Author: greg

If the story in Mel Gibson’s The Passion sounds vaguely familiar, you won’t be surprised by the revelations in Franklin Foer’s article in the Times today. It apparently comes from a 1979 Warner Bros. movie called Jesus. [o Hollywood, remakes are like manna from heaven.] “JESUS” (the movie) has developed something of a cult following [sic].
Thanks to 300 earnest evangelicals at the Jesus Film Project who have translated it into 848 languages, and thousands of projector-and-generator-toting missionary/exhibitors who circle the globe, “JESUS” has become the centerpiece of a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style filmic conversion experience, albeit one where bread and wine replaces flying toast.
The distributor and original producer, Campus Crusade for Christ, claims that over 3 billion people have seen the movie. For those living in remote Andean and African villages, it was often the first film they’d ever seen. Foer points to Bro. Brian Helstrom’s unsubtly symbolic story of a screening in South Africa:

“‘You could see them physically jump back at the sight of the serpent tempting Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘When soldiers whip Jesus, you could hear grown adults crying.’ After Jesus’s death, but before his resurrection, a black South African missionary told the crowd that they had a chance to pray and to accept Christ. ‘He asked everybody who prayed to walk forward and come into light,’ Mr. Helstrom says. ‘One hundred forty-five people walked out of the darkness into light.'”

And within months, missionaries from the Church of Loew’s set up the bush country’s first multiplex, making it possible for Charlie’s Angels II: Full Throttle to be screened 35 times a day. Hallelujah.
I’m somewhere between troubled and pissed that film experience is so uncritically substituted for (or equated with) religious experience. There’s some serious bill of goods-selling going on here. When I was a missionary (for another demonination) in Japan, I ran across people whose names were on the Church baptism rolls but who had no interest in being Christian at all, any more than eating at a Mongolian BBQ would make them want to be Mongolian. Turns out that ten years earlier, some missionaries with more zeal than sense decided to overcome Japanese teenagers’ general religious apathy by starting a baseball league. After a season or two, they’d help out their cool American friends and climb into that pool there, and…well, what are friends for? Conversion may be embracing and emotionally powerful, but friendship ain’t religion, and neither is a tear-jerking movie.
I wonder, what does the Bible teach us on this subject? There’s the “render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s” thing, which should put the kibbosh on selling cheap, emotionally manipulative cinematic hat tricks based on techonological superiority as salvation. [Unrelated: I can totally picture Mel having a “render unto Caesar his points against the gross” clause in his distribution contract, btw.] But I have another verse in mind: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” or as they say in the picture business, “what else has he done?”
Jesus, it turns out, was an adaptation, or as its opening credits describe it, a “documentary taken entirely from the Gospel of Luke.” But Luke lost his story credit [Luke, baby, you need new representation. C-A-L-L M-E. -ed.] to Barnet Bain, who has gone on to produce such dubious religious schlock as The Apocalypse (starring Sandra Bernhard??) and the eternally punishing Robin Williams CG-hellfest, What Dreams May Come. Decidedly not funny.
Co-director Peter Sykes has even more to answer for at judgment day (not to be confused with T2: Judgment Day, which rocks. Somebody say amen!). Before turning to Jesus (The Movie) Sykes made, um, let me get this straight: Tell Me Lies, Demons of the Mind, and, um, Child of Satan. I mean, I know the well need no physician, but what in hell [sic] was the Campus Crusader behind the project thinking to hire this guy? And where exactly did they meet?
So Campus Crusade is the world’s biggest film distributor, the unsung McDonald’s of global evangelism–with over 3 billion saved–and Mel’s set to open his Passion on 2,500 screens. Whatever. As The Man Himself (verily) says (un)to us, “they have their reward.”

David Foster Wallace parody contest finalists. [via Kottke]
Not enough for you? Just buy Infinite Jest. Hint: the used copies haven’t been opened beyond page 25. They were on the coffee table, not the nightstand.

Xu Bing, a Chinese artist whose frequently subtle engagement with opacity I admire, has installed a piece at Artes Mundi, an exhibition at the National Museum in Wales, made of dust the artist collected on September 11th in lower Manhattan.
Xu scattered the dust across the gallery floor and wrote a Zen poem in it with his finger,
“As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust collect itself?”
Several years ago at P.S. 1, Xu placed a giant vase of mulberry branches in the lobby, which were eaten by silkworms, whose cocoons gradually replaced the leaves.
Artes Mundi opens Saturday, (as) if you’re in Cardiff. They’re giving a big prize in order to get press coverage. Read Maev Kennedy’s profile of Xu in the Guardian .

Dramatis Personae: Blacktable, a website of a certain age; Gawker, who witnessed the event.
Setting: Writers hilariously mourn the recent decline of the New York Times‘ Monday write-in feature, Metropolitan Diary by imagining cute crosstown bus encounters that didn’t make it past the Diary’s new editors. [note: any similarities of to these anecdotes last year’s “Adam Gopnik’s Metropolitan Diary“ are purely due to the utter predictability of the MD format.]
The anecdotes I submitted to MD (both of which were published–Choire take note–for a fee of zero dollars per word) were written to highlight my own sophistication and cultural superiority in a suitably oblique way (e.g., “…As the exasperated waiter came out of the Carlyle dining room…” and “…where I overheard two Italians conversing about…”). The one time I recognized myself in someone else’s submission, I was making smartass comments on Canal about buying street turtles.

Film critics David Edelstein and A. O. Scott take time–and wordcount–off from reviewing films to discuss books. Books about films. By critics. J. Hoberman’s The Dream Life, a political/cultural history of film in the 60’s and 70’s and Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, a bitchstory of independent film in the 90’s.

How many times have you replayed the Richard Pryor movie, Brewster’s Millions, in your head and said, “I could spend $30 million in 30 days and have nothing to show for it, what’s the big deal?” Not counting P Diddy’s entire, hapless, yacht-renting existence, Howard Dean is the only person I can think of who’s actually done it. He’s a veritable Doctor of Spendology.

In addition to what I wrote on Gothamist,

1. Do these nominees follow the Zapf Zipf distribution? It seems like they’re either mega-blockbusters or tiny independent films. Granted, many so-called “indie” films are made by the studio-owned mini-majors, aka Dependents, but still.
2. I’m burning through like $10/day on Google ads for people who misspell Sofia Coppola. She’s now famous enough to have her name spelled correctly. I’m sure the kids from Spellbound would agree, if they weren’t all in some rehab program for washed up child stars.
3. Is Cold Mountain the first movie edited with Final Cut Pro to be nominated for Best Editing?

I would add a big 4. There is no Elephant is this room. That’s more than a Punch-Drunk Love-level snub. I think Gus Van Sant has completely replenished his indie cred. [1/31 update: The Observer‘s Philip French clearly doesn’t vote in the Academy; he calls Elephant “a chilling tour de force.”]