Posted on 03/27/2014 8:04:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Most religious movies feel as if they’re made by a church committee, but every now and then a wild-eyed prophet wanders in and rattles the theater with brimstone. Regardless of your feelings about either movie, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” qualifies and so does Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Now director Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan,” “The Wrestler”) has ascended to the mountaintop and returned with the strangest, most visionary cinematic parable yet.
“Noah” is equal parts ridiculous and magnificent, a showman’s folly and a madman’s epic. It elaborates on the Book of Genesis’s slender story of Noah and the Ark with subplots and additional characters and computer-generated effects that would have Cecil B. DeMille drooling. If that stands to put off the faithful, many of them, and many others besides, may be won back by the film’s ambitious seriousness of purpose.
Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel are working on a vast, primeval scale here, as if they were carving their story out of rock. The movie hacks away at big ideas, too: man’s stewardship of his planet, man’s relationship with his Creator, the line where righteousness becomes mania. The parts of “Noah” that don’t work really, truly don’t. But the parts that do almost sweep you away in the flood.
First things first: Russell Crowe turns out to be perfectly cast in the title role. He’s big, he’s implacable, he can turn on a dime from sensitivity to mournful fanaticism. Most importantly, he carries himself with the authority — the sheer moral weight — of an Old Testament patriarch.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonglobe.com ...
EXCERPT FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES :
Noah, one of the last descendants of the peaceful line of Seth, is a vegetarian and a nomad, camping out on the brown hillsides with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and their children. The family is occasionally harassed by marauders from the line of Cain, a clan that has blighted the planet with greed and industry, killing off animals and strip-mining precious minerals. Their leader is a shaggy, bellowing warlord named Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), conveniently the object of Noah’s justified vengeance as well as of fully merited divine judgment.
Is that a parody?
“is a vegetarian”
True by Gn 1:28, but when he steps off the ark, Noah is told to change his vegan ways by the Creator (Gn 9):
“All the beasts of earth, and the winged things of the sky, and the creeping things of earth, are to go in fear and dread of you, and I give you dominion over all the fishes of the sea.
This creation that lives and moves is to provide food for you;”
STRIP-MINING PRECIOUS METALS??
Everything I have read about this movie makes it out to be a total and complete pile of crap where adherence to that actual biblical story is concerned.
Don’t waste your money and don’t support those that would distort and twist this wonderful story.
I will be interested in hearing what Michael Medved has to say. He is a bit too mainstream Republican and Rhino for me, but he is very good at breaking down a film. If half of what Glen Beck says is true, which is often the case, it should be a scathing review.
i have not seen it... do not know if i will see it in the theatre, as i rarely go... but Russell Crowe is one of my faves, and i like that he has re-teamed with Jennifer Connelly... i thought they were superb in A Beautiful Mind...
Wow this sounds truly awful. Hollyweird and the self-hating JINO Aronofsky won’t get my cash.
that must have been quite strange... but yummy! i love meat!
“Noah, one of the last descendants of the peaceful line of Seth, is a vegetarian and a nomad, camping out on the brown hillsides with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and their children. The family is occasionally harassed by marauders from the line of Cain, a clan that has blighted the planet with greed and industry, killing off animals and strip-mining precious minerals. Their leader is a shaggy, bellowing warlord named Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), conveniently the object of Noah’s justified vengeance as well as of fully merited divine judgment.”
So basically Noah was a wimp and took his ball and left. Just so happens it was rainy season.
That its purpose is 'serious' I have no doubt. That its purpose is the subversion of a biblical story for non-biblical (even anti-biblical) purposes, I also have no doubt. Consider me not won back.
He took everyone’s balls.
I’ve heard there’s not one single reference to God in the movie. God told Noah to build the ark, so how did they get around that one in the script?
That plot line is hilarious.
Did you make that up yourself?
Yeah, they must have got that from the fact that Tubal-cane worked metals.
Let’s not neglect the rock-covered angelic beings that help Noah build the ark!
Couldn’t be any worse, or could it, than THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, SAMSON AND DELILAH or SODOM AND GOMORRAH (1962), or a dozen other awful Italian epics.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056504/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/?ref_=nv_sr_1
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041838/?ref_=nv_sr_1
De Mille’s films were well over the top, but never dull!
"It's not the accuracy of the plot but the seriousness of the purpose."
RE: That plot line is hilarious.
Did you make that up yourself?
______________________________________________
No, It was from the New York Times film review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/movies/russell-crowe-confronts-lifes-nasty-weather-in-noah.html
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