Mike Leary on Mary

My friend Mike Leary has written a great review of Abel Ferrara's Mary, where, amongst other things, he gives more specific references for the quotations from the Gospel of Mary than my own scene analysis. Here's a brief sample, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Mary is likewise burdened by Ferrara’s "messiness," but this time that messiness works with the grain of his characters in a realistic scramble for faith and redemption. Faith is messy, the search for the historical Jesus is messy, and fortunately, so is Ferrara’s film.

BBC's Passion DVD Release

Region: 2 (PAL)

Number of discs: 2

Classification: 15

Studio: Acorn Media

Release Date: Oct 2008

Run Time: 180 minutes

Having given the Bible Society's release of this film a four week head start, the BBC's DVD of The Passion goes on sale today. But whereas the earlier version was only available through the Bible Society, this one has been released nationwide with many online retailers offering it substantially below the £20 RRP.

Assuming that the review discs I received a while ago have not changed in the interim, then the discs' transfers are good, but there are no special features. Indeed there doesn't even appear to be a basic menu. Whilst this does give the advantage of being able to watch it straight away, it's disappointing given the amount of material the BBC made available on the website, which will, no doubt, disappear one day.

So, ultimately the consumer is left with a choice between the Bible Society's set with a few extra features but a substantially higher cost (and their price is unlikely to drop if past history is anything to go on), or hunting out a bargain on the official, bare bones version. One other plus point for the BBC release: its cover art is significantly better that their rival's - at least that's my opinion.

The Times has marked the occasion with a fascinating piece Joseph Mawle (Jesus from The Passion. It's rare that a journalist just lets the actor speak for themselves, but on this occasion it's absolutely the right choice. In particular, Mawle discusses the crucifixion scene culminating in his discussion of it's after effects:

I remember feeling like someone in a car crash — everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The sun was absolutely blinding, but I had to keep facing upwards. The director had positioned a camera above my head to capture the agony on Jesus’s face and the moment when he utters his last words.

The scene took three days, and although I’d only been up on the cross for minutes at a time, my arms were still numb when I returned to London.

The review has also sparked an outburst by Bite my Bible which criticises the film for portraying the resurrection as being just a "vision". To my mind that is certainly one valid interpretation of the end of the film, but only one among several possible, and equally valid, interpretations of the programme's ending. As I said at the time it also fitted the views of Wright et al. that "the failure to recognise the risen Jesus was because his resurrection body is a physical body, but one that is significantly different from his pre-resurrection body"¹. Conversely, the ending could be taken as saying that the resurrection never really happened (save in the disciples' minds). What is so good about the film's ending is that it remains as open to interpretation as the gospel accounts themselves. As Doug at MetaCatholic points out Jesus is "one moment unrecognisable, the next known. One moment nowhere to be seen, the next in the middle of the room. How do you do justice to that in a visual medium, as opposed to an oral one?". Indeed given the variety of post-resurrection accounts in the gospels, and the low, albeit vital, correlation between these accounts, I wonder if the problem for some more conservative commentators is that this film is a little too "faithful to the gospel narrative"². Hat Tip to Mark Goodacre

1 - This is a quotation from my earlier piece not one from Wright himself
2 - Mark Thompson. Cited at Bite my Bible - http://www.bitemybible.com/2008/10/the-bbc-is-anti.html - from either a talk held by the public theology think-tank Theos or his lecture at Westminster Cathedral earlier this year.

Brian Cox Joins Kings

A new article at The Hollywood Reporter claims that Brian Cox will star in four episodes of NBC's Kings. Cox will play "former King Vesper" - nemesis to Ian MacShane's King Saul figure. As Peter Chattaway notes, it's not immediately obvious whether Vesper relates to a particular character in the Old Testament text or whether the series spins off in it's own direction. Either way, Cox has good experience playing monarchs from the early second century BCE - the picture above is from his turn as King Agamemnon in Troy

Ferrara on Mary and Herzog's Bad Lieutenant Remake

Filmmaker Magazine has an interview with Mary director Abel Ferrara, presumably to coincide with its forthcoming screening in New York. I've not heard him talk a great deal about the film - which is now 3 years old - so it's interesting to hear some of his thoughts on it (though the language is not for the faint-hearted). He also 'discusses' Werner Herzog's plan to remake Bad Lieutenant - another film with a lot of unconventional things to say about Jesus.

Your Chance to Star in The Year One

I was going to post this up last week, but, for some reason, decided against it. According to Glorioso Casting, extras are required for the re-shoots of The Year One. I have no idea whether the stars will be involved in these re-shoots, so you may not get to meet them, but for any Bible film lovers in the area it's a chance to grab yourself a claim to fame. Sadly, it's half the world away from me (and the call for 6'5" blond men is minimal in Bible films anyway - although clearly nobody told Dolph Lundgren), so I won't be involved...

Mary to Play in New York

Following on from yesterday's post Peter Chattaway also posted the news that Abel Ferrara's Mary is to get it's first public screening in his native New York. There's also a piece on Ferrara in the New York Times which contains a few hundred words on the film, including the following excerpts:

But when he started working on Mary — "living within three blocks of the Vatican," he noted — he revisited the Bible and this time approached it "as a revolutionary tome."

Mr. Modine, who first worked with Mr. Ferrara on The Blackout", said via e-mail that he and Mr. Ferrara prepared by poring over ancient scripture. "Abel and I tried to strip away the interpretations and poetic language", he said.

Like a more serious and angst-ridden Da Vinci Code, the film draws on Gnostic texts that have offered alternate views of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity... With its sincerely ambivalent efforts to plumb the nature of belief, it’s the rare movie that could stand as a rebuke to both The Passion of the Christ and Religulous.

By the way, it seems that in addition to the French and German DVD releases for this film there is now also a Spanish version.

Ben Hur: Mini-series Update

I must admit that Peter Chattaway is generally far better at discovering the latest Bible film news than I am, and he posted a number of different items over the weekend.

For now, I'll just deal with the news regarding the new TV miniseries of Ben Hur which plays at next week's MIPCOM. Production company Alchemy have released some posters and flyers, whose taglines have caused some comment. The main poster is the one on the right. It's clearly been heavily influenced by the publicity for 300, and the tagline suggests this may also be true of the script. Whereas the 1925 version of this story had the subtitle "A Tale of the Christ", the TV series has opted for "Rome made him a slave. Revenge set him free." It's not just a different angle, but the whole premise of the original story was that the desire for revenge was a more powerful master than the Romans had ever been.

However, the one of the left is from a selection of flyers and posters, and it's tagline is "An epic tale of revenge and redemption", which would have fitted General Wallace's work, and its three film adaptations. It remains to be seen whether this new version will still hinge around Ben Hur's encounters with Jesus, or whether the source of his redemption will be something else.

Edit: Alchemy just posted an updated version of their website and the Ben Hur pages feature a few production photos and the following description:

Based on the classic novel by Lew Wallace, BEN HUR tells the story of a young man whose best friend betrays him, sending him into exile, slavery, and near certain death. Through his skill as a chariot driver, Ben Hur triumphs over his enemies and eventually finds peace through forgiveness.