Word: mel
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...Mel Gibson's first achievement in "The Passion of the Christ" is to strip the biblical epic of its encrusted sanctimony and show biz. It takes hard men to work this Holy Land, men who labor under the twin burdens of poverty and the oppression of Roman occupation. Their clothes are dirt-dry and sweat-drenched. By jolting the viewer to reconsider Hollywood's calcified stereotypes of the New Testament, Gibson wants to restore the immediacy of that time, the stern wonder of that land, the thrilling threat of meeting the Messiah on the mean streets of Jerusalem...
...allow me to baffle or anger my new flock by getting to today's subject: a simple, informative survey of a dozen or so film biographies of Jesus, noting particularly how their depiction of the Messiah's conviction and death compared with Mel Gibson's. The alleged Messiah is once again hot (in the more attractive sense of that word), and readers may be helped by these scattershot notes on other examples of the genre. All of the films, including "Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter," are available on video and/or DVD from amazon.com...
...Holy Thursday night scenes in Gethsemane. The Passion section, which consumes the last 14 minutes, has no more juice than the rest of the film. Back then, of course, directors didn't have access to the fake-blood squibs and other effects of today's gore artists. (The blood Mel used was fake, wasn't it?) Remember, too, that in 1912 film was in its infancy; that D.W. Griffith and others were still creating the medium's visual vocabulary and sentence structure; and that, for most Christians and lots of non-Christian moviegoers, "From the Manger to the Cross...
...premise, from screenwriter Ian Driscoll, is piquant: Jesus H. Christ joins forces with a priest to rid Ottawa of a vampire coven. He's an activist Savior ("If I'm not back in five minutes, call the Pope") who kicks beaucoup d'ass. He's closer to a standard Mel Gibson hero than to the hero of the new Mel Gibson movie. But the comedy is slack, the song lyrics feeble, the pace torpid. Note to cultists: A movie may be incompetently acted and amateurishly shot. That doesn't mean you have to like...
...guilty only of standing by his deluded old man and expressing opinions that are less popular in Hollywood than they are in the rest of the country. So my bet is that the studios will keep hiring him, for two reasons. One: they believe in box office, and Mel delivers it for them. Two: they could then boast they have hired at least a token religious right-winger...