Jesus of Nazareth
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anne Bancroft, James Mason, Laurence Olivier, Olivia Hussey, Robert PowellBrand: Lions Gate
Producer: Bernard J. Kingham
Producer: Dyson Lovell
Producer: Lew Grade
Producer: Tarak Ben Ammar
Writer: Anthony Burgess
Writer: David Butler
Writer: Franco Zeffirelli
Writer: Suso Cecchi D'Amico
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Digital Sound, Full Screen, NTSC, Surround Sound
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 382 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-03-01
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Lions Gate
Product features:
- Jesus of Nazareth
Movie Reviews of Jesus of Nazareth
Movie Review: What A Bunch Of Beardos.
Summary: 5 Stars
Not making any friends here.
I don't expect to get too many positive votes for this review simply because I am an atheist who wears his atheism on his sleeve. Though I think that this film is absolutely great, I don't want any part of religious faith because of evidence. I just don't see any well documented reason to believe in God. The more we learn about the natural world around us, the more absurd the biblical account of human existence becomes. Even with something as basic as the age of our planet, Christianity is so far off base with their 6,000 year old world story, that it would be like saying that the distance from NY City to San Francisco is just 22 and 1/2 feet. Religious faith is completely divisive, it discourages independent thought, thrives in unsolved mystery, and avoids any and all examination of facts. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the powers of institutions, institutions that pop up on every street corner since the invisible product is free enterprise. Religious faith makes a virtue out of not thinking. It tells us that if we can retain our faith against the evidence, against the teeth of reality, the more virtuous we supposedly become. It is a backward belief system that reason must challenge since religious faith has such a negative power of making perfectly rational people do such destructively irrational things. I find the notion of believing in an invisible space God and the twisted tales about him that where written by ancient crusty desert nomads to be morally dubious at best, and intellectually poisonous to say the least. The way I see it, we are all atheist about most of the Gods that societies have ever invented and believed in, I just happen to go one God further.
This brings me to Jesus of Nazareth, a film that tries to take the most widely considered gospel account on the life of Christ and display it nakedly upon the screen for all to see. Being that I am an atheist, I have a rather distinct advantage over a believer when it comes to viewing this material. I am after all, unfettered with any personal desire to impose my own spiritual aspirations upon this particular story. This means that I won't be getting my undies in a bunch over which inadequate mere mortal actor gets to play the part of the lord, or whether or not the director is focusing on way too many side stories and not just that of Christ himself. Instead, I see this movie for what it is, an impressively vast ensemble piece adapted with surprisingly effective skill for the cinema. I see the sum of all the parts and can focus on performances and scenes exactly the same way that one of the actors in this film would. For me, Jesus of Nazareth is like seeing a really enjoyable play full of bearded men acting like raving lunatics about something that they can not even see or touch. Since the goal of this movie is to make the viewer identify with the various characters throughout the story, this odd behavior stands out even more to me when I try to place it into my own perception of normality. In this review, I will be making a few brash observations fallowed by a few closing remarks. Hopefull some of you will find this approach as humorous as I do.
Joe Blow.
Here we have a man in Joseph who is a real stand up guy. This is the type of person who would have great credit and not so much as a traffic ticket on his driving record. He would be the ideal citizen and the perfect neighbor. Yet, he is getting married to this rather odd chick named Mary who's special behavior has even caused some of the local men in the village to actually say something to Joseph about her prior to the wedding date. Still, being the decent chap that he is, he sticks to his promises anyway. Then Mary starts talking to the morning sunlight as it comes into her bedroom window. When next she sees Joseph, she cavalierly lets him know that a celestial being has impregnated her. Ouch! Yet, racked with guilt, he marries her anyway. Only now, this mysterious pregnancy has caused strange men from strange lands, wearing even stranger costumes to search out his estranged family. They too start to behave in a very strange way. Worse still, his very own king, Herod The Great, gets wind of these distant travelers, freaks out, and flippantly orders the slaughter of every male toddler in the country. Talk about a real bummer. Poor wishy washy Joe has to round up his wacky wife and illegitimate child and flee the country for the next half a decade. I wondered out lout at this point if Joseph was cursing the day that he ever laid eyes on crazy Mary.
It was at this point in the story that I was attempting to look on the bright side just to help poor old Joe out. At least Olivia Hussey who plays crazy Mary is smoking hot. Sure, every time that she opens her mouth she annoyingly rolls various vowel groups and consonants with a vocal pattern awash with anguish. I guess she thinks that she is the female John The Baptist or something, but at the very least, she sure looks hot when she is talking this way. Still, I would even feel a bit worried about how she might age if I where Joseph, becuase the actress that was picked to play Mary's mother looked a bit too much like John Houseman. Would the future Mary also have bulldog jowls and a hook nose full of protruding inch long nostral hair? Is Mary's current hotness even enough to overlook all her other constantly accumulating flaws? And what in the world happened to Donald Pleasence's beard?
Lorenzo Monet was the actor that was chosen to play the 12 year old Jesus. Talk about a freak show! This kid is more ghastly then a thousand ghouls. He was chosen for the part because of his pale blue eyes and fair colored lambs wool hair, but in all honesty, the entire horror movie community should have been backhanded with a phone book across the face for not using this evil looking child monster in at least half a dozen Omen spin offs. Deity and Demonic are a bit too closely linked if you ask me.
So now we come to Old Joe's reward for a life time of servitude to God while raising his bastard son. Was he to be given a brand new set of golf clubs and a retirement villa in the Florida Keys for being such a good sport about things? Guess again. You see, good old Joe Blow now has to drop dead. Supposedly, and as far as I can figure, it is because a grown Jesus on a mission can't possibly have two fathers at the same time. Maybe God should of offered to drop dead for at least a little while just so that Joe could enjoy a few of his golden years. I guess this only goes to show that some old sayings are indeed true...Nice guys do finish last.
Who Invited Jesus.
During the six and a half hour long film, Jesus performs various miracles. It's a great ploy for the director too, because he can utilize many different key dramatic techniques. Most of these consist of having amazed people staring back in awe at the miracle worker as they are lead away in an absolute dumbfounded daze. It really is some very satisfying stuff to see cinematically. Yet during the possession scene, I was struck by a thought. I have lived for nearly half a decade now, yet I have never been in any gathering where a possessed person just suddenly pops out of the woodwork foaming at the mouth and climbing up the wall paper. I am also a movie nut, and can vouch that outside of a minuscule subgenre of the horror industry, I have also never witnessed a single possessed person make an unannounced appearance in any other kind of film...Must be a very rare phenomenon indeed. Yet, if you take the gospel accounts of Jesus as true, then every where he went, possessed people where coming up to him all the time like a pestilence. I don't know about you, but I don't think I would invite Jesus to one of my gatherings. One of his posessed pals would probably show up unannounced and ruin the party by spilling all my guests drinks.
Beatnik Bashing.
If you have a cool manicured beard with little or no mustache hair in this film, then you are an irredeemable beatnik wannabe in the eyes of the lord. There are only two such people sporting this kind of beard style in this film, one is the rich chap who is like trying to thread a camel through the eye of a needle, the other is Herod Antipas played by Christopher Plummer. Yet, not even God could touch the high style of Herod Antipas.
Not only does Christopher Plummer have one awesome looking beard, but he gets to wear all the coolest king robes while being carried around in his super sweet ride by his posse. While he's kicking it in his luxurious cherry ride full of pillows and drapes, he gets to mack like a real player on his own brothers wife Herodias. He even has his own theme music in the form of a traveling Roman brass band. Style points aside, the moral here is that it is not cool in the eyes of the lord to be a finger snapping daddy-O in this film. If you're going to be sporting a beard then you best not trim the sucker, because beatniks are out, and hippies are in.
I saw the face of Olivia Hussey in my grilled cheese sandwich...But I ate it anyway.
Despite the fact that Olivia Hussey and Michael York both must of gone to the same "Ham it Up" school of acting, this giant cinematic opus is still a testimony for great acting performances. Though it is hard for me not to picture Robert Powell as DR Martin in the 1972 film Asylum, his performance as Jesus is nothing short of remarkable. I have a feeling that it was the director Franco Zeffirelli who chose to have Robert Powell remain so still during so many of his scenes. I think he did this to accentuate the fact that Robert Powell looked more like Jesus then Jesus himself. Nonetheless, this stillness on Robert Powell's part made for a very striking juxtaposition when compared to his "Woe to you Scribes and Pharisees" tirade. Melodramatic though it might be, it still comes off as an all out acting tour de force. Rod Steiger's portrayal of Pontius Pilate is also interesting in that he clearly resembles an over worked angry inner city traffic court judge. A choice that worked like gangbusters in his only scenes. Equally effective was Anne Bancroft's portrayal of Mary Magdalene. It is especially heart breaking and supplied a much needed feminine tone to this story of wandering nomadic men. Yet, it is Ian Holm who impressed me most of all. Not only is it a delight to see him sporting a full thick black beard, but he is also spectacularly scary as Zerah of the Sanhedrin. Full of back handed intelligence and scheming politics, he embodies a person that is just simmering with sinister intentions and bad vibes. Not exactly a man I would ever want to have a beer with.
My favorite thematic choice in this entire epic was the fact that the supernatural occurrences that riddle this story with improbability where shown in such an ordinary light. Some of them, like the immaculate conception and the actual resurrection itself seemed entirely void of any mythical connotation whatsoever. I especially enjoyed the way in which Mary Magdalene had to argue her way just to convince the skeptical disciples that she had supposedly seen Jesus alive after his death. It took Simon Peter's decision to believe her story as fact without any proof at all for the rest of the disciples to willingly go along with it. This to me is the very key to Christianity, and why I don't believe in it. We arrogantly make ourselves out to be the focal point of the universe rather then just accepting that reality is random, and that the vastness of the solar system is indifferent to us. Any story about extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence, yet religion can only give us extraordinary excuses. The gospel story of Jesus is one that hinges on special status outside of science and evidence which can not be proven, but isn't all superstition just an act of detecting patterns where none exist? I'd much rather look at the world through the rigors of logical observation and evidence through reason. I choose to be free of superstition and dogma so that I can base my knowledge of existence on actual evidence. There is simply no way that I can digest the idea that 2,000 years ago, a space God decided it was time to be born as a man just so he can die for my sins. I also can't digest the notion that my acceptance into the good place is based entirely on believing this as a fact without a shread of evidence. To be perfectly honest, I don't even find the good place to be good for me anyway. I don't want to hear a sermon, and in fact, I find biblical writing to be extremely distasteful. In short, heaven is not my idea of heaven. The real clincher is that if I don't believe in all this without any proof, then I will burn forever in a lake of fire. The gospel story is a pretty one to watch on screen, so much so, that even an atheist like me can enjoy it, but as an ultimate truth, what conclusion can a rational person come to except for barking mad?
Summary of Jesus of Nazareth
Beginning before the Nativity and extending through the Crucifixion and Resurrection Jesus Of Nazareth brings to life all the majesty and sweeping drama of the life of Jesus (portrayed here by Robert Powell) as told in the Gospels. A star studded international cast featuring Michael York Sir Laurence Olivier James Earl Jones Anne Bancroft Olivia Hussey Rod Steiger and Anthony Quinn adds depth and humanity to the roles of the saints sinners and ordinary people who walked in the footsteps of the Lord. The film provides the setting and background for the birth childhood baptism teaching and many miracles of the Messiah culminating in the Divine Resurrection. Directed by Oscar nominee Franco Zeffirelli and acclaimed by critics and religious leaders worldwide Jesus of Nazareth tells the greatest of all stories with tremendous emotion and splendor.System Requirements: Running Time 382 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 012236128113 Manufacturer No: A012811Similar DVD Movies
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