How are Christian films so awful?

[Della]

DIdn’t help that they made the mistake of releasing in the summer “blockebuster” season instead of the holiday season like they did with LWW and Dawn Treader

Yes, that was bad marketing on their part. Peter Jackson knows this, which is why the LOTR trilogy and the upcoming “The Hobbit: And Unexpected Journey” were all slated to come out near Christmas.

 

[MrZoom]

Of the three films in the Narnia series, IMHO Prince Caspian fares the worst on repeat viewings.

 

[coco2]

I have also noticed that some of these movies ( especially recent movies) are not well written or directed, awkwardly edited, and the acting, well…it seems like they must have an open call and no one with an acting degree auditions. Seriously, the acting is horrible. Seems like no one ( with money) but Mel Gibson is interested in making a good religious movie, but due to his personal problems, people won’t show up. I think he wanted to make a movie about Fatima, but it is now probably scrapped.

 

[patrick457]

I thought I’d just write something about movies specifically about the life of Jesus.

The act of portraying Jesus in film is in itself something that attracts controversy. People I expect are familiar with all the hoopla that surrounded certain productions like The Last Temptation of Christ or The Passion of the Christ (a few other films also had their share of controversies, like Jesus of Nazareth: Bob Jones and a few Fundamentalists protested that the film was a blasphemy, before it was even broadcast). Obviously, many of these films are made by and/or for Christians, who tend to be rather sensitive when it comes to these matters. It is Jesus Christ we’re talking about here, after all: Messiah, Son of God, second Person of the Trinity, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

Since Christian orthodoxy teaches that Jesus is God and man, naturally film-makers are at a dilemma as to how to portray Him. Showing Him as God has the risk of making Him too exalted and detached from human experience, to the point of being robotic; showing Him as man, on the other hand, risks showing Him as being too ‘vulgar’ and less special than He is supposed to be (at least, from a Christian POV). It is rather difficult to maintain a balance between the two, and no matter what one does, there will always be people who will not be pleased with the finished product. In fact, there are even a few folks who think that the life of Jesus should not be filmed at all, film of course being such an evil and depraved medium.

In fact, there was such a resistance to film portrayals of Christ in the early days of cinema that even the act of showing Jesus on film was forbidden by the British Board of Film Censors from 1912 up until the end of World War II (Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 The King of Kings had to obtain a special license to premiere; other films had scenes showing Jesus edited out of them). Also, 1930s-1950s Golden Age Hollywood came to have a sort of phobia against showing Jesus and His life overtly onscreen, due to the 1934 Production Code which required a high standard of reverence toward any depiction of Christ, thus discouraging many filmmakers into directly tackling His life (the last time Jesus can actually be seen on the theaters was in DeMille’s film; He would not make any further major appearance until the 1961 King of Kings by Nicholas Ray). And now you know the reason why the historical Hollywood epics of the 30s up to the late 50s (read: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Barabbas, etc.) are all films where Jesus can be a pivotal character but does not (have to) make any direct appearance. The art of hiding Jesus got rather creative: filmmakers literally used every opportunity they could to hide His face and sometimes, even His voice.

Both filmmakers and audiences, for a long time, seem to have had a sort of allergy towards the prospect of going by the latter ‘Jesus-as-human’ route: based on my personal observation, films who attempt to show a more humanized Jesus, with a more subdued, subtle hints of divinity and authority (or in a few extreme cases, no divinity at all), tend to receive more flak than those which go full-blown God mode.

Case in point: going back to the Jesus of Nazareth example, filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli told that the film would portray Jesus as “an ordinary man—gentle, fragile, simple”. Bob Jones III (of Bob Jones University fame) leapt to the conclusion that Zeffirelli was denying the divinity of Christ and started to spread the word that the upcoming film is ‘blasphemous’. Unlike the very vocal and public protests that accompanied The Passion of the Christ or The Last Temptation, this one did not reach to such extreme levels, though 18,000 letters of complaint were sent to General Motors, which had provided $3 million of the film’s cost, which led them to back out of their sponsorship. The funny thing here is, Sir Lew Grade (the producer, who got the idea of making the film after a meeting with Pope Paul VI) specifically ordered Zeffirelli to make the film such that it does not offend anyone. In fact, Robert Powell’s Jesus still comes off as being a rather stiff, sonorous, non-blinking (Powell’s Jesus’ signature stare is the fruit of practice and a little makeup) man who is clearly in a different world than the other characters, in good Hollywood epic tradition.

I also note with curiosity that out of all the four Gospels, the one which a number of directors choose to pick out from the most - most filmmakers tend to follow the harmonization approach and pick and choose different pericopes from different Gospels and weave them together in a single narrative - is John, where Jesus is more overt concerning His otherworldliness. By contrast, I only know of a handful of films which, say, chooses to film purely the Synoptics, especially Mark’s Gospel, which admittedly has a much lower Christology and a more flesh-and-blood Jesus compared to John, and even Matthew and Luke: and even if they did, chances are they will amplify them so that Christ still comes off as being an obvious God in the flesh (at least, to the audience ), if only to appease the audiences who would be expecting such and avoid any rotten tomatoes that might be hurled towards their direction. The situation is - fortunately IMHO - changing nowadays; people are becoming more willing to allow more leeway, and are not as up in arms at the prospect of (gasp!) a Jesus who is really 100% human, but old habits die hard.

 

[patrick457]

Now, to be honest, I find several Jesus films to fall into the categories we’re talking about. I find quite a number of them to be so obsessed with emphasizing that Jesus is a very special and unique person. The 1979 film Jesus is quite notorious in this regard, in my opinion: I find the film proper to be rather decent enough, if a bit bland, but at the end you see " and the Sinner’s Prayer bitconfess Jesus as Lord and be saved common in certain Protestant sectors. Jack T. Chick’s (yes, that Jack T. Chick) The Light of the World is a worse offender: it is literally just one long film version of his tracts, so you can pretty much guess how preachy they could get. This is of course, well and good - I don’t find anything bad in all this in essence - but I think that it would be better if filmmakers learn to be more subtle (as other posters have fail previously, subtlety is a department in which many fail miserably) and not too in-your-face about what they want to say.

I think it would be better if we actually get a film that actually shows the life of Jesus Christ: the world has had enough films of an apologetic and teaching nature. If people could make very good films about historical figures and events without turning them into some kind of overt evangelization or propaganda tool (Sergei Eisenstein, I wasn’t looking at you ), why could they also not do the same for Jesus?

This is actually why I loved Pier Paolo Pasolini’s adaptation of Matthew’s Gospel. As I said last time: it seems that because he was an unbeliever that he never had the baggage Christian filmmakers have when filming the Gospels. There was no agenda involved: Pasolini merely found Matthew’s Gospel to be very beautiful and edifying after reading the New Testament in a hotel room, and so wanted to film the story itself. To this end, he used only the dialogues of Matthew’s Gospel as his script, without any addition whatsover (this is the film’s strength and weakness: a first-time viewer who is not familiar with the plot could easily get lost), and deliberately chose to be anachronistic - he wanted to approach the story of Jesus in his own terms.

 

[Della]

Any film that depicts Jesus is going to have to deal with the fact that he was certainly 100% human and also 100% divine, and therein lies the difficulty. How do you do that without robbing one aspect of Christ to depict another?

Jesus hid himself very carefully from all but his closest disciples, only allowing his divinity to shine through as he thought necessary. The day in day out reality of being with him would naturally be quite different from sitting through a 2 hour film that has to pick and choose what will be emphasized. I don’t think it’s really possible to do the Christ full justice nor really give an audience the same experience as those who saw and heard him in the flesh.

All any filmmaker can do is his best, but with a subject like Jesus, one will never be able to completely capture his fullness. We can only get glimpses of his essence, which means the divine will always trump the natural when showing any part of his life.

 

[patrick457]

Any film that depicts Jesus is going to have to deal with the fact that he was certainly 100% human and also 100% divine, and therein lies the difficulty. How do you do that without robbing one aspect of Christ to depict another?

Jesus hid himself very carefully from all but his closest disciples, only allowing his divinity to shine through as he thought necessary. The day in day out reality of being with him would naturally be quite different from sitting through a 2 hour film that has to pick and choose what will be emphasized. I don’t think it’s really possible to do the Christ full justice nor really give an audience the same experience as those who saw and heard him in the flesh.

All any filmmaker can do is his best, but with a subject like Jesus, one will never be able to completely capture his fullness. We can only get glimpses of his essence, which means the divine will always trump the natural when showing any part of his life.

Exactly.

I should also point out that another difficulty in filming the Gospels is that their plots do not run like many movies: they do not have things like action sequences or romantic subplots, nor can one easily insert them. (This is another reason why the filmmakers of Golden Age Hollywood mainly chose to film the Old Testament - which is more easy to translate into film than the New - or deritative novels: that type of approach allows for spectacle.) Jesus is pretty much an unconventional type of main character.

There is also the episodic nature of the Synoptics and the rather ‘flat’ personalities of many characters in them. The Synoptics read very much like bald summaries of the events: we are told about what happened, but they never tell us about the whys or hows. Most of the Apostles, for instance, are mere names; we are never told why the Pharisees appear (out of nowhere, apparently) seemingly only for the sole purpose of criticizing Jesus; we do not exactly know what motivated Judas to go to the priests, or what Pilate and Caiaphas may have been thinking, or what Jesus had in His mind during the first Good Friday. (This is in contrast to John, which has a discernible chronology and who writes such that his characters have realistic, believable personalities. Again, no wonder filmmakers would choose his Gospel.)

 

[Della]

Exactly.

I should also point out that another difficulty in filming the Gospels is that their plots do not run like many movies: they do not have things like action sequences or romantic subplots, nor can one easily insert them. (This is another reason why the filmmakers of Golden Age Hollywood mainly chose to film the Old Testament - which is more easy to translate into film than the New - or deritative novels: that type of approach allows for spectacle.) Jesus is pretty much an unconventional type of main character.

There is also the episodic nature of the Synoptics and the rather ‘flat’ personalities of many characters in them. The Synoptics read very much like bald summaries of the events: we are told about what happened, but they never tell us about the whys or hows. Most of the Apostles, for instance, are mere names; we are never told why the Pharisees appear (out of nowhere, apparently) seemingly only for the sole purpose of criticizing Jesus; we do not exactly know what motivated Judas to go to the priests, or what Pilate and Caiaphas may have been thinking, or what Jesus had in His mind during the first Good Friday. (This is in contrast to John, which has a discernible chronology and who writes such that his characters have realistic, believable personalities. Again, no wonder filmmakers would choose his Gospel.)

And it’s why stories like Ben Hur, in which Jesus is hardly seen but is pivotal to a man’s life can be made, love story and all. The story of agape love is much harder to capture and to understand by most movie audiences.

 

[ringil]

I remembered another pretty good Christian movie. How about the classic Beckett starring Richard Burton. I enjoyed that one.

 

[Diotima]

Any film that depicts Jesus is going to have to deal with the fact that he was certainly 100% human and also 100% divine, and therein lies the difficulty. How do you do that without robbing one aspect of Christ to depict another?

Yes, most movies about Jesus seem to lean towards one of his natures rather than fully depicting both. Jesus of Nazareth, as Patrick points out, shows an otherworldly, unblinking Jesus. Last Temptation of Christ, which Scorsese hoped would humanize Jesus, instead attributed so many human failings to him–weakness, indecisiveness, sin (at the beginning of the film, he collaborates with the Romans), lust, hypocrisy–that he comes across, as not as a normal and sympathetic human being, but as practically subhuman.

This is why saint stories seem to fare better on film than Jesus stories.

 

[Job42]

Has nobody mentioned Bella yet? I thought that was pretty good.

As far as the Sherwood people, I have not seen anything from them since Facing the Giants which I thought was pretty bad.

 

[patrick457]

Yes, most movies about Jesus seem to lean towards one of his natures rather than fully depicting both. Jesus of Nazareth, as Patrick points out, shows an otherworldly, unblinking Jesus. Last Temptation of Christ, which Scorsese hoped would humanize Jesus, instead attributed so many human failings to him–weakness, indecisiveness, sin (at the beginning of the film, he collaborates with the Romans), lust, hypocrisy–that he comes across, as not as a normal and sympathetic human being, but as practically subhuman.

This is why saint stories seem to fare better on film than Jesus stories.

Since Zeffirelli was ordered to make the series as inoffensive as possible, the ultra-solemn Jesus may have been an attempt to play it safe.

As for The Last Temptation, I agree with you: I would say that the main flaw in its premise is that it takes a highly negative view of human nature. The film, and novel it is based on, by author Nikos Kazantzakis, is based on the idea of struggle: in this case, between the willing, superior spirit and the weak, inferior flesh. In Kazantzakis’ idea, this is something we all experience in our daily lives, but for Jesus, who is both God and man, the battle between the two sides would have reached epic proportions. For him, it is really the fact that Jesus had managed to defeat His inner demons (the ‘flesh’, His desires as a Man) and choose the higher path (the ‘spirit’, His duty as the Messiah and Son of God) that makes Him special, a role Model for men to follow. This would have been a rather interesting and promising premise IMHO, were it not for the fact that human nature (which is here equated with the ‘flesh’) is portrayed highly negatively as hopelessly depraved and base.

(As an aside, I often complain about this, but the book and the movie are best treated as two separate works, which only happen to share the same title and the same basic plot.)

 

[Justin_Swanton]

Since Zeffirelli was ordered to make the series as inoffensive as possible, the ultra-solemn Jesus may have been an attempt to play it safe.

As for The Last Temptation, I agree with you: I would say that the main flaw in its premise is that it takes a highly negative view of human nature. The film, and novel it is based on, by author Nikos Kazantzakis, is based on the idea of struggle: in this case, between the willing, superior spirit and the weak, inferior flesh. In Kazantzakis’ idea, this is something we all experience in our daily lives, but for Jesus, who is both God and man, the battle between the two sides would have reached epic proportions. For him, it is really the fact that Jesus had managed to defeat His inner demons (the ‘flesh’, His desires as a Man) and choose the higher path (the ‘spirit’, His duty as the Messiah and Son of God) that makes Him special, a role Model for men to follow. This would have been a rather interesting and promising premise IMHO, were it not for the fact that human nature (which is here equated with the ‘flesh’) is portrayed highly negatively as hopelessly depraved and base.

Keeping in mind, of course, that Christ, being free of Original sin, did not have any inner demons to defeat. The only interior battle the Gospels show him undergoing was the agony in the garden, when his purpose of will had to contend with his natural horror of death.

I’ve watched quite a few life of Christ movies (except Last Temptation) and I have never come across one that didn’t leave me with a feeling of unease with the main character. Too stiff, or too merely human, just not Christ himself.

I visualise his personality as the apex of an equilateral triangle. Movie producers have to work along the baseline: they veer between one point and the other but can never get up to where he truly is. A novel of Christ’s life would fail in the same way. I wonder if he didn’t leave earth in his bodily form for precisely that reason: he cannot really be grasped or comprehended in the flesh. One has to get to know him in the supernatural union of Faith.

 

[Diotima]

Since Zeffirelli was ordered to make the series as inoffensive as possible, the ultra-solemn Jesus may have been an attempt to play it safe.

Probably. His St. Francis sure wasn’t ultra-solemn.

The film, and novel it is based on, by author Nikos Kazantzakis, is based on the idea of struggle: in this case, between the willing, superior spirit and the weak, inferior flesh. In Kazantzakis’ idea, this is something we all experience in our daily lives, but for Jesus, who is both God and man, the battle between the two sides would have reached epic proportions. For him, it is really the fact that Jesus had managed to defeat His inner demons (the ‘flesh’, His desires as a Man) and choose the higher path (the ‘spirit’, His duty as the Messiah and Son of God) that makes Him special, a role Model for men to follow.

The movie would have been more interesting if Scorsese had actually followed this idea, but it would have been gnostic rather than Christian. (I’ve read Scorsese’s thoughts on Last Temptation, and it seems he did really intend to make an orthodox Christian movie depicting both of Jesus’ natures. But, being a lapsed Catholic, he probably wasn’t the best man for the job. He undermined his own best intentions through clever affectations, like casting Willem Defoe as Jesus because he had previously seen him play an evil character.)

 

[patrick457]

Probably. His St. Francis sure wasn’t ultra-solemn.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon - which I haven’t watched yet BTW - was made before Jesus of Nazareth after all. And he was really only hired to do the film by Lew Grade, who, as mentioned, got the idea of making a film about the life of Christ after a meeting with Pope Paul VI, who congratulated him for his Moses, the Lawgiver (Jesus of Nazareth’s more obscure and forgotten elder brother: both were made for Grade’s ITC Entertainment, were filmed by Italian directors, were written by Anthony Burgess, and feature a star cast) and asked Grade - a Russian Jew by birth, who happens to be born in December 25 - whether he is considering making a series about Jesus next.

The movie would have been more interesting if Scorsese had actually followed this idea, but it would have been gnostic rather than Christian.

I wouldn’t say that it is gnostic per se, though Kazantzakis was indeed heavily influenced by Existentialist philosophy (especially Nietzsche) and Buddhism. He was a rather tortured and spiritually restless man, and it shows in his portrayal of Jesus, which is virtually a mirror image of Kazantzakis. (Thus proving the old adage about how characterizations of Jesus tend to reflect more their authors than the Man Himself true. )

(I’ve read Scorsese’s thoughts on Last Temptation, and it seems he did really intend to make an orthodox Christian movie depicting both of Jesus’ natures. But, being a lapsed Catholic, he probably wasn’t the best man for the job.

Making a Jesus film is actually Scorsese’s childhood dream, so he really jumped into the bandwagon when given the chance to adapt the novel in the late 70s.

He undermined his own best intentions through clever affectations, like casting Willem Defoe as Jesus because he had previously seen him play an evil character.)

Defoe in the film had a few bright moments (the Sermon on the Mount and the wedding in Cana scenes for instance), but on the whole his Jesus was just too whiny and neurotic to be bearable, IMHO. And for the record, I said it in another place, and I’ll say it again: I found it hard to suspend disbelief upon seeing David Bowie (of all people) as Pilate. I was jokingly half-expecting him to sing Starman or even Magic Dance.

Now to be more serious. I think that the main flaw with Scorsese’s adaptation, is that he chooses to film the book in the naturalistic manner that has since become popular with Jesus films. The book somewhat belongs to the magic realism genre, almost something like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Here, the fantastic and the supernatural blend in with the real world (otherworldly beings who appears from time to time in the story, such as Satan, various angels, and in one brief scene, the personified spirit of the river Jordan, are as ‘real’ as the human characters), and curious, if somewhat anachronistic, references abound to things like Kazantzakis’ native and beloved Crete - as evidenced by the omnipresence of lemons - and both Jewish and Christian tradition and spirituality: in the Baptism scene, for example, John baptizes Jesus using the Eastern words of baptism minus the Trinitarian formula, and Jesus is once greeted within the ‘last temptation’ sequence with the words: “we worship your Passion, we salute your holy resurrection.” In the film adaptation, however, Scorsese and Paul Schrader (the scriptwriter) mainly chooses to go down the naturalistic route used in recent films like Jesus of Nazareth or Roberto Rossellini’s Il Messia (but with some precedents from the early days of cinema, cf. From the Manger to the Cross), where only the ‘real world’ is directly shown on screen and anything that smacks of the highly supernatural deliberately toned down, made ambiguous, or cut out altogether, though they do add some fantastical scenes of their own - such as the one where Jesus takes His heart off His chest (without any blood!) and shows it to the disciples a la the Sacred Heart - which, given the overall realist portrayal, feels really disturbing and jarring, if a bit out of place.

 

[patrick457]

Keeping in mind, of course, that Christ, being free of Original sin, did not have any inner demons to defeat. The only interior battle the Gospels show him undergoing was the agony in the garden, when his purpose of will had to contend with his natural horror of death.

I’ve watched quite a few life of Christ movies (except Last Temptation) and I have never come across one that didn’t leave me with a feeling of unease with the main character. Too stiff, or too merely human, just not Christ himself.

I visualise his personality as the apex of an equilateral triangle. Movie producers have to work along the baseline: they veer between one point and the other but can never get up to where he truly is. A novel of Christ’s life would fail in the same way. I wonder if he didn’t leave earth in his bodily form for precisely that reason: he cannot really be grasped or comprehended in the flesh. One has to get to know him in the supernatural union of Faith.

Exactly. A number of Jesus movies made in the last couple of decades fall into the “too merely human” category: the 90s was really the age of the so-called ‘buddy Christ’ films. They try so hard to make Jesus accessible, relevant and well, human ‘just like you and me’ (again, here we see a lack of subtlety - ever notice a pattern? ), that they unwittingly end up robbing Him of any authority and gravitas. Jesus is now just some nice guy with a big grin plastered all over His face, who tends to act now and again somewhat childishly by cracking some joke or playing a prank (mostly on His disciples), to the point of being crass.

 

[NeedsMercy]

I’m not a student of film, but, yeah, some of these Christian films are real stinkers: “The Robe”, “The Silver Chalice”, “Barabbas” (aaarrrggghhh!). I can’t watch “King of Kings” without thinking that “Jesus” (Jeffrey Hunter) was in the pilot episode of “Star Trek”. As far as “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” are concerned, well they’re OK (except for that chariot race - best ten minutes of film ever!). I did like “Passion of the Christ” (read the book, though – “Dolorous Passion of Our Lord” by Emmerich) “Black Robe” was great, as well as “Virgin Spring”. I remember seeing “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” when I was young and our class, en masse, was taken to a nearby theatre to see it. At the end of the movie, I looked around the theatre to find that I was the only kid not sleeping and slumped all the way down in the seat. I thought, even then, that it was very well done! There were a couple others that are worth mentioning: “Quo Vadis” (Deborah Kerr and Victor Mature? It’s got to be good!) and “Song of Bernadette” with Jennifer Jones. The latter was just a little syrupy, but very, very good. Hey, and for all you Boomers from the 70’s, how about “Jesus Christ Superstar”? Despite its obvious flaws (theology is loosey-goosey and the Jews really come off as evil “Christ Killers”), it is SO MUCH FUN!!! The best of the flower children singing and dancing!!! And the anachronisms- the bus, the tanks, the machine guns – what more can you ask!!!

 

[patrick457]

I’m not a student of film, but, yeah, some of these Christian films are real stinkers: “The Robe”, “The Silver Chalice”, “Barabbas” (aaarrrggghhh!).

From what I heard, The Silver Chalice is a rather infamous piece of work, yes. I haven’t watched any of these three films properly yet, but I will when I get some time.

I can’t watch “King of Kings” without thinking that “Jesus” (Jeffrey Hunter) was in the pilot episode of “Star Trek”.

The decision to cast Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus was rather controversial, actually. Despite his being in his early thirties at the time the film was shot, critics thought that he was too young for the role (they even called the film “I was a teenage Jesus”! ) The result? Hunter had to redub ALL of his lines in a deeper, solemn voice. Oh, and he also had to shave his chest and armpits for a reshoot of the crucifixion scene because the test screen audience did not like seeing an hirsute Jesus.

As far as “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” are concerned, well they’re OK (except for that chariot race - best ten minutes of film ever!).

The Ten Commandments, starring Chuck Heston as the noble prince turned sinless Lawgiver. For many people, it is THE Moses film: to be honest, it’s not really faithful to the Biblical accounts (the 1995 miniseries Moses starring Ben Kingsley is much better in this regard IMHO) and is so full of the mix of piety and debauchery that’s so characteristic of Mr. DeMille, but really, who can deny its massive influence?

As for Ben-Hur, I really recommend the 1925 silent version. Some elements of the film are to be honest disappointing, like the lame and ironically rather Bultmann-esque ending (“He [Jesus] will live forever in the hearts of men”…what? No resurrection?), but the chariot race - the director of the 1959 version, William Wyler, was an assistant cameraman for this scene in the 1925 film; he pays a lot of homage in his version to this one - is just as epic.

 

[patrick457]

There were a couple others that are worth mentioning: “Quo Vadis” (Deborah Kerr and Victor Mature? It’s got to be good!) and “Song of Bernadette” with Jennifer Jones. The latter was just a little syrupy, but very, very good.

Peter Ustinov’s Nero FTW.

Hey, and for all you Boomers from the 70’s, how about “Jesus Christ Superstar”? Despite its obvious flaws (theology is loosey-goosey and the Jews really come off as evil “Christ Killers”), it is SO MUCH FUN!!! The best of the flower children singing and dancing!!! And the anachronisms- the bus, the tanks, the machine guns 口 what more can you ask!!!

I’m not a boomer - I was born way after that generation - but I also have the 1973 JCS in my list of favorites. It hasn’t aged really well, but personally I think it is in some ways superior to the new 2000 film version. Both Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson (Jesus and Judas) were really great vocally. Ted hitting that high note in Gethsemane, that montage of paintings of the Crucifixion…really mindblowing. Sure, from a Catholic lens it is rather off theologically in a few places, and the ‘villains’ are one-dimensional (which does bring up the charge of Anti-Semitism - another issue which the various retellings of the Jesus story must struggle with), and some people simply loathe it, but yeah.

 

[patrick457]

Sorry for posting again, but over at the Curt Jester: Why Christian produced movies suck.