(8/29/2004) There's nothing more I can add to the reviews of "The Last Temptation of Christ"... it's one of the most discussed movies in cinematic history. Martin Scorsese's long battle to make the film came out decidedly in his favor; one of my favorite Scorsese movies. Willem Dafoe, I think, played a more realistic Jesus than has been present on the screen before. I mean, this is a Jesus that is a man at the same he is a god. Some reviewers get on Dafoe for playing Christ as sort of a weak-willed spaz, but when that divine spirit fires up inside Christ after his emergence from the desert, there's not a single thing weak-willed about Dafoe's performance. He did a good job of portraying a normal man coming to grips with a massive, overwhelming destiny.

Good support for Dafoe comes from Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, and Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul. David Bowie does a great job in his cameo, underplaying Pontius Pilate very nicely... not the sneering patrician you might expect. A smattering of New York actors make up the rest of the main supporting cast, and this is what leads into my major pet peeve:

How can reviewers complain about the "Noo Yawk" accents of the cast members?? Why does the accent of the performer matter at all in a biblical movie? It's not like they had British accents back then, yet I've heard several times how people think that British accents make Bible stories more "realistic". Unless you're gonna go the whole nine yards like Mel Gibson and film everything in Aramaic, Hebrew, & Latin, it shouldn't matter at all (and even in "The Passion of the Christ" there are bound to be some accent mistakes, since 2 of the 3 above languages are as dead as disco). If you're gonna bust on Harvey Keitel for having a Brooklynese accent, you might as well erase Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston, Max von Sydow and Brian Blessed from their religious films. In fact, just wipe out any actor who ever starred in any historical epic ever because they can't pronounce their hard R's.

For the movie: 5 stars.

For reviewers who have some arbitrary little problem with accents: 1 finger. You follow?

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Created May 05, 2009 at 10:06pm • Submit your own review...