Word: filming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hand doeth. The studio is distributing Monty Python's Life of Brian, the British comedy troupe's send-up of the Gospels that is widely condemned as blasphemous by Christians and Jews alike. But almost simultaneously, it is releasing another movie that will please the pious. This film, titled simply Jesus, is calculated to appeal to the most ardent biblical purists: all the action and virtually all the words spoken by the actors and off-screen Narrator Alexander Scourby are taken straight from the Gospel of Luke...
...Jesus is not so much a movie as a religious documentary drama, which is its weakness as well as its strength. Since the Gospels are basically collections of episodes that were set down for inspiration and information, a film that follows them faithfully cannot help jumping from event to event without much narrative flow. However, the movie is also mercifully spared the hype that commercial film makers usually inflict on biographies of Christ, as in Nicholas Ray's 1961 remake of Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic King of Kings and George Stevens' overwrought 1965 The Greatest...
...film's British producer, John Heyman (The Go-Between), who comes from a Jewish background, decribes Je sus as not a conventional "movie movie" but a "translation" of the Gospel into a new medium. Jesus is not church-basement fare, however. It was produced on a sizable budget ($6 million) with a cast that includes more than 5,000 extras, and meticulous attention to authenticity. All the filming was done in the Holy Land, and a Sanhedrin of Bible scholars and other experts was consulted on costumes, sets and historical sites. The film deals frankly with the signs...
Bertolucci makes incest deadly by simply skirting the whole issue for most of the film. Caterina (Jill Clayburgh) is an American diva with an obnoxious, teen-aged son (Matthew Barry) and a pathetic, ancient husband who's efficiently knocked off in the opening sequence. Dad dead, it's off to sunny Italy for Caterina and Joey. The obligatory opening night sequence is filled with lots of American extras running about trying to look Italian by wildly gesticulating and screaming 'Brava, Brava.' Bertolucci also drags out an antiquated collection of cliches about opera and its fans. His women parade about...
...writhing about fully clothed, displaying to full advantage a mere pair of skinny legs. No sexual tension or even desire ever builds up between the two. The two moments of sexual activity occur for no apparent reason; Bertolucci never integrates this incest into the broader context of film. The only truly startling moment in the film occurs when Joey plunges a for into his arm. That's shocking. The single men who came with hats over their laps were sorely disappointed; Luna is not soft-core porn for the artsy...