lost passion

so in reflecting a bit on easter, good friday, lenten fasts etc, i was drawn back to an old blogpost from 2005.

i have a question: why the recut?
mel gibson's controversial film 'the passion of the Christ' has been recut with the more 'offensive' stuff removed.

i have another question: feel better now?

once again we have opted for a tidy retelling of the story- as if there aren't already enough of those. about a month ago my marcy and i were tossing around some of film's more comical (:-0) portrayals of Jesus' story.

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marcy said
This all started when I started asking people who they thought the worst ‘Jesus Actors’ of all time where. I mean, we’re talking from Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’ on down through ‘The Robe’ and what-not, the worst Jesus Actors of all time.

We’re talking the worst method actors known to cinema: “A November Boston Globe review of Jesus Christ Superstar called the non-Equity show "so unspeakably awful it's enough to make a writer give up theater criticism forever and set up a shoeshine stand in the middle of a mudslide."

Anyways, here’s a partial list of Jesus Actors:
Willem Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ
James Caviezel in The Passion of the Christ
Jeremy Sisto in Jesus (made for tv)
Brian Deacon in Jesus (from '79)
Claude Heater in Ben-Hur
Kenneth Colley in Life of Brian
Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar
William Powell in Jesus Of Nazareth
Max Von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told
Jeffrey Hunter in ‘The King of Kings’ (61)

Okay, but Willem Dafoe also played the mad scientist in the Spiderman movie. Enough said there.


to which i felt compelled to reply:
as for willem dafoe, thank God actors play roles, rather than live them (another plug for "Jesus of Montreal" yay!) because a bunch of the guys on this list have either taken bizarre/embarrassing parts somewhere along the way, or have never worked again...

ted neeley played 'curly' (the creepy cowboy with a glove full of vaseline) in the 70's version of john steinbeck's "of mice and men"

"max von sydow was 'brewmeister smith' (a deranged scientist who goes for global mind control by adding hallucinogens to canadian beer at oktoberfest)in bob and doug mckenzie's "strange brew" (major canadiana piece there) and has portrayed mostly malevolent authority figures ever since, in mind-bending psychological films like "minority report" and "shutter island"

jeffrey hunter went on to be commander pike in the "star trek" pilot, returning to the little screen in a recut version of it called "the menagerie"

there's probably many more great laughs we could have over the aesthetic folly/curse (it's kinda interesting that in casting the new superman, both jim C and willem D were not even considered because they had both already played JC. darned do-gooders!) attached to playing Jesus- i just don't have my big fat cross-referenced movie book handy to go digging further.

i am just glad that malcolm mcdowell has never played the Christ (unless you include "a clockwork orange"- but that one's probably just conjecture) because i don't think that i could see "Caligula Christ" without becoming really uncomfortable.

and on it went...
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point is, there are already a bunch of 'biblical epic' type portrayals of Jesus' passion which just don't rate, and clearly it's not about visual desensitization, because desensitized people would dismiss the flogging scene as merely running too long without moving the story forward...

it's about letting love in. we hate that a good person could be so cruelly treated; or we hate that people will watch a film and weep, but will eat supper on the couch while watching wars and their atrocities chronicled on cnn; we hate the idea that such horrific torture could be undergone by the son of God on our behalf (although that is still too personally and spiritually problematic for many- let's just stick with the good person part; it permits filtered consciencing.) telling a story is one thing, but depicting a troubling historical event in such extreme detail is somehow too much.

give us 'kill bill.' we know that that's silly. we know that that isn't supposed to get into our hearts. we know that people are not, as presented (brilliantly, i might add) by tarantino, huge sacks of blood just waiting to explode, and therefore we can laugh at our mortality rather than fear losing it to face a loveless forever, completely absent from the presence of God.

don't kid yourself- none of us has any idea how dark the darkness really is. how dark can you imagine? does it compare to what we find offensive about the original cut of the film?

Jesus said 'forgive them, for they have no idea...'

sometimes it feels like we've given up truth for lent.