2/26/2004 10:57:00 AM|W|P|Danny Eagle|W|P| Well there you have it. It's on screen, and documented, the damn Jews killed Jesus. I knew it! I fucking knew it. My minister was always like, yeah Pontius Pilote was the guy, and the Romans did it, but I was always suspicious. I mean, I live with a Jew, and to be honest, I think he's always scheming on something. Whether it's eating the last English muffin or pushing his smoked salmon on me, he's always up to some shady business. He even grew a beard once! Thank God, that the Lord Jesus spoke to Mel and blessed him with the insight, the vision, the millions of dollars to bring this oft-overlooked aspect of history to light. I mean really, would the Romans who regularly fed Christians to lions at the Coliseum do such a nasty thing as crusify a man? C'mon. Please know that I kid. The Passion of Christ was compelling and at times difficult to watch but to sum up, it was a bit hard on the Jews. The movie was interesting because it made real a very popular religious tale with solid acting and careful attention to detail including the use of Aramaic and Latin. It also was pretty low-key about Jesus magic tricks and lightning bolts. You did see Jesus re-attach a man's ear and there was some thunder at the end, but it was less God-like and more human, which I think is true to the Biblical version, and in the end, more interesting to the general non-Christian world. What I'm missing from the movie is the simple fact that Jesus was a threat to the political stability of the Roman empire. The Jews might have been happy to see what they saw as a heretic go, but in the end the Romans were the ones who wanted to stop a revolution, and had him killed. The Romans were almost sympathetic to Jesus in this movie which is nothing short of ridiculous. To pin his death on any group is also ridiculous, as it was humanity itself that killed Christ, that was the big message from the Bible. The most glaring mistake was the absence of the other half of the crucifixion story: the resurrection. The big idea behind Jesus, in case anyone's unclear, is that he forgave and loved his enemies, that he rose from the dead and gave hope to the hopeless, rinsing the earthly world of sin. This movie was about a Jesus beat down. In the end, there was no love, there was no forgiveness, there really wasn't a redemption or re-birth. The last scene is Jesus rising from the tomb, but if you're not familiar with the story, you might think he was headed out to bash some skulls. You felt sad and downtrodden as Jesus must have felt, but lacked the real ending to the story, the all-important moral. If you're at all squeamish DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE. Take Braveheart, multiply it by 10 and take out the combat aspect. This is about a torture. A long torture. The violence was at times gratuitous, but perhaps not entirely inaccurate to the details of the events as they really happened. If you have any interest in actual religious history it's worth a look but be prepared to be disturbed and possibly unresolved at the film's end.|W|P|107782201787757661|W|P|Mel Gibson | The Passion of the Christ|W|P|scottlmoe@gmail.com2/10/2004 08:07:00 AM|W|P|Danny Eagle|W|P| Delta Force is to the Western/Arab culture clash what Shaft was to racial division in the 70's. It's the suped-up patriotic masturbation fantasy of 'Mericans stickin' it to those Islamic fundamentalists. I'm not talking about a cool-headed hostage extraction, or even anything remotely realistic. I'm talking about a bearded Palestinian muttering "Alahu Akbar" just as Lee Marvin rams a bazooka shell down his throat. I'm talking about Chuck Norris blasting a road block with a missile-equipped dirt bike, and literally doing a jump over a burning man. Cue up the Casio score, it's time to bash some terrorists! This is the anti-Black Hawk Down. Led by mullet-loving Chuck Norris and action old-schooler Lee Marvin, the Delta Force is called on to end a hostile takeover of TWA's bizzaro airline: ATW. The sweaty terrorists are determined to get US attention. Why? Well, we don't really know. But what we do know is that they are very bad. And dangerous. And they've got a dangerous and confusing name: the New World Revolutionary Organization. Most importantly, they just done fucked with Americans. The plane's hostages are a smorgasbord of US citizenry: you got a black Marine, a holocaust survivor, a little blond white girl, even a priest named Father O'Malley. Sure enough as the holocaust survivor is led away to an almost certain death, the priest stands up, proclaiming "I'm a Jew...because Jesus was a Jew!" Seriously, this Jew for Jesus stood up to risk his life for his fellow American regardless of religion�after all, this is an American flight! Right? Who's with me here?! While it's all peace and love among the races on the plane, the Delta Force is tearing up the countryside, hunting down A-rabs. Delta Force kept me laughing, and made me long for the more simple days of the Dirty Dozen, where Lee Marvin hit his peak. The Dirty Dozen was loaded with racial stereotypes too, including a scene where Jim Brown as "Jefferson" is called upon to do a football-like grenade maneuver, trapping Nazis in a gas-chamber-like bunker. But it seemed so much more innocent and pure. After all it was WWII, you know, good guys vs. bad guys. Delta Force is quite different. Its plot is foggy at best and at its most racial moments it has me wondering if Al Qaeda watches this shit at their cave-in hate rallies. Or if Rumsfeld and Bush get naked and put this on to "warm up" their discussions on foreign policy. Peep out this movie and remember the world of 1986. Where would we be today without it?|W|P|107642937352150720|W|P|Menahem Golan | The Delta Force|W|P|scottlmoe@gmail.com