The Passion of the Christ

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Registered: 07-25-2003
The Passion of the Christ
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Thu, 02-26-2004 - 12:58am
Has anyone been able to see it yet?

I knew it would be opening big, but I was surprised to find out this morning that one of the local 20-plexes was showing it to sold out crowds on every screen from 6:30 this morning to around 11:00 when their usual lineup started and The Passion only continued on a few screens.

I've been reading incredibly moving reactions to it like this one in National Review--

"THE PASSION IN HARLEM

I just got out of a screening at the Magic Johnson Theatres up at 123rd and Frederick Douglass in Harlem. The theatre was packed, with an audience that was about 85 percent black, and included many seniors (of course: daytime). The response to the film was just about universal: Loud applause at the end, and vocal endorsements of the movie as we exited. One sweet elderly lady, I’d say about 80 years old, was shaking her head on the way out, saying: “If you read the Bible, that’s exactly what happened.” Another woman, in her 30s, was brushing away tears. “It’s not the movie,” she said,” it’s the reality of the thing.” During the screening, the man I set next to—a guy in his 20s, tall, strong, and vigorous-looking, nobody’s wimp—gasped at some of the cruelties inflicted on Jesus. (When Jesus’ cross is turned over on its face so He can be nailed to it more securely, this man blurted out, “Oh, s***, that’s too much.”) Before the movie started, there was a little film in which Magic Johnson explained the rules for his theatres: “No talking. . . . No hats or colors . . . . If you have a problem on the street, don’t bring it inside.” I couldn’t help thinking: There is a problem on the street, every street, and this movie is about the solution."

I wanted to see it this weekend, but now the local news is reporting that virtually every showing in Dallas through the weekend is already sold out, so now I have to wait til next Saturday.

Renee

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Registered: 04-03-2003
Sun, 02-29-2004 - 8:12pm
<>

Mel Gibson didn't make up this violence, it really happened.

Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 12:51am
What I meant by the word ‘vision’ as in “his vision” was - an image or concept in the imagination.

I was commenting on the creative decision Gibson made in concentrating on and amplifying the violence of the crucifixion.

I have several friends who are religious iconographers and they view themselves as conduits through which God sends the work they apply to canvas, paper or panels. Their work requires months of intense meditation, so I have some idea of what Gibson may have experienced and I would never belittle it.

C

Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 1:19am
<< Mel Gibson didn't make up this violence, it really happened.>> Violence can be portrayed in many ways, when it’s presented in a visual medium. Gibson chose to use very graphic images and then embellish them with additional violent details that he knew would be shocking to many people. This was a creative decision on his part and he has said as much. My comment had nothing to do with whether it really happened; it had to do with how it was portrayed.

C

Avatar for car_al
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Registered: 03-25-2003
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 1:47am
“Because the director's wallowing in gore finds an excuse in a religious purpose — to show how horribly Jesus suffered for humanity's sins — the bar against film violence has been radically lowered. Movie mayhem, long resisted by parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.” I totally agree with this statement from the following commentary by William Safire.

c

Not Peace, but a Sword

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON — The word "passion" is rooted in the Latin for "suffer." Mel Gibson's movie about the torture and agony of the final hours of Jesus is the bloodiest, most brutal example of sustained sadism ever presented on the screen.

Because the director's wallowing in gore finds an excuse in a religious purpose — to show how horribly Jesus suffered for humanity's sins — the bar against film violence has been radically lowered. Movie mayhem, long resisted by parents, has found its loophole; others in Hollywood will now find ways to top Gibson's blockbuster, to cater to voyeurs of violence and thereby to make bloodshed banal.

What are the dramatic purposes of this depiction of cruelty and pain? First, shock; the audience I sat in gasped at the first tearing of flesh. Next, pity at the sight of prolonged suffering. And finally, outrage: who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?

Not Pontius Pilate, the Roman in charge; he and his kindly wife are sympathetic characters. Nor is King Herod shown to be at fault.

The villains at whom the audience's outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers. This is the essence of the medieval "passion play," preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as "Christ killers."

Much of the hatred is based on a line in the Gospel of St. Matthew, after the Roman governor washes his hands of responsibility for ordering the death of Jesus, when the crowd cries, "His blood be on us, and on our children."

Though unreported in the Gospels of Mark, Luke or John, that line in Matthew — embraced with furious glee by anti-Semites through the ages — is right there in the New Testament. Gibson and his screenwriter didn't make it up, nor did they misrepresent the apostle's account of the Roman governor's queasiness at the injustice.

But biblical times are not these times. This inflammatory line in Matthew — and the millenniums of persecution, scapegoating and ultimately mass murder that flowed partly from its malign repetition — was finally addressed by the Catholic Church in the decades after the defeat of Naziism.

In 1965's historic Second Vatican Council, during the papacy of Paul VI, the church decided that while some Jewish leaders and their followers had pressed for the death of Jesus, "still, what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

That was a sea change in the doctrinal interpretation of the Gospels, and the beginning of major interfaith progress.

However, a group of Catholics rejects that and other holdings of Vatican II. Mr. Gibson is reportedly aligned with that reactionary clique. (So is his father, an outspoken Holocaust-denier, but the son warns interviewers not to go there. I agree; the latest generation should not be held responsible for the sins of the fathers.)

In the skillful publicity run-up to the release of the movie, Gibson's agents said he agreed to remove that ancient self-curse from the screenplay. It's not in the subtitles I saw the other night, though it may still be in the Aramaic audio, in which case it will surely be translated in the versions overseas.

And there's the rub. At a moment when a wave of anti-Semitic violence is sweeping Europe and the Middle East, is religion well served by updating the Jew-baiting passion plays of Oberammergau on DVD? Is art served by presenting the ancient divisiveness in blood-streaming media to the widest audiences in the history of drama?

Matthew in 10:34 quotes Jesus uncharacteristically telling his apostles: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." You don't see that on Christmas cards and it's not in this film, but those words can be reinterpreted — read today to mean that inner peace comes only after moral struggle.

The richness of Scripture is in its openness to interpretation answering humanity's current spiritual needs. That's where Gibson's medieval version of the suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame, fails Christian and Jew today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/01/opinion/01SAFI.html?hp

Avatar for katmandoo2001
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Registered: 03-26-2003
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 2:41am
I can't believe the blatant hypocrisy of the critics of this movie! The very SAME critics, I might add, who will heap praise on a director like Quentin Tarantino for garbage filled with gratutitous violence like "Kill Bill" or "Pulp Fiction!"

I think much of this hyprocisy is fueled by fear, though, more than a real (and quite sudden) concern about violence in THIS movie...a fear that Christians will begin to take their movie-going dollars elsewhere or choose to stay home! IF this country has as many believers as is indicated by the numbers of people flocking to a movie about Jesus, then maybe they SHOULD be afraid!

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 8:25am

Why It's So Bloody.
Gibson's movie is theologically in tune with the times — the 1300s.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040301-593591,00.html


Let us travel back to a very bad time. Not A.D. 30. That was a fairly bad time. No, to a period roughly 650 years ago. The Black Death was ravaging Europe, killing upwards of 20 million people. The survivors fought in what was known as the 100 Years' War. Add grueling poverty. They called it the Middle Ages. And from it emerged ... Mel Gibson's new movie, The Passion of the Christ.


Those who walk into their multiplexes wondering whether Gibson's film is anti-Semitic will find answers according to their standards. Mine was that it is, in a stock, caricatured way. Romans do the actual torturing, and a handful of "good" Jews seem to defy cliche, but the folks controlling the mob and forcing their overlord's seemingly pliable hand are the same band of swarthy miscreants that have wandered through Passion plays for centuries.


Yet the film's true shock lies in Gibson's vision of what is most important in the Jesus story, in the relentless, near pornographic feast of flayed flesh. Gibson gives us Christ's blood, not in a Communion cup, but by the gallon. Blood spraying from Jesus' shackled body; blood sluicing to the Cross's foot. This Passion begins just before Jesus' arrest. It ends with a blink-length Resurrection. The bulk of his ministry, miracles and post-Resurrection appearances are absent, and his preaching of love flicked at in telegraphically brief flashbacks. Meanwhile, his scourging, handled in all four Gospels in a total of three sentences, takes up nine full minutes of film.

Western Christianity has seen this treatment before, although not before about A.D. 1000. The stunning concept of divine self-sacrifice--"Jesus Christ and him crucified," as Paul put it — is the faith's heart, bound inextricably with his glorious rising three days later. But the grisly specifics of his mortification before then were of little interest to most Christians until the turn of the second millennium.

It was starting in the 1300s that the Passion truly bloomed. Scholars located details of Jesus' suffering in allegedly prophetic verses in the Old Testament. Mystics built devotions around his scourging after a Cardinal returned from the Holy Land bearing the pillar to which he said Christ had been chained. Flagellant lay groups clogged the streets, seeking bloody identification with the flayed Christ. So dominant grew the Passion, writes Catholic historian Gerard Sloyan, that believers felt "meditation on alone could achieve unity with Christ and yield some share in the work of redemption he accomplished." It came to overshadow not just "the Incarnation, but even the Resurrection."

Sloyan does not regard this as a good thing, but never once does he suggest that it was inexplicable. It derived in part from the everyday misery and terror facing average believers. However badly they suffered, they thought, Jesus must have suffered more. If they dedicated their torments to his, others concluded, it might lend sanctity to the senseless. Little wonder that one mystic reported that Christ had told her, "I was beaten on the body 6,666 times; beaten on the head 110 times; pricks of thorns in the head, 110 ... mortal thorns in the forehead, 3 ... the drops of blood that I lost were 28,430."

As the plagues abated, Passion piety faded. It has never fully disappeared from Catholicism (why should it, as long as there is suffering?), and remains particularly pronounced in the Hispanic church. But observances like the Stations of the Cross and the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary settled into more balanced harmony with Easter.

Why, then, does Mel Gibson feel that America needs the old medieval recipe? One answer is, perhaps he doesn't. He has maintained that the film was never intended to be commercial but reflects a near suicidal period he survived by meditating on Jesus' suffering. "I had to use the Passion of Christ to heal my wounds," he told an Australian newspaper. The Passion is his personal candle lit in thanks.

And yet recently greater claims have been staked on the film's behalf. Gibson's production company has marketed it to church groups as "perhaps the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years," and conservative Christian luminaries have embraced it as such. The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, compares the work to that of Michelangelo, who captured the spirituality of a more expansive age. Like the Sistine ceiling, Haggard says, The Passion of the Christ will inspire believers for decades or even centuries.

With due respect for his desire that Christ's sacrifice be understood by all and for the gratitude among Christians that a Hollywood deity has finally made an accomplished and utterly unironical Christian film, one can only hope that he has it wrong. The Christian story includes joy, astonishment, prophecy, righteous wrath, mystery and love straightforward as well as love sacrificial. The Passion of the Christ is a one-note threnody about the Son of God being dragged to his death. That may be just the ticket for some times and for some benighted places where understanding human torment in terms of God's love is the only religious insight of any use. But in a culture as rich, as powerful, as lucky and as open-minded as ours — one might even say, as blessed — it is, or should be, a very bad fit indeed.



 


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Registered: 04-03-2003
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 9:40am
I Can't believe you wrote that. Mel Gibson is a smart man and you saying he did it for money??? Did you see any of his interviews?? He did the movie because he wanted to send out the word of Christ, Not for the money.. He even says "its never been about the money.", in an interview with Dianne Sawyer. This movie however much money it will make was not made for the attention he's getting or for the money. Its about the message..
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Registered: 02-03-2004
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 10:10am
i found the movie borderline ridiculous. so "good v. evil" that it seemed unrealistic. the roman soldiers's nonstop flogging/laughing, flogging/laughing seemed outlandish. no one knows if it truly happened in the way that Gibson portrayed.

also, according to roman law, flogging was a legal precursor to the crucufixion (but they were only allowed 39 lashes), and the severity of the flogging depended on the soldiers who were performing the act. we don't know how severe they were towards jesus (and i found it unrealistic that roman soldiers - who had little stake or concern in whether jesus was truly the son of God or just another "rebel", would be SO vicious). for the soldiers, it was just another day. crucifixions were performed all the time, and were performed on men whose crimes were considered much worse than jesus'. the fact remains that we don't know these things - e.g. we don't know if he was tied or nailed to the cross (both were common practice during this period of rome).

also re the anti semitisim...recently read the review in the Chigaco Sun Times. here's an interesting excerpt:

"In the movie's scenes showing Jesus being condemned to death, the two main players are Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, and Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest. Both men want to keep the lid on, and while neither is especially eager to see Jesus crucified, they live in a harsh time when such a man is dangerous.

Pilate is seen going through his well-known doubts before finally washing his hands of the matter and turning Jesus over to the priests, but Caiaphas, who also had doubts, is not seen as sympathetically. The critic Steven D. Greydanus, in a useful analysis of the film, writes: "The film omits the canonical line from John's gospel in which Caiaphas argues that it is better for one man to die for the people that the nation be saved.

'Had Gibson retained this line, perhaps giving Caiaphas a measure of the inner conflict he gave to Pilate, it could have underscored the similarities between Caiaphas and Pilate and helped defuse the issue of anti-Semitism.'"

why the omission? what was seen in the movie is obviously not portrayed AS IT HAPPENED. it is not fact. it is an interpretation.





Edited 3/1/2004 10:11:10 AM ET by themgreenapples


Edited 3/1/2004 10:12:05 AM ET by themgreenapples

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Registered: 03-01-2004
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 10:30am
I am boycotting 60 Minutes due to Andy Rooney's stupidity and lack of respect and sensitivity
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Registered: 03-01-2004
Mon, 03-01-2004 - 10:41am
If you are a person of faith, Andy Rooney's editorial was insulting and meant to make Christians appear to be nuts. If you are not of faith, the editorial wouldn't bother you.

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