Word: gibsonized
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...Minutes this week. The Almighty roused Mr. Eyebrows from the slumber of the senescent and confided, "Mel is a real nut case. What in the world was I thinking when I created him? Listen, we all make mistakes." Then Rooney had a question of his own for Gibson: "How many million dollars does it look as if you're going to make off the crucifixion of Christ...
...Bart Simpson would say, that's funny for so many reasons. Only a few weeks ago, movie insiders were confidently predicting that Gibson would lose his hairshirt over this movie-the $30 million of his own money it took to produce, plus another bundle for prints and advertising. Now that the film has registered the highest opening-day midweek gross of any non-sequel in North American box office history, Gibson's supposed to be a panderer, pimping Christ's suffering to audiences who didn't realize they needed to see their personal Redeemer get scourged for the longer part...
...Wednesday, PBS' Charlie Rose convened a panel of savants to hash out the controversy of the film's purported anti-Semitism and Gibson's provocative and defensive public statements. A hash some of them made of it. Leading the attack, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens appropriated rhetorical tactics employed by both political fringes. Like some segments of the Christian right when Last Temptation and Dogma came out, he called for a boycott of a film he apparently had not seen. And he exhumed that favorite old pejorative of the Bolsheviks, fascist: he said the movie is "quite distinctly fascist...
...Donning canonical robes, Hitchens found Gibson in violation of canon law. Hitchens declared that "He specifically rejects the findings of the Second Vatican Council," which absolved Jews of culpability in Jesus' death. But the Council "found" a lot of things; what Gibson disputed was not the resolution of the Jewish question but, for example, the abrupt shift in the Liturgy from Latin to the the faithful's own modern language. Another panelist, Newsweek's Jon Meacham, added the observation that "The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued pastoral guidelines about how believers should dramatize the Passion ... almost every...
...Plenty of commentators have criticized Gibson's defense-cum-promotion of The Passion as meso-Messianic. When he declines to denounce his father Hunter, an extreme religious and political right-winger who has in articles and interviews come close to denying the Nazi holocaust, Mad Mel is supposedly seeing himself as the suffering Jesus and his dad as God the Father-He who demands the ultimate sacrifice, He who must be obeyed. Mel has also sounded addled, even paranoid, when he said that making this movie was putting his career on the line. But, as the saying goes, just because...