Posted on 12/01/2006 5:42:28 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
Are you ready for “The Passion of the Christ: The Prequel”?
The self-explanatory “The Nativity Story” arrives at local theaters in time for the holidays, and it’s a sweet, live-action version of an elementary-school Christmas pageant.
The big story behind the scenes is that Australian Keisha Castle-Hughes, this film’s Blessed Virgin, is pregnant in real life at age 16, which is the kind of publicity money can’t buy. As Mary, she is young, strong and vulnerable, but her performance is a bit of a blank slate.
The action begins with a paranoid Herod ordering the murder of all Hebrew first-born male children to thwart a prophecy that a king will be born to take his place.
In flashbacks, Mary’s Aunt Elizabeth conceives a child at an advanced age, a child who will become Christ’s forerunner, John the Baptist, and Mary is visited by the semitransparent, wingless angel Gabriel Joseph, the industrious and handsome young carpenter, lives conveniently across the way from Mary.
Meanwhile, back in Persia, the three Magi - Melchior, Balthasar, and Shemp, I mean, Gaspar) - seem more like the THREE STOOGES than WISE MEN. They’re watching three heavenly bodies align and bickering over whether to mount a camel-borne expedition to the East.
The film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke has less in common with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s neorealistic landmark “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (1964), Martin Scorsese’s controversial “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and Mel Gibson’s gore-splattered “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) than with the blandly earnest Hollywood biblical epics of the 1950s and ’60s. Screenwriter Mike Rich followed the leads provided in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
For her part, Hardwicke - who shot in southern Italy, where both Pasolini and Gibson preceded her - brings a refreshingly enlightened view of women’s roles and details the lives of her biblical characters. Mary’s mother, Anna, for example, makes and sells designer goat cheese, which she rolls in thyme, in the village.
The dialogue is in English and Hebrew and advances the plot, but does not reveal much about characters’ inner selves. The film’s climax relies too heavily on canned, choral music. The first of the expected offspring of “The Passion,” “The Nativity Story” is an after-Sunday-school special.
It will be worth your time!
You're welcome!
Media and critics hate this story. That why I cannot get enough of it. We don't need nasty critics to make a beautiful story a make or break for us.
Just from that pic alone I want to see the movie. Sounds good to me.
My husband and I wept thru most of Nativity Story.
It was fantastic and will make your Christmas truly
meaningful!
Every aspect of the Nativity Story was filmed and directed and dialogued and acted just perfectly, IMHO! They neither added or subtracted to the bare bones of this story - seeing that three wise men with passed-through-the-ages names are widely accepted).
The simplicity with which the story over all and specific scenes within it are shown forth is its greatest achievement.
In God's Good Grace I hope to purchase enough copies on DVD by next Christmas to send one to every person on my Christmas card list, as a testimony to them - worship unto the saved, witness to those who have not yet received the Greatest Gift Ever Given, amen.
We had to travel over an hour to get to a theatre where it was showing, and that was the case for the entire Christmas season. We were grateful it was playing in the state at all on the 26th, which is the date we were able to go. The friend I went with and I had the entire theatre to ourselves. While this means the movie is not making a great deal of money, and I would not have it that way, we were joyous to laugh and talk and cry and praise to our hearts' content aloud throughout the showing - a great gift which I've never had the pleasure to experience before!
Thank You, Good Giver our God, and thanks to New Line Cinema! Lord, bless them for this offerring, please, in Jesus Christ, to the increase of Thy Kingdom and Power and Glory in the earth, amen!
I liked it, too. I was disappointed that people here and, it seems, Christians in general, spent so much time quibbling over minor points. It was overall a beautiful meditation on the birth of Our Lord and also on the life of the Virgin and St. Joseph. The conditions of the time and place (domination by the Romans, Herod, etc.) were also very well depicted and gave me more insight in what it must have been like to live in that remote, unimportant little corner of the world, which was essentially nothing more than a tax farm to its rulers.
Of course, the fact that the powers that be went out of their way to prevent its advertising didn't help.
Incidentally, there's another movie that might be of interest to Christians. It's called Children of Men, and it deals with a future state-dominated society in which euthanasia is the norm and people have stopped bearing children. The society is dying. And then a young woman turns up pregnant...
It was supposed to be released in the US on Christmas Day. It's a United Artists film, directed by a high-profile director who specializes in action films. But suddenly its release was limited to about three theaters in the US, even though it got a 92% positive rating from Rotten Tomatoes. I wrote to United Artists to find out why, but I haven't heard anything.
In any case, your mention of the fact that you had to travel to get to The Nativity reminded me of this. I think one of the techniques used to "control" the good films that do get made is to restrict their showing, not advertise them very much, etc. This would have happened with The Passion, except that it caused so much advance interest that when they tried to prevent it from being shown, the attempt backfired and I think actually more people went to see it in the end.
Thank you so much; I had not heard of "Children of Men," either the movie or the book which preceded it. I will add it to my long list of movies that I want very much to see but have to wait for on DVD (for all the reasons you mention). God bless you.
That is a shame you had to drive an hour, but I'm glad you were able to see it. Happy New Year!
I agree!
I've been hoping that Christians would recommend the movie to other people.
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