Just saw the film this after-noon
Positivas:
Monica Belluci est pulchritudinae est!!!!
Beautiful composition of shots.
Great use of colour.
Good score.
John the Beloved was a cutie...Yeshua had good taste in male lovers!!!
They got the Veronica/Mandylion in there.
Latin with an Italian accent...probably how the Vulgar Latin sounded.
I got to hear Aramaic!!! And I could decipher most of it. Yaaayyy!!!!
Loved the "Pieta" at the deposition!!!
Good portrayal of the "agony in the garden/" I have always though this is where the Christos is most approachable by the reader.
I liked the presentation of the Shaitan as a beautiful androgyne. Since it is supposed to be a fallen
aggelos it makes a wonderful amount of sense (mental note: Might Annie Lennox be the anti-christ?).
The shots of the arma christi during the deposition.
Mediocritas
The bit with Judas and the kids reminds me of the horror stories my friend who teaches fourth grade frequently relates!
Pilate was
not a wuss. This aspect was likely an attempt to make the gospels more acceptable to a Roman audience. I wish that Gibson had not followed this balderdash.
The "monsterization" of the centurions. Cheap and predictable, and not at all subtle. This was elementary school logic and detracted from the filmmaking.
The grotesqueness of all of the Jewish charachters.
The "wound suit" was horribly done, and looked too, too fake.
the falls were overdone. By the third one someone in the audience made the "falling whistling sound," and many laughed.
By the time the Christos had his cross tipped over I thought, "oh, come on!
this is silly!"
Costuming, etc.. were horribly historically inaccurate, but certainly on a par with most hollywood productions set in antiquity (i.e..: Gladiator).
The "action hero ending, with the view through the stigmata.
I liked it, but I am approaching it from a slightly different perspective than many. I found the identification of the Magdalen as the woman taken in adultery interesting. Usually she is identified as an amalgamation of Mary of Bethany, the woman cured of seven devils, and the woman with the heavy menstrual period. identifying her with the woman taken in adultery certainly supports the
magdalena Meretirces idea popular during the time of Katarina Emmerich (whose "visions" Gibson based the film on).
I also found it interesting from the point of attempting to understand the later medieval meditations on the passion, and particularly the emphasis on blood imagery (see Ross,
The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Later Medieval England, (Oxford, 1989) and Rubin,
Corpus Christi: Eucharistic Devotion in the High Middle Ages, (Oxford, 1987-ish, or thereabouts) ).
I was also stunned by the people in the audience "amen-ing" and "yessing" to themselves as they saw the film, As well as weeping conspicuously at parts. Some aging frat boy type accosted me as I left the theatre over "whether I was a 'krischin" (sic) and over the fact I have a button on my satchel with the face of Bush with a no-bozos symbol. I ignored him.
