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Originally written by Maaya:

The entire oeuvre of historical fiction, alternate and otherwise:

FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP
HUFF PUFF HUAUGUAUUGH
OH GOD HONEST ABE

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Originally written by Schrodinger:

In grad school you can actually start to earn some money, instead of seeing it all dwindle slowly away. It's not much, but since you're not usually stuck with the same bills and you get paid for research (at least science majors, anyway), you can actually survive!

You can survive even better if you eat only Ramen, work as a TA in addition to research, and don't mind sharing an apartment, but better in this case means maybe a few thousand $$ more per year.

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Originally written by Majordomo:

So the States has a HECS type thing to? HECS in Australia is like defering your uni tuition fees until you have a job, etc, and then they deduct it from your pay (depending on how much you earn).

People consider HECS to be EVIL, but it has an upside - the loan is interest free, yay. It's still evil though. Back in '73-'75 Gogh Whitlam made uni here FREE. How sick is that? Man, wish I'd done uni then...

Md.

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Originally written by Alorael:

I'm still a fan of Bach, Telemann, and Vivaldi, but I love far too many composer and pieces to list them all. Handel deserves a nod as well, as do Mozart, Beethoven, and... I'm not going to keep listing.

?Alorael, who is still one of the few, the proud, the recorder players. Don't laugh, please!

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Originally written by Maaya:


Alec: what bad habits? It's only as rulesy as you make it, and it's no more rulesy than the average RPG. The DM should take care of most of the technical crap for you.
The problem is that in the age of computer RPGs, it's a bit obsolete.
There's also the apparently huge decision to minimax, but I doubt it can be helped.

Eh. I guess my issue just breaks down to exceptionally poor DMs.

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Originally written by Seaweed:

Well, now I've seen it.

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Originally written by Maaya:

What about the movie's mysterious Satanic figure? I don't recall reading anything about THAT in the Gospels.

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I think it was a rather good move, having satan walk around among the people and arousing them. It depicts quite well how all humankind is responsible (through satan) for Jesus' death, not only the Jews/Romans/other.
Or, in other words, it's saying that we're not responsible for the evil we do, but we have to pay for it anyway. Lovely...

Anyway, I don't quite understand this talk about anti-semitism. The Jews where the ones who wanted him dead and the Romans executed him, no? That's how the story goes and there's no point in denying it.
'The Jews were the ones who wanted him dead' is exactly what Vatican II decided against -- a very large stratum of the Jewish community liked Jesus at that time, so obviously 'the Jews' didn't want him dead. This is a serious logical error that has lead to so much murder and hatred over the past two millenia it's ridiculous.

However, Jesus life had only one meaning: to end. It was the famous divine plan. It wouldn't have mattered whether He would have been killed by Jews, Anglicans, Indonesians or the Eskimos. He was killed by men, and that's what matters. The Jews were just handy enough, and spared Him a trip to the north pole. If you want to blame someone for Jesus' death (which is silly. would you rather live without hope of deliverance?), blame yourself.
Jesus's only point in living was to die? I would disagree. Would the world be a better or worse place if he said 'Get the buggers before they get you', had the poor driven into the desert, and supported the murder of gentiles? According to that arguement, neither, because what Jesus said and did in life was ultimately completely unimportant because his purpose was to die.

The film was a bit too bloody for my liking, but I guess you can't overestimate Jesus' suffering. Or should.

In conclusion, I'm glad I saw it.
It's still too sadistic for my taste.

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Originally written by Kelandon:

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I don't know why the Bible isn't enough for you; I certainly understood the brutal beating and execution of Jesus perfectly well before 'The Passion'.

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For me, knowing what happened and seeing what happened were different. I was struck by the enormity of it, which was Gibson's point.
That's an imagination issue, I guess. But if you're on a subject like Jesus, why focus on the death? His life was much more exceptional.

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Mel Gibson is one of those Catholics who rejects Vatican II. His father is a blatant anti-Semite, and I have heard that Passion really overplays the Jewish-betrayal angle.

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Neither of these statements is entirely true. Vatican II said that it was no longer mandatory to do the Mass in Latin, etc, but it never said that it was not acceptable to continue to do it that way. It did say, however, that the Jews were not responsible for Jesus's death. Gibson simply chooses to attend a Mass that is done in the traditional manner, which was never outlawed, and while his father is anti-Semitic, to the best of my knowledge Mel Gibson has never explicitly stated views that were anti-Semitic.
He rejects the decision on the culpability of the Jews, and has been open about this. The exact wording runs something vaguely like "neither the entire community at that time nor any Jew at this time can be called responsible for the crucifixion of JC". It's a reasonable, logical statement, backed up by Papal sanction (which is, to Catholics, supposed to be infalliable), and he has made it clear he rejects it. 'Rejecting' the Latin issue would be flatly nonsensical, and I refuse to believe that's the sole motivation behind it.
In addition, explicit statements of racism are usually a sign of a severe problem; implicit statements abound quite a bit more.

Similarly, the Passion doesn't overplay the Jewish-betrayal angle. Most of the Jews in the film are portrayed as terrible people. But so are the Romans. The Romans laugh as they beat Jesus, and they seem to enjoy the brutality of their actions. Peter himself denies Jesus in the movie, just as he does in the Gospels. And for that matter, Gibson's own hand holds Jesus down as the Romans nail him to the cross, which is supposed to indicate that we are all responsible.
Treating the Romans as jerks is fine and good, but one has to remember that it would not be for centuries that Christians even stopped considering themselves Jews, much less created the kind of schism that exists now. Portraying nearly all of the Jews who are not directly related to Jesus or his teachings as terrible people is heinously unrealistic and most definitely implicit anti-semitism.

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Quite frankly, I would consider a movie about Jesus's life more appropriate than one about his death;

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Maybe. But this would be a very different movie, and not the one that Gibson set out to make. I understand if you dislike the movie for this reason, though. I have a different opinion, but I understand how this could bother a person.
Opinions being what they are, I'll let sleeping dogs lie on this one. I just feel like Gibson's movie was designed to cash in on fundamentalism rather than to really educate about the glory of Christ.

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Everyone doesn't know what Jesus taught -- either even Mr. Gibson doesn't or he conveniently chose to forget the bit about turning our Father's house into a place of merchandise

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I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. Because if you mean the part about the Jewish temple being wildly corrupt, the movie does show a scene of Jesus toppling over the tables of the money-changers.
Jesus spoke in metaphor quite a bit, and 'moneychangers in the Temple' are conventionally taken to be metanymic for 'selling' faith. I'm sure it's been used against simony, indulgences, and so forth, and this kind of movie really brings the issue up. If Gibson had the sort of passion for the issue he is portraying here that he claims he does, he would have paid whoever he promised to pay with the box office sales and given the rest to charity; it's very morally ambiguous to give people your version of God for profit.

I do have some issues with the historical inaccuracies, though. The Romans in the movie speak Church Latin, not Classical Latin (so they all speak with Italian accents, basically). Most of them would've been speaking Greek under those circumstances, anyway. Jesus, as Alec rightly notes, wouldn't've looked like the man who was playing him. And the brief scene of the resurrection doesn't quite mesh with the Gospel account. When Jesus appeared before the disciples, he was still bleeding. Thomas refused to believe that it was him until he touched his wounds. Those wounds are not present in the movie.
I haven't seen the movie -- I've read a lot of reviews, both positive and negative -- so I'll have to take your word for it. It's interesting that one of the biggest metaphorical issues in the Crucifixion -- the various wounds inflicted upon Christ on the cross and the skepticism of Thomas -- was apparently eschewed in favor of whipping scenes.
People need to know that if we could find one major celebrity and call him a Jesus look-alike, that particular celebrity would be U. bin Laden. I am incensed by the physical appearance issue, because it's a matter of petty, 'conventional' racism over factual accuracy.
Then again, why should we pay that much attention to how Jesus comes out -- in physical and spiritual terms both -- if the only reason for the movie is to off him? :rolleyes:

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Originally written by iDavid:

[quote=Nemo Custer Impune Lacessit]
However, it also portrays Jesus as a handsome Greek -- the image most have had of him since the Byzantines cornered the market on images of the man in the first few centuries. Given as how little issue is made of his physical appearance in the Bible, he would have been black-haired, tan-to-brown skinned, bearded, and rather typically Jewish in appearance. Western standards of beauty are unkind to Semites in general, which means that we'd see someone who looked reasonably like Jesus as rather ugly.

The Bible itself says that Jesus was ugly, more or less. But who wants him to be ugly? The movie doesn't really focus on what Jesus looked like. Making him look different from the general American mental picture would serve only as a distraction.
Mr. Gibson could have directed the movie in English if he wanted it to be easily accessible before being factually accurate...

So far as I can tell, seeing this movie is like paying $7 to watch a high-budget production of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' in the original middle-German. Sure, it must be pretty powerful, but is it really something we haven't seen before?

I don't know, you answer that. How often do you see the brutal beating, torture, and crucifixion of a good man (or God incarnate, depending on your beliefs)? I can't really imagine the movie not being powerful. Comparing it to Jack and the Beanstalk... I know I'm not the best with examples, but really, Alec, a little more sensibility in the future, please?
The idea is that we've all read both. I don't know why the Bible isn't enough for you; I certainly understood the brutal beating and execution of Jesus perfectly well before 'The Passion'. Quite frankly, I would consider a movie about Jesus's life more appropriate than one about his death; everyone knows that Jesus got crucified at Calvary, everyone knows that he got whipped, stabbed, &c, everyone knows the crown of thorns and INRH. Everyone doesn't know what Jesus taught -- either even Mr. Gibson doesn't or he conveniently chose to forget the bit about turning our Father's house into a place of merchandise --
and I'd follow Jesus's teachings the same whether or not I believed he was divinely born, was killed to save man from his sins, &c.
The movie has no moral message; it is, in essence, a brutal snuff film featuring the savior of mankind. It blames the Jews, it makes Jesus into if not an Aryan than at least a European, and it conveniently sidesteps the Messiah's teachings.
This is not an uplifting film, it is not a moral film, and it is not a good film. It's just something designed to shock people with an incoherent knowledge of theology and no imagination.
How often do we see the brutal beating, torture, and crucifixion of a good man? We would plenty if we were in ancient Rome or the modern Sudan. We don't see good men make a difference on the way people believe, though, and I think that sidestepping Jesus as a man in favor of clubbing us over the head with his 'dying for our sins' is sickening.

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