As secular as Hollywood is, the entertainment industry recognizes the dramatic impact, and box office lure, of Jesus' tale. TIME scanned a century of Messiah movies.
This revisioning of the Gospels by the immortal British comedy sextet was greeted by howls of Catholic protest — or, as Hollywood calls it, free publicity. In the Python reading, Brian (Graham Chapman) is an ordinary Israelite who is mistaken for Jesus and crucified. The climax is a mob scene: 139 people are to be crossed up, and this perpendicular Golgotha gang displays all manner of traditional English class snobbery, transported to Palestine. Eric Idle has a few good bits as a series of incorrigibly sunny prisoners. “See,” he tells Brian as their crosses are planted, “not so bad when you’re up.” Idle tops this with the immortal, blithely idiotic music-hall cheerer-upper, “The Bright Side of Life,” making Life of Brian that rare Crucifixion movie you could hum your way home from. Words to live and die by:
Life’s a piece of s—t
When you look at it.
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show.
Keep ‘em laughing as you go.
Just remember that the last laugh is on you
And always look on the bright side of life.
Always look on the right side of life.
In Morocco, on a pinchpenny budget of $6 million, Scorsese recreated a Palestine of sere deserts and balding meadows. His style is impatient, intimate, conspiratorial, the camera scurrying ever closer to the heart of the matter — X-rays of souls in stress. In the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and Paul Schrader’s script, the director found a story like the one he has made again and again throughout his career, from Mean Streets to Raging Bull, from The King of Comedy to The Color of Money, from Goodfellas to Gangs of New York to The Departed: a toxic buddy movie, in which two men are bound by love or hate; one must betray the other and thereby help certify his mission.
The Scorsese Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man; he is a man who discovers — or invents — his own divinity, and he’s both tormented and excited by the revelation. The Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong, loving activist. He wants to overthrow the Roman occupiers, while Jesus wants freedom for the soul. To fulfill his covenant, Judas must betray not Jesus but his own ideal of revolution. He must hand the man he most loves over to the Romans.
The faithful picketed the executive offices of the movie’s distributor, Universal Pictures. Some said the film was a plot by Jews to discredit Jesus — odd, since the director was raised Roman Catholic, the screenwriter Calvinist and the author of the source novel Greek Orthodox. Any Jesus film with sex and violence is bound to stir the anger of people who would never see it anyway. But these elements were simply bold colors on the canvas, images of the life Jesus must renounce and redeem. So no matter that The Last Temptation of Christ was a flop. It’s a great film, full of love for the dilemma of a god-man.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
