Posted on 08/09/2002 8:06:23 AM PDT by NYer
Mel Gibson, star of action movies such as Braveheart and Mad Max, is considering casting himself as Jesus in a new film about the last days of Christ set in Matera, southern Italy.
The Italian Catholic daily newspaper Avvenire, reports that the Catholic actor has been meeting with church officials and theologians to gain an insight into Christ's Passion and Crucifixion, including the Last Supper and the vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Matera is a Unesco World Heritage site, famed for the Sassi, palaeolithic cave dwellings that were inhabited until recently.
Filming is due to start next month. Movie sources say Gibson chose the rocky, remote town because it was so convincing in Pasolini's 1964 classic Gospel According to St Matthew - which Gibson has long admired.
Pasolini chose the area for its bleak landscape and used unknown actors in his film - in contrast with the stars cast in other biblical epics of the time, such as the Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. Christ was played by Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish student, who Pasolini thought resembled the gaunt Jesus of El Greco's paintings.
I think he was a tough enough hombre all right, but there is no Biblical evidence that he spent any time in the construction trades after age 12. There is a lot of extra-Biblical suggestion that he may have spent some of the next 20 years exercising his American Express travel card.
(In Johnny Carson's voice:) "I did not know that..."
There is always the chance Hollywood would attempt to mock Christ by casting an odd-looking character like 'Carrot-Top', OR worse --....Danny DeVito!
...In recent years Historians have come to understand that America's committment in Blood -&- Materials over the 10 years we were in Vietnam...
...forced a Communist Soviet Union that could NOT afford it to do the same for Communist North Vietnam.
...It BANKRUPTED them in the end was we all witnessed the Fall of the Berlin Wall -&-the Communist Soviet Union years later...
...while The Enemy Within HILLARY RODHAM, BILL CLINTON -&- their Friend WALTER CRONKITE shed tears of blood.
May GOD Bless our Freedom Fighters...
ALWAYS.
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