Word: mel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Director Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ represents the teachings of Jesus through a gore-drenched recreation of the final twelve hours before his death. Here, the son of God is a wholly human figure, and Gibson constantly reminds his audience of this with an unceasing depiction of shredded flesh and spattered blood. The effect is alternately piercing and numbing. Nevertheless, Gibson eventually succeeds in overwhelming his audience with the kind of potent visual poignancy unseen in his previous directorial work. The telling of the story is equally effective, as screenwriters Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald (Wise...
There are three fatal flaws that damage Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ for nonbelievers: almost no characterization or narrative, a spectacularly large amount of violence and almost all of the Jews are evil Christ-killers. In Gibson’s mania to present the extent of Jesus’ suffering, character is lost, and by the end of the film, Jesus begins to resemble a piñata more than a man. The effect is that it is hard to understand quite what the point of all this is. It is never clear...
...this happened, of course, the same week that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was sweeping its way towards a 10-day, $200 million gross at the U.S. box office...
...People don’t believe in heroes anymore,” Roger Ward whispers to Mel Gibson in the climactic scene of the 1979 shoot-’em-up epic Mad Max. Strangely enough, twenty-five years later, the king of blockbusters is still making R-rated epics about the bloody trials of troubled heroes. But now, Gibson has traded the race car for the cross...
This dispiriting experience was not merely a failure of Mel Gibson's art, but it also seemed to be evidence of a growing American affliction: we are addicted to the explicit and then quickly inured to it. We are in need of ever more shocking images to stimulate our attention, impervious to nuance or subtlety. There are political implications to this. Democracy isn't easy in such an environment. "The things that shock are the things that get through," says John DiIulio, former director of the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "Meanwhile, serious consideration...