Yesterday was the day when Eastern Orthodox Christians remember Gamaliel, the Jewish leader who defended the apostles before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5. So I thought it might be fun to take a quick look at how Gamaliel has been portrayed in film.
It has been two months since I last wrote about Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, the film adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel about Jesus’ childhood. At that time, the studio behind the film had announced a release date but no cast members. Today, however, a colleague tipped me off to the fact that the film’s IMDb page now lists 20 actors, and at least one of them is fairly well-known: Lord of the Rings co-star Sean Bean.
The story of Jesus has become so familiar to us that we sometimes fail to grasp just how shocking, disturbing, or ultimately motivating it really is. Even films designed to take us back to first-century Judea can tend to come across as soothing or reassuring, which hardly matches how the apostles would have experienced those events. Sometimes it takes a radical reimagining to get us to really think about the implications of that story, and how it might be applied to our present-day reality. And one of the most interesting such reimaginings — certainly in recent years — is Son of Man, a South African production that depicts Jesus as a political activist working in a war-torn modern African country.
Like most independent foreign films, Son of Man has kept a relatively low profile — it didn’t even come out on DVD on this continent until four years after it premiered at the Sundance festival in 2006 — but it can now be streamed on Netflix in the U.S., and it has attracted a fair bit of attention in some circles. The conversation surrounding the film is now further illuminated by Son of Man: An African Jesus Film, a collection of 16 essays that look at the film within the contexts of African culture and the Jesus-film tradition as a whole.
Remember Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus?
Last year, the National Geographic Channel teamed up with Ridley Scott’s production company to turn O’Reilly’s book into a TV-movie, just as they had done with his earlier books Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot.
Now comes word that they’re going to make their third project a little longer, and turn it into a four-hour mini-series that will begin production this summer and premiere sometime in 2015.
Hmm. You don’t suppose the enormous success of the mini-series The Bible last year — which led to this year’s Son of God on the big screen and next year’s A.D. on the NBC network — had anything to do with Killing Jesus getting more airtime, do you?
Meanwhile, a very different sort of TV show is set to premiere this year. The Hollywood Reporter says Aaron McGruder, creator of the animated comedy The Boondocks (2005-2010), is working on a live-action series called Black Jesus for the Adult Swim network, and the trade paper describes the premise thusly:
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I’ve been sitting on some of these for a while — but no longer!
1. It looks like MGM is serious about remaking RoboCop (1987; my comments). The studio created a poster for the new film and put it on display at the Licensing International Expo in New York last week, and a studio rep reportedly re-assured a fan that the remake will be rated R, just like the first two RoboCop films — and unlike the PG-13 third film. The new film is apparently set for release in 2010, though no one is attached to direct it — yet.
2. Speaking of cyborg franchises that began in the 1980s, the MTV Movies Blog has a picture of the poster for Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins that also appeared at the Licensing Expo — and they also report that the first trailer for that film might be attached to The Dark Knight, which comes out a month from now.
In related news, Terminator director McG posted an update to the movie’s official blog a couple weeks ago, in which he talked about the various Terminators that have been designed for the film — including the rubber-skinned T-600, which pre-dates the T-800 model that was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first three films.
Oh, and McG also floats the possibility that the new Terminator film might not be rated PG-13, as some have suggested.
3. And speaking of franchises that went from R to PG-13 and almost always suffered a drop in quality as a result, the MTV Movies Blog also reports that Brett Ratner is thinking of making Beverly Hills Cop 4 a PG-13 film, “to make it new for kids.” Or perhaps Ratner is really talking about making an R-rated movie for the kids? That would be kind of dodgy, even for him.
4. Jumper star Hayden Christensen has told the Toronto Sun that a sequel to his teleportation movie — indeed, a full-on trilogy — may be in the works. “But,” he adds, “I don’t think they’re rushing to get into production.” Thank heaven for small mercies.
5. Variety says John Moore is attached to direct a remake of Capricorn One (1978), the Peter Hyams conspiracy thriller about a faked mission to Mars. Moore’s last two films — Flight of the Phoenix (2004; my review) and The Omen (2006; my review) — were also remakes. Is it the director or the industry for which he works that is stuck in a rut here? Discuss.
6. Matt Page reports that the makers of Color of the Cross (2006), which posited that Jesus was a black man, have produced a sequel, Color of the Cross 2: Resurrection, that apparently came out on DVD about three months ago.
7. Remember how Disney announced two years ago that they were going to produce a bunch of Tinker Bell videos, in which the formerly mute fairy would now have a voice, courtesy of Brittany Murphy? It seems that Pixar dude John Lasseter, who has since taken over the Disney animation division, didn’t quite care for this development, so Brittany Murphy is out … and Mae Whitman is in. The first video comes out October 28. Hollywood Newsroom and the Hollywood Reporter have the details.
8. The Hollywood Reporter says Elizabeth Berkley, who may be best known for starring in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995), is joining the sequel to Donnie Darko (2001) — and yes, there is a sequel in production — as “a speed freak-turned-Jesus freak whose sentiments about ridding the world of its exponential sin are rivaled only by her infatuation with her dreamy pastor.” I have to ask: What is it, exactly, that makes this sin so “exponential”?
9. Jeffrey Wells passes along this note from Werner Herzog:
As you probably know, I will begin principal photography of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in three weeks time, with only a very short period of pre-production. But I am doing fine, and this does not make me nervous. By the way: it is not a remake (as reported almost everywhere) — it is a completely different story in the same sense as the last James Bond is not a remake of the previous one.
“On another note: just before the hurricane I was scouting locations in Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam for The Piano Tuner, and as soon as I arrived in Bangkok I found myself arrested and handcuffed to a chair because of unpaid bills and taxes by the producers of Rescue Dawn. It required much explaining to explain that I was not the producer.
Just when you think this guy’s life couldn’t get any more interesting than it already is… Oh, and Variety says the Bad Lieutenant sequel, or whatever it is, may re-unite Ghost Rider (2007) co-stars Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes.
10. TrekMovie.com has the details for the newest Star Trek Fan Collective DVD set, which will focus on “alternate realities” — including six episodes set in the Mirror Universe, taken from three different series. The new set comes out September 16.
11. This isn’t a sequel or remake or anything quite like that, but I just have to note that a 20th-anniversary edition of Heathers (1989) is coming out on DVD next month — apparently one year early. Even so, has it really been 20 years already? That’s more than half my lifetime. Gadzooks, I feel old.
My article on ethnicity in Jesus films — which looks primarily at the current releases The Nativity Story and Color of the Cross, but also touches on King of Kings (1961), Dayasagar (1985), The Miracle Maker (2000), The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Son of Man — is now up at the Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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