Word: madness
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...plot was the nightmare and revenge fantasy of a boy forced to take piano lessons under the stern eye of Dr. Terwilliker, whose mad ambition (in the boy's dream) is to have 500 boys play a piece of his at the world's largest piano. The project was a nightmare for Geisel, too. "Hollywood is not suited for me," he said when it was over, "and I am not suited for it." He rebelled, futilely, when Kramer insisted that a love interest be added to Geisel's. Geisel hated all the compromises of a studio production, the sapping...
...movie is also daring in its extravagant (though seemingly not expensive) sets by Rudolph Sternad, who designed 23 films for Kramer, from "Champion" in 1949 to "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" in 1963. Sternad worked from Seuss sketches to devise rolling, arid science fiction landscapes, ladders that stretch to the sky, gilded bedrooms and grotty dungeons and, for the 500 boys to play at the climax, a gigantic two-tiered piano with 44,000 keys. Seuss peopled these vast, forbidding vistas with characters from his own teeming imagination (and his old notebooks): hulking sentries, their skin painted...
Gibson has often played heroes like this. In his starmaking Mad Max films he was the postapocalyptic angry young man. In Conspiracy Theory he spouted eccentric political and religious scenarios ("Somebody's got to lift the festering scab that is the Vatican," he barks at two startled nuns in his taxi), one of which, when it turns out to be true, earned him a death sentence from today's Sanhedrin, the CIA. In Signs, the Gibson character saw alien creatures attacking his family; The Passion's Jesus sees Satan everywhere, clouding men's minds, taking the form of snakes...
...this exactly a date movie. No, the audience profile for The Passion of the Christ is fairly narrow: true believers with cast-iron stomachs; people who can stand to be grossed out as they are edified. And a few movie critics who can't help admiring Mad Mel for the spiritual compulsion that drove him to invent a new genre--the religious splatter-art film--and bring it to searing life, death and resurrection...
...town of South Park, four nine-year-old boys delve into eschatology nearly as much as scatology. Jesus Christ is a palpable presence in South Park - not surprising, since he lives there and hosts a cable access talk show ("Jesus and Pals"). A good and mild man in a mad and wild world, Jesus has fought a championship boxing match with Satan (episode 108), attempted to calm Millennium jitters at a Las Vegas concert with Rod Stewart (episode 316), and battled evil cult-magician David Blaine with the help of his Super Best Friends Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, Krishna...