we saw Jesus as deluded, not divine. By the end of the film, while I had some sympathy for him, I felt much closer to Pilate (played by Hristo Naumov Shopov - note the irony of his first name), the Roman Consul unable to rise to the challenge set him by mystics and bigots. If I had to spend eternity with any character in the film, it would be with that honest, and very human, man. |
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Good cause 
Helping refugees |
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