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October 31, 2005
Catholics in Hollywood
Clayton Emmer's your man...first, with this new blog detailing the RCIA program he's facilitating (that, I believe, Barb Nicolosi began..right?). Then, with this podcast of a talk Barb gave on "Artists and Sacraments" recently.
And, on a couple more film notes:
Peter Chattaway on a documentary coming next spring:
Will The Passion of the Christ (2004) become the annual Easter event that some predicted? Maybe not, but then again, maybe, sort of. The original film raked in heaps of money at the box office two Easters ago, and then The Passion Recut flopped earlier this year. But the fun isn't over yet! IndieWIRE reports that, next Easter, THINKFilm will release The Big Question -- a documentary shot on the set of The Passion -- across North America.
Peter also links to a news article on Gibson's new Mayan film...
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Comments
Gibson said the story would be told through the eyes of a Mayan man, his family and village, and would touch on universal themes about "civilizations and what undermines them"
Early prediction: the Mayan movie will contain a veiled pro-life theme. I believe last year Mel Gibson was quoted on California's Prop 71 saying that one of the first signs of the decline of a civilization is when the people start to sacrifice their children.
Posted by: LP at Oct 31, 2005 11:21:17 PM
I heard that Mel actually believes in the Mayan calendar stuff, which predicts the end times in three years...
Posted by: Clayton at Nov 1, 2005 1:27:24 AM
Doubt it.
From the article again: "But it's not a big doomsday picture or anything like that.
Posted by: LP at Nov 1, 2005 7:40:21 AM
I wonder if he's riffing on the legend of Quetzal (sp?), a legendary warlord or king who ruled with justice and forbade human sacrifice to the gods, only to be struck down by them in revenge (the later MezoAmerican cultures, less humane in their rituals, apparently preserved it as a cautionary tale against hubris). Quetzal was sometimes conflated with the deity Quetzecoatl, and it was apparently Quetzal that Cortes was taken for a reincarnation/returned version of.
Posted by: derringdo at Nov 1, 2005 10:58:15 AM
If Gibson pulls this off like he did The Passion, it should be very interesting. The entirely Mayan dialogue (another similarity to the Aramaic The Passion) will probably relegate it to an art-film, but it sounds like it could be a really interesting art film.
The only ancient Mayan-based movies I've ever run across were Hollywoodized sword-and-sorcery flicks; one with the same sense of versimilitude of The Passion would be quite an achievement -- even more so if it actually gets good box office.
Do you think Gibson might start a trend of grittly-accurate historical flicks?
Posted by: Ken at Nov 1, 2005 12:22:31 PM
Ken: I would love, love, love that to be the case-my reaction about halfway through Passion, when the High Latin and the Vulgar and the Aramaic were all flying around was; "WOOOHOO! Why can't all historical epics be like this?" Meticulously staged movies in archaic languages would be a darned good thing: squeeze some of the useless-airhead-eye-candy "actors" of both genders out of work, force directors to do a better job of telling their stories visually, and acclimate the public to subtitles. It's a polish! It's a dessert topping!
Seriously though, I have an awful feeling that this one's gonna tank. And not just because the working title is uh, wrongheaded, or Mel is nuts, though both of those propositions are indubitably true.
Posted by: derringdo at Nov 1, 2005 12:36:51 PM
Seriously though, I have an awful feeling that this one's gonna tank. And not just because the working title is uh, wrongheaded, or Mel is nuts, though both of those propositions are indubitably true.
At least he's GLORIOUSLY nuts. Sometimes the nuttiness is itself an art form.
And the secondary strangness it can bring:
The Passion got ballyhooed throughout the Christian community as An Evangelical Tool instead of an Art film. (But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) There were a few News of the Weird side effects, primarily chronicled by the Totem to Temple blog:
1) A lot of churches bought out whole screenings, to the point that at least one cinema chain had to stop giving out group tickets so other-than-church-groups could get in to see it. (They had to keep turning people away as "sold out" while the constant convoys of church buses kept pulling up for every sold-out screening.)
2) There was some fear that Christian audiences would turn the screenings into revival meetings with mid-screening Pentecostal antics, but this fear proved unfounded -- the power of The Passion put a baseball bat up side their heads before they could start with the tongues or praise choruses.
3) Urban legend was that at one Texas screening, the closing credits got pre-empted by a couple (very clueless) preachers coming out on stage for an altar-call salvation sermon while the audience was most vulnerable. I think as they started preaching, the shocked audience starting throwing things at them.
4) And in another urban legend, one Pentecostal splinter-church that taught all movies were Satanic made an exception for The Passion. With a twist -- they screened a bootleg of it during their services so as not to put any money into Godless Hollywood. (But what about putting money into video piracy?)
Posted by: Ken at Nov 1, 2005 3:13:44 PM
When my Mom went to see "The Passion" the previous show had been filled by a local black evangelical congregation, the minister of which proceeded to give a post-show unscheduled sermon of about 40mins duration, holding up the next showing.
I understand that Gibson's latest planned project is a film adaptation of "Under and Alone", a depiction of the infiltration of a violent motorcycle gang by an ATF agent. The senseless, drug-fueled violence described in the book could be the basis for a powerful pro-life message if spun right.
Posted by: Al DelG at Nov 1, 2005 3:48:49 PM
When my Mom went to see "The Passion" the previous show had been filled by a local black evangelical congregation, the minister of which proceeded to give a post-show unscheduled sermon of about 40mins duration, holding up the next showing.
I think that comes under heading (3) above -- seriously clueless preachers. (You know, if somebody were to write that into a novel, nobody would believe it -- too off-the-wall to be plausible.) People DO weird things like that -- as one of the Whole Earth Catalogs put it, "People are people and the world is full of tricks and twistiness yet undreamed of."
Posted by: Ken at Nov 1, 2005 6:43:41 PM
