Article on the Passion

And still they keep coming. This well-written piece by Thomas Doherty appears today in Australian newspaper The Age, apparently originally in Los Angeles Times:

Personal Passion Breaks Hollywood's Commandments

What Doherty says about DeMille ("he covered all the theological bases by placing on the payroll a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest and a rabbi") is still more clearly getting played out in the theological advisory committee behind The Gospel of John, which is beginning to look like a brilliant move. Doherty obviously knows his Jesus films; I like his one-word characterisations of the following and may have to use them for essay questions in the future,

Only with the collapse of the Production Code did offbeat and irreverent portraits dare to desecrate the image: countercultural (Jesus Christ Superstar, 1973), blasphemous (Monty Python's Life of Brian, 1979) and hallucinatory (Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988).

Also worth noting -- he gives a release date of Ash Wednesday, February 2004, presumably for Australia?