Word: baptiste
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...close to the mainstream of American life. They don't smoke, drink, or care about sex. All of their emotions are conveniently sublimated into religious faith. When they do reach out to each other, it's in a sappy, harmless way. The modern day Jesus and his John the Baptist are played by two adolescent Adonises who spend a good deal of time hugging each other...
WHAT THERE IS of plot comes from the Book of Matthew, which most people know already. The Biblical myth loses its metaphysical connotations, leaving an oversimplified story of eight innocents in search of an answer. John the Baptist pulls a flower bedecked cart over the Brooklyn Bridge one morning. He appears to the city's hungry souls in need of salvation. Their troubles are varied: one has spilled coffee on her waitress's uniform. Another is stuck in a traffic jam and a third is unfairly forced to wait in line to use a Xerox machine. He summons them...
There is one good bit in the film. Jesus and John the Baptist -- who later becomes Judas -- do a vaudeville dance number, complete with top hats and canes, in front of the famous Bulova sign in Times Square. The computerized sign creates a precisely synchronized expansion of the two dancers going through their paces. The sign is amazing -- I once spent ten minutes hypnotized by it in Times Square. Unfortunately this bit lasts for only thirty seconds and the film drags on for about ninety minutes. The rest of the choreography, unaided by mechanical intervention, has all the vitality...
Liberia's ramshackle capital of Monrovia used to look a little like a gigantic Mississippi riverboat minstrel show. The men at the Masonic Lodge dressed in top hats and black morning coats; the ladies at the Baptist church wore flowing skirts and bandannas; and everybody spoke in an exaggerated Deep South drawl. In these mannerisms they imitated both their forebears, freedmen who returned from the U.S. in 1822 and subsequently founded Africa's first republic, and their president, William Vacanarat Shadrach ("Uncle Shad") Tubman, who ran the country with a kind of dandified despotism from 1944 until...
Departures. As with the church, the current Jesuit controversy has been simmering for years, but it came to a boil as the Second Vatican Council drew to a close. The society's superior general, John Baptist Janssens, died, and the order convened in 1965 one of its rare "general congregations," both to elect a successor and adjust its ways to the council's rapprochement with the modern world. Jesuit superiors and provincial representatives from around the world converged on Rome. The man they elected as the society's 28th general (to serve, like the Pope, for life) was a career...