Reviews archived here:
Moulin Rouge & the Myth of Orpheus
Lord of the Rings
Gates of Fire
Passion of the Christ
Not yet reviewed; send us your opinions!
                                 Bewitched
                                 What the [Bleep] Do We Know?
                                 The Wicker Man (original)
                                 Zeus 
                                 Full Circle
                                 The Sorceress (now available dubbed in English for VCR

Do you know of sleeper movies that carry a Pagan or magickal theme? Tell us why you love them!

Organize YOUR own Pagan Popcorn night!
                                   

Press Release
Yale Ph.D. Dubs
'Passion of the Christ'  'Pagan'
 ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 6 /PRNewswire/ --

No, he's not talking about the hefty box-office receipts, pewter nails, or excessive gore, though these are all symptoms. He's talking about the idea, blazoned on www.ThePassionoftheChrist.com, that "dying was Jesus' reason for living."

"The God of Gibson's film is a bloodthirsty God," says Dr. James Cook, 15-year religion professor at Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Michigan. "This supposedly loving heavenly father wants a human sacrifice to appease his wrath. That's not ethical monotheism. That's not the Jewish idea of sacrifice as token of repentance for sin. That's paganism."

When asked if Jesus being a blood sacrifice for sin wasn't what most Christians believe, Cook replied that that's exactly his point. "Gibson isn't making theology. He's reducing to absurdity a life-denying theology that stifled Jesus' real message almost immediately after he died."

And what was Jesus' real message?

"Love," answers Cook. "Not 'God loved us so much that he accepted his own son as a blood sacrifice in our place.' What kind of love is that?" Cook believes Jesus taught that we must love one another the way God loves us.

According to Cook, Jesus' followers corrupted his message. "You see it right there in the New Testament," he charges. "It goes from 'He who would be my disciple must take up his own cross and follow me' to 'Christ paid the penalty for sin' so we can go to heaven." The result, he avers, is an "anti-Christ Christianity obsessed with escaping this world instead of transforming it through love."

Like many Jewish leaders, Cook, who calls himself a Christian existentialist, sees Gibson's film as anti-Semitic and says its anti-Semitism is part and parcel of its paganism. "Paganism is about power and security. Ethical monotheism is about serving God in spirit and in truth. Judaism is the original ethical monotheism. It witnesses against  the preoccupation with a never-never land in the sky. It's about God's kingdom coming to earth. Jesus didn't run away from life. He embraced it. He didn't live to die. He died to live. God didn't plan his death. We continue to crucify him as long as we don't live in love."

Cook expresses his views dramatically in his new novel, "The Judgment of Christ" (Publish America, Feb. 2004).
 http://www.JudgmentofChrist.com

Contact:  Yuko Takatori, 734-913-5898




SOURCE  James Joseph Cook, Ph.D.
Web site:  http://www.JudgmentofChrist.com
http://www.prnewswire.com
04/06/2004 08:49 EDT
 
Green View: A Pagan Commentary


The Cult of the Passion
IS the Roman Catholicism
I Grew Up With
By Christa Landon, MA, D.Min.

Gibson's gruesome depiction of the death of Jesus was just using better production values than the  hour long  'Stations of the Cross" ritual which capped every Friday afternoon in Lent for me from the ages of 8 to 13.  

This doesn't surprise me, as Gibson and I are
both products of pre-Vatican II religious
education.

As Dr. Cook says, "Gibson isn't making theology." In  fact, the movie presents just a more vivid expression of a very familiar story and theology, which is why Roman Catholics and Protestants alike fell in love with this sadomasochistic obscenity.

Cook, however, IS making theology. His own
religious identity seems much healthier, rather like 19th century Universalism.  (See Hosea Ballou's THEORY ON THE ATONEMENT.) But Cook does it by ignoring everything in the Bible and tradition that doesn't fit his romantic idea of "real Christianity."  

I wouldn't mind, except that Cook is playing
Orwellian games with us. First, he reframes 
Christianity to eliminate everything he disapproves of, claiming to have known "the mind of Jesus better than the authors of the Gospels and Epistles. THEN, he labels everything he dislikes as PAGAN!!!

Perhaps Mel Gibson can introduce him to a
"True Scotsman."

 Among Pagans, only Gnostics and some of the
Mystery Cults were "obsessed with escaping this world"; the bulk of Pagans, ancient and modern, relish their time "in the sun" and love THIS LIFE. 

I don't know what courses on the subject of
Paganism he took at Yale -- surely he would have
bothered to check his facts BEFORE he used another religion as his whipping boy -- but apparently he would have learned better at the University of Chicago.  

Cook damns Paganism as being "about power
and security."  It's true that Pagans (and
Christians) whose faith is immature pray mostly for power -- power within, if not power over others.  

Very few Pagans I've known in the past 35 years organize their lives around security in any sense, and most aren't very effective at obtaining any kind of power that is recognized in the marketplace. Being Presbyterian has always been better for business in America than being  Pagan.

Dr. Cook's Christianity is very nice and civilized, much nicer than Gibson's, or Paul's, Matthew's, Mark's, Luke's, or Johns. 

I could imagine meeting him at a Unitarian
Universalist coffee hour. However, if he's going to be my neighbor, I'd prefer he didn't dismiss the commandment about not bearing false witness.

I imagine that he's well-suited to writing fiction, since then he won't be encumbered with facts that stubbornly resist the narrative he wants to tell.

Moulin Rouge & the Myth of Orpheus
Sannion recommends:

http://www.clubmoulinrouge.com/html/member/background_orph.htm
(Not very informative, but discusses Baz' use of myth in all his films)

A Discussion about Orpheus and Moulin Rouge
www.surlalunefairytales.com/boardarchives/2002/apr2002/orpheusmoulinrouge.html
(Has a very in-depth analysis about half way through)

Movie Review
http://www.preview-online.com/may_june2001/feature_articles/cannes/
(Decent overview of the Orphic themes in Moulin Rouge)
Lord of the Rings

It's bloody, it has NO good witches, and best of all, it ends with the magical people leaving the world, so the Christians have adopted LOTR, ignoring entirely its Heathen foundations. 

I think it's the battle scenes.  Anything that looks like the Battle of Armagedon just has that fundamental appeal to the Fundamentalists.  And any simplistic, radically-dualistic struggle reassures them that their world view not only makes good movies, but MUST BE TRUE.

Of course, if LOTR weren't being offered in competition with Harry Potter, LOTR would not generate so much enthusiasm among the Radical Religious Right.

Preview the BIG battle of the Lord of the Rings Part III: The Battle of Pelennor Fields.
http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/movie.aspx?m=523187

The Christian Right's appropriation of LOTR requires some "heroic" denial on their part, because it's well-known that Tolkein acknowledged that he used Nordic sources and explicitly denied any Christian meaning or connection with the Christian Book of Revelations. 



 Composers hired for a stage version of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy

A London musical stage version of The Lord of the Rings, is being developed and Indian composer A.R. Rahman has been commissioned to write songs. The Finnish folk troop Varttina will collaborate with Rahman, a veteran Bollywood songwriter who scored the Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced London musical Bombay Dreams. Producer Kevin Wallace commented, "A.R. Rahman writes brilliant melodies with an exotic quality, and we know he will write something which audiences will adore."

The Finnish contribution will be especially appropriate since Tolkein's Middle-earth and the story of a hero's quest for a magical ring, drew on the Finnish folk epic The Kalevala. The Finnish language inspired the Elvish tongue of Tolkein's trilogy. 

The musical is scheduled to open in London in spring 2005. 

Gates of Fire 
Review by Tracy Marks 

Based Upon: Based on the 1998 Steven Pressfield novel, Gates of Fire is a classical history epic in the grand tradition of Gladiator and Spartacus. 

The novel and film are based upon the true story of 300 Spartans who, along with about 7,000 allied Greeks, held back an army of over 2 million Persians (you read that right) for several days in 480 B.C. at the Battle of Thermopylae. Though they lost the battle, they held back the Persians long enough for the Greek states to rally together. The key to success were the "Gates of Fire", a narrow pass in the mountaintops where the Spartans positioned themselves, acting like a valve, keeping the Persians from passing, even as their own dead served as shields. Facing armies that numbered over in the millions, the Spartans obviously knew they would ultimately lose, but they fought on, regardless. If the Persians had conquered Greece that early on, Western culture as we know it probably would never have happened.

The story is told through the eyes of a battle squire, Zeones, the lone Spartan survivor at the legendary Battle of Thermopylae. Told in flashback, the film follows the story of the young slave (aka, a "helot", a servant), starting with his childhood, through his Spartan military training, ending with one of the most famous battles ever, as the relatively tiny band of Spartans holds back an army of thousands of Persians. 

Not Based Upon: Pressfield's novel is not the only recent book about the Battle of Thermopylae. Many fans know the tale from Frank Miller's excellent graphic novel, 300, which is highly recommended for anyone looking for a beautifully rendered (though violent) historical read.

Thermopylae Note: The pass known as Thermopylae, which hung over the sea in 480 B.C. is now over a mile away, due to 2,000+ years of silt build-up. Also, the name, which means "hot gates" (aka, "gates of fire") comes from the hot sulfur springs found nearby. Thermopylae is a narrow pass, four miles in length, that went on to be integral in battles against the Celts in 279 B.C. and Romans in 191 B.C. (source: BR.nnica.com)

GATES OF FIRE
Production Company: Maysville Pictures (Clooney), Forward Pass (Untitled Howard Hughes Biopic) (Michael Mann)

Cast: George Clooney will have a role, possibly as King Leonides, since he's producing as well.

Cast Notes: (2/3/01) The central character of Zeones will require a young, teens/20's-ish actor. Clooney also told Movieline that Bruce Willis is interested in a role.

Director: Michael Mann (Heat, The Insider, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans; he's currently working on Ali; after that, this might be his next film)

Screenwriter: David Self (The Haunting, 13 Days; next up are Road to Perdition and The Bourne Identity, which he co-wrote); rewrite by John Orloff (debut; he wrote episode 2 of Band of Brothers.)

Filming: There is no production start date for this project yet but production is expected to be in summer or fall 2003 with a film opening slated for fall 2004 or winter 2004-2005.

The film is not expected to open to well after the big screen debut of Troy, slated for mid May 2004.

There's also a full review of the Gates of Fire script at:
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/36023p1.html Apparently, one of the details that was changed from the novel is that in the draft of the script reviewed by IGN, Zeones was a helot, but in the book, he was not. It's quite possible this might all change again by the time the film actually starts production.

Book Review: SlashDot.org (Not only a good review, but the dozens of talkbacks at the bottom are interesting as well).

Updated June 24, 2005