Thursday, December 14, 2006

The Nativity Story (Catherine Hardwicke, 2006)

The Nativity Story (Catherine Hardwicke, 2006)

Excerpt:

Catherine Hardwicke's "The Nativity Story" (2006) sad to say, feels like a stillborn effort; you want to poke at it with a stick or the tip of your shoe, but the thing just lies there on the big screen, limp and rather lifeless, with a strong soporific effect (I had to stand at the back of the theater to stay awake, myself).


It's not a bad movie or at least not an actively evil one, as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was. It doesn't take the lunatic writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich (or possibly Clemens Brentano, who may have added to or heavily rewritten her) and turn them into an ostensibly pious picture that's really an excuse for beautifully photographed torture porn and vicious anti-Semitism (I hope no one out there still harbors doubts--Gibson pretty much revealed his heart's true sentiments in that famously suppressed police report. "In vino veritas," if you like).

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