Posted by nastypup at pcp04985504pcs.benslm01.pa.comcast.net on February 23, 2004 at 09:19:13:
In Reply to: I find the premise behind the premise offensive. posted by Smalls on February 23, 2004 at 04:42:06:
: That he somehow thinks he's doing the "closest we'll ever get to how it actually went down" is actually what galls me.
: I think that any sane person realizes that those accounts were two generations away from first person accounts at best, have gone through eighteen thousand editors with eighteen thousand agendas and fifteen retranslations... and that all the good films about the Christ experience admit, up front, that they're the interpretation of the writer/director/actors/writer-of-the-material-adapted-from and fully open to interpretation. That its one take of many.
: I think focusing on the prosecution, horrific torture and death of a political dissident in the Roman-controlled Jewish homeland two-thousand-years-ago completely misses the point of what Jesus's teachings seemed to be about. Yeah, h(H)e suffered profoundly... the point was Jesus was teaching people an ideology in the hopes of ending earthly suffering, it seems antithetical to focus on how much the government beat the shit out of Jesus before Jesus was killed. It's like it's implicitly begging for an eye-for-an-eye response that Jesus specifically rejected.
: And frankly? If this guy's father is running around saying the Holocaust didn't happen, speaking for him wherever and whenever he possibly can... and he's NOT going around explicitly saying "I'm sorry, I love my dad but he's completely fucking nuts and he doesn't speak for me" then... yes, it's fully acceptable to read the film through a lens of anti-Semetism.
: I mean, I'll probably see it. But if it focuses on how much the figure Christ physically suffered and how "historically accurate" it believes itself to be then... it will have done nothing for the world other than to create an illustrated text for anti-Semites to refer to when they make wild claims about "who killed Jesus"... when it's entirely beside the point.
: "Didn't you see that light-skinned fellow getting whipped to death by those awful swarthy types?"
: Blah. I will say, sometimes trailers lie.
: But Gibson's refusal to refute his bat-shit-insane borderline-flat-out-evil father pretty much doesn't.
: And anything the fundamentalists have this much of a hard-on over pretty much can't be good, come on.
: Mike