Word: gospeller
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW...
...Gibson has snorted his derision over the two earlier Jesus films that have earned the most sustained critical acclaim. Asked a year ago by TIME correspondent Jeff Israeli for an analysis Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Il Vangelo secundo Matteo," (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) he faked a big yawn. Of Martin's Scorsese's "Last Temptation," he said, "You've got Harvey Keitel as Judas saying" - and here Gibson shifted into a Brooklyn accent - "Hey, you ovah dere." Maybe his was just dissing his strongest competition. He knew that these films were closest to his, in setting, rigor, power...
...Seen when it opened, the Pasolini film was a tonic shock: a low-budget black-and-white pastoral Christian film, worlds removed from the elephantine variety of Hollywood's Biblical epics, made by an atheist Marxist homosexual. "The Gospel" seemed stranger in light of Pasolini's later work, which grew more sensational, culminating in the 1977 "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom," which transposed de Sade to the Nazi...
...Pasolini said he responded to the literary brilliance and narrative propulsion of the Matthew gospel. He made the film, in part, to show that the greatest story ever told was, among other things, a great story. His dark-haired, dark-eyed, unibrowed Jesus (played by Enrique Irazoqui, a Basque Jew who, like the other performers, was not a professional actor) spits out the parables and prophesies with a brisk ferocity, like a union organizer with a spiel to finish before the end of the lunch break. He is testy with his inquisitors and abrupt with his Apostles...
...Christ, that Gibson said he removed from his film. (Turned out, he removed only the subtitle for the Aramaic translation of the curse.) We leave for another day the debate over whether a film is anti-Jewish if it repeats a line swathed in 18 to 20 centuries of Gospel tradition. Anyway, in the Pasolini film, with Italians chasing Italians, the curse seems one not of race or religion but of clan. Besides, Pasolini, a poet before he was a filmmaker, would be unlikely to excise a controversial line from a text he felt bound to honor...