Did anyone order a copy of The Passion?

I pre-ordered it on Amazon several weeks ago. Got an e-mail from them the other day saying the order has been shipped. It's a gift for my wife - I doubt if I'll watch it.

It may be good to have around for those who haven't seen it.

My family has watched it. My husband and I thought it was very well done. Had me balling like a baby.

I haven't seen it, and I don't expect to. I read the book and I have generally been disappointed when books are transferred to the screen.

Kelly

I though it awful. I'm going to donate my copy to the library in the apartments.

I'm too scared to see it...I know it will be an emotional/overwhelming movie. Gotta wait until I can muster up the courage. I'm sure I'll buy a copy one day.

Would it not be great if we could get Mel Brooks to make a version of The Passion? He would not, of course, if only because of the inevitability that it would stoke the fires of anti-semitism. But it would be delicious.

I havn't seen Mel Gibson's snuff film and don't intend to. The very idea of it is grotesque.

I've just seen the film. Nothing particularily new in it. Same basic characters and no plot surprizes. Fine bit of film making with excellent production values, and nice cinematography. About the same amount of biase as one finds in the New Testiment, though the impact of the visuals is greater than the dry text. Historically it leaves a bit to be desired and some details were wrong, e.g. nailed hands, rather than wrists, etc.

All in all, a tempest in a teapot.

We also watched Tom Hanks in the Cohen Brothers remake of Lady Killers. Usually, I like Cohen films and Hanks has a good eye for interesting scripts. This one was a disappointment. I far prefer Alec Guiness and Peter Sellers in the original version. It wasn't the best DVD double bill we've had here.

Adding My 2 Cents' Worth on This Film
The dust of reviews has settled on this film and so, perhaps, the time has come, perhaps, for a more dispassionate, a more considered, a more reflective, commentary on a film that precipitated a great deal of public reaction in the last few months. Review is not quite the right word for what follows. What I have written here is just a comment, but it is no less provocative than the most provocative you’ve read thusfar and I think you will find here some refreshing and intelligent insights into Gibson’s film, its social context and the way it was perceived. The film moved into the top ten money spinners in the history of cinema in the last week, so someone is watching it, loving it, hating it or indifferent to it, as the case may be.
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THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: A Comment by Ron Price
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This film was not intended to be a masterful historical documentary as, say, Ken Burns' work on the Civil War or one of many others done in the first century of the existence of the cinema. Gibson's work is far from possessing what some might call an intellectual poverty in its pretensions at historical documentary. Shawn Rosenheim says all TV documentaries possess an intellectual poverty. If Rosenheim is right the visual media are simply incapable of producing historical documentary.1 And if Rosenheim is wrong, as I tend to think he is, historical documentary of an event 2000 years ago is not impossible. It is, rather, a recreation. We simply do not know enough about the event Gibson is recreating to claim that what we are seeing is a documentary. There is enough faithfuness to the New Testament story to make it recognizable to those raised in the Christian tradition, even if most of the these viewers don't read the Bible much any more.

We all know that Gibson did not take his camera crew to downtown Jerusalem or into the little hamlet of Nazereth and surrounding parts in some kind of time-warp to produce an anti-Jewish, anti Roman clip for the evening news. Even if he had and he then produced for us all an evening two hour special, spectacle, called "the crucifixion," there would still be questions about visual manipulation and the program's service in the name of directing popular thought toward a new religious movement. New religious movements have always had trouble getting popular exposure unless they can be associated with conflict and violence, eccentricity and the bizarre, indeed, anything visually stimulating and distracting. The crucifixion might have got on the evening news for 30 seconds back then, with the chariot crash or a story about poverty in the Roman provinces.

No one would claim that Gibson's is a neutral recording of objective events. It is a construct operating from a certain point of view. It is a rhetorical argument achieved through the selection and combination of elements that both reflect and project a world, a world view, a cosmology if you like. It is achieved by certain cinematic conventions that try to erase any signs of cinematic artificiality. An ideology is promoted by linking the effect of reality to social values and institutions in such a way that these values seem natural and self-evident. In the case of Mel Gibson's work, a work that I found quite stimulating in its own way, the ideology is simply and strongly: fundamentalist Christianity.

I've never been attracted to Christianity in any of its fundamentalist forms. But I liked this film. Film can often get to people in ways that words, ideas and simple beliefs cannot. It was not because of its historical accuracy that I liked it. I liked All the Presidents Men and a number of other films based on and rooted in some historical theme. Rarely are historical films accurate; the main reason they seem so is that the people watching them know so little about the theme, the event, that it seems plausible to them. Sadly, but truly, we know so little about the events of the life of Jesus of Nazereth that a good script writer, a good cinematographer and a big, expert, band of men and women can bring something to life that may never have happened at all.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his Why I'm Not a Christian that, in a court of law, there is little evidence for even the existence of Jesus let alone his manner of death. Historicity simply does not exist when it comes to the events in the life of a man who has had a profound affect, I believe, on history. Of course, Russell says he does believe Jesus existed; he just wanted to make a point about the paucity of historical evidence. C.S Lewis would not agree, but then he was a Christian and a fine apologist for that religion.

What we believe in life and what we know usually exist in two separate worlds, although hopefully their assumptions are not totally blind. What people who are believers and what they are as knowers, so to speak, about Jesus are radically separate. The distance between the pulpit and the academic chair of religion has been widening for at least two centuries. In fact for millions of men and women these days historicity is irrelevant to their beliefs. History has become, for those millions, what it was for Henry Ford: bunk or was it bunkum? Mel, my optimistic muse would give you 4 and my pessimistic muse 2--out of five.

As a sort of epilogue to this brief comment on the film: one of the main reasons many people are turning to religions and movements like the Baha'i Faith among a host of others is that historicity is important to them. Religions that have grown up in the modern age, of course, face different problems of historicity, often too much rather than too little information and distortion by opponents and critics whose prime aim is to create dissention.

The Baha'i Faith, to stay with this example of one of the more successful New Religious Movements today, confined as it is to only 6 million adherents, has grown slowly since the mid-nineteenth century. The originating impulse for each of the major religions of history, an impulse that led to the phenomenon of revelation or some defining religious experience has receded so far into history as to be accessible to us in only a very limited and unsatisfactory degree. Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith. The details of His life are massively documented. And one could choose other claimants in modern history as well but that would lead to prolixity here.

History has a thousand faces, a thousand forms, and Mel Gibson has given us some very stimulating ones in his film ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ The secular humanists among us do not seem, on the whole, to be moved by the account. Billy Graham cried; some left the theatre; some stayed home. The movie will serve for some of the millions who watched it to bring them closer to One whom Baha'u'llah, the Baha'i Faith's founder, said "when Christ was crucified the world wept with a great weaping." Some wept again but most, it would appear from the last six months of reaction, were not concerned with the portrayal of a man who as an object of their belief.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
FOOTNOTES

1. The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, editor Marcia Pandy, The Athone Press, London, 2001.

I watched this yesterday and couldn't have been more bored. Don't rent it folks.

Too much blood for my taste, no new ideas / perspectives, super-ugly marketing, and personally I can't take seriously a Bible movie that was shot in Italy.