Word: jesus
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...those who missed it in the not-com version of TIME - the magazine - here's my review of that brutal and powerful film about Jesus Christ...
...have represented Israelites of two millenniums past, but they often looked Nordic; God must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones, the heart's revolution that Jesus preached became an Oxford don's lecture, and his ghastly, redemptive death a tableau painted on velvet...
...Jesus film with violence is bound to roil some people. But the film's carnage is emetic, not exploitative. The crowning with thorns, the scourging at the pillar, the agonized trudge up Calvary show what Jesus suffered and why; and James Caviezel's spiky, ferocious, nearly heroic performance is a perfect servant to the role. This is not a movie for all believers - or for all moviegoers. But it is, nonetheless, a believer's movie. Gibson believes in the power of Jesus' message. He believes in the power of cinema to rethink traditions, to make Jesus live in a skeptical...
...criticized Gibson's defense-cum-promotion of The Passion as meso-Messianic. When he declines to denounce his father Hunter, an extreme religious and political right-winger who has in articles and interviews come close to denying the Nazi holocaust, Mad Mel is supposedly seeing himself as the suffering Jesus and his dad as God the Father-He who demands the ultimate sacrifice, He who must be obeyed. Mel has also sounded addled, even paranoid, when he said that making this movie was putting his career on the line. But, as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn...
...often aligned with belligerent conservatism-is, to many in the media, a threat or a joke. They don't understand religious devotion, at least in the less attractive sense of the term. They are much more comfortable producing anti-religious entertainment (all the comedies that make mock of God, Jesus and the clergy) than some sweet sappy Nun's Story...