Word: passionate
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...often does a movie get the kind of prerelease raves that have greeted Mel Gibson's The Passion. "Could fuel hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism" (the Anti-Defamation League). "Could readily promote anti-Semitism" (Sister Mary C. Boys of New York City's Union Theological Seminary). Some critics predicted toxic damage: "Its real tinder-box effect could be abroad," wrote Frank Rich in the New York Times, "where anti-Semitism has metastasized since 9/11." In the usually sober pages of the New Republic, Paula Fredriksen, the Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University, warned, "When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson...
From the outset, The Passion--a Jesus film that underlined the story's physical and emotional violence--was bound to start arguments. For extra realism, dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (though some scholars say the Romans in Palestine spoke Greek). To accent the strangeness, there are no subtitles (that's being rethought). A $25 million film directed, co-scripted and self-financed by a famous Catholic conservative...
...Passion punch-up broke out when Gibson's father Hutton, 85, a rabid Catholic traditionalist who writes treatises on the perceived lapses of Mother Church, denied the Nazi Holocaust in the New York Times Magazine. Now Gibson should no more be blamed for the sins of the father than Arnold Schwarzenegger is. But Mel, who attends Latin Mass, is outspoken against the Vatican's reforms of the 1960s. Some say he saw The Passion as his own declaration of Catholic fundamentalism. He wanted to steamroller the new Catholic orthodoxy, not steam up a host of biblical scholars...
...have relied on grass-roots campaigns to spread the word, with mixed results. For the animated Moses film The Prince of Egypt, producer Jeffrey Katzenberg consulted hundreds of religious leaders and scholars, then made changes to placate the experts and avoid the sort of controversy that is hurting The Passion...
...acrobatics, the ball shoots everywhere, occasionally leaving the table altogether and hitting passers-by on the head. At this year's Verbier Festival in Switzerland, where audiences and performers mingle in the local bars, I found myself facing off against the Chinese boy wonder's unique brand of uncompromising passion. For the record, he lost. Then again, only two hours before, he'd played the most exciting performance of Rachmaninoff's famously challenging Piano Concerto No. 3 I'd ever attended. So he could be forgiven for letting his football skills dip. Lang Lang is already a veteran...