Anticipating The Passion

[spqrblues]

Dum Dallae sum, apud amicos manebo. Non scio quando The Passion of the Christ videbo. Nonne hoc intellegis? Quis est quin linguam Latinam amet? Eheu! Oculi mei fiunt languidi.

Oh, sorry, aren't you fluent in ancient languages? I'm pretty rusty myself. Allow me to provide subtitles.

The last movie I saw performed entirely in an ancient vernacular (not counting the occasional production of Aeschylus) was Sebastiane, a film about the early Christian martyr Sebastian. It managed to make naked Roman soldiers engaging in a variety of explicit acts incredibly tedious. The gimmick of performing the movie in Latin (pronounced with a wild array of accents and in randomly grouped syllables by the mostly buff and mainly naked actors) quickly became distracting, except for one amusing scene among buff, naked Romans about the latest arena spectacular by "Fellinus." All told, the movie was a conceitful vehicle for the director to explore a rather obscene obsession and it quickly became No Fun At All, even with all the buff, naked, sex-crazed ancient Romans, which I otherwise wish we would see more of in the movies. Sebastiane is pornography pretending to be Art—or, rather, the distributors thought they could pass a porno film off as Fellini. The language gimmick just distracted the audience from the nookie, which, as I recall, was rather shoddy itself. Purely prurient. But then, I'm a chick, and we generally like a little coherent story mixed in with the nudity.

Now, why do I worry an extremely religious man such as Mel Gibson would produce a movie comparable to a silly skin flick that just happened to be performed in Latin?

Keep on reading at Outside Food (it gets long and a little theological...)