[missyme]

A BIT MORE:
When the news of Gibson’s interest in Howard Fast’s novel was picked up in the media, Foxman reportedly told Fast’s widow he would “feel more comfortable putting it in the hands of Mr. [Harvey] Weinstein than Mr. Gibson.” The irony is delicious.

Weinstein is the Hollywood producer who co-founded Miramax and made X-rated art movies like "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" as well as, more recently, "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Kill Bill: Vol. 2." If Harvey Weinstein and motion pictures had been around in 167 B.C.E., Weinstein would have been the guy making “controversial” films about naked discus-throwing

How secular liberals, Jewish and otherwise, will respond to the new Gibson effort is an interesting question. "The Passion" proved to be an embarrassment for the ADL and others who predicted that the film’s supposed anti-Semitism would expose America’s Jewish community to medieval-style perils. Of course, no such thing came to pass.

All that the protests succeeded in doing was to ensure that many, many more people would see Gibson’s film than would have done so had there (without the ADL’s efforts) been no controversy to begin with.

For the folks who made such an aggressive and pointless fuss about "The Passion," there would seem to be two choices. The first is, once again, to raise a ruckus about how Gibson again casts Jews (in this case the secular liberal Hellenizers) as bad guys, and accomplish nothing positive. The other is to let Gibson alone. Personally, not myself being a big fan of the overlong, gratuitously violent "Passion," I would like to see him get back to the kind of spiritual thriller that caught his imagination when he starred in M. Night Shyamalan’s fabulously gripping "Signs."

[Austin Willard Wright]

This guy likes "Signs?" That movie was a yawner.

[Borges]

Weinstein is the Hollywood producer who co-founded Miramax and made X-rated art movies like "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" Both of those films were British/European productions. Not Mirimax.

[CGVet58]

bttt

[Dunstan McShane]

There already is a movie about the Maccabees. I had never heard of it till I came across it as a used VHS tape in a second-hand bookstore a couple of months back. Misleadingly titled "The Old Testament" (for its American release), it's one of those Italian spaghetti epics from the early sixties, about Matthias and Judas Maccabeus and the revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes.

Not likely to win any film awards. Has anyone else ever heard of it (or seen it)?

[Aquinasfan]

X-rated art movies like "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover"

Easily the worst movie that I've ever seen.

[shrinkermd]

Gibson would do better to make a movie out IB Singer's The Slave. It is historical, a love story and the travails of a just man in an unjust world.