“What a week,” Robert Costa, moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week,” sometimes begins his broadcast. But really, he could just say that every week. Another mass shooting. Another celebrity – or 10 – accused of sexual harassment. Puerto Rico still mainly without power. It’s sort of like an evil “Groundhog Day.” ...
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As Lent ends and the Easter season begins today with Christians celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, TV has once again presented its share of documentaries and films about Jesus’ Passion.
PBS’ “Last Days of Jesus” offers a detailed consideration of what it meant to die by crucifixion. I now no longer watch such scenes, just as I no longer watch horror movies. “Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows,” as President Bill Clinton put it at the Democratic National Convention this past summer, prefer to dwell on happier circumstances. Not that we eschew suffering. Indeed, the surest way to prolong suffering is the refusal to endure it. It’s just that we no longer feel the need to go out of our way to create or endure needless suffering. ...
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Was it sacrilegious – not to mention completely shallow – of me that I bought “The Bible” miniseries for the hunky guy who plays Jesus?
The series itself – from Roma “Touched by an Angel” Downey and her hubby, “Survivor” impresario Mark Burnett – isn’t very good, concentrating too much on the dreary dutifulness of religion rather than the joy it can bring. Which is, I think, part of Jesus’ message.
The actor who plays Jesus in “The Bible” and the subsequent Downey-Burnett collaboration “Son of God” – Portugal’s Diogo Morgado – is one of a long line of beautiful Jesuses. Think of Jim Caviezel in “The Passion of the Christ.” (The moment I saw him in “The Thin Red Line” as the otherworldly Christ figure Witt, I knew he’d make an excellent Jesus.) Or Robert Powell, my favorite, in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jeffrey Hunter’s blue eyes were so dreamy in “King of Kings” that some critics dubbed the film “I Was A Teenage Jesus.”
Sure, there have been stern-looking Jesuses (a miscast Max von Sydow in “The Greatest Story Ever Told”) and even commonplace Jesuses. (Dennis Potter’s “Son of Man,” with stocky, course-looking Colin Blakely in the title role, was lambasted for making Jesus ordinary, even homely, when it aired on British TV in 1969.)
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: Jesus must be gorgeous.
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