Im sick of this shit.

[The Brain]

Originally posted by KensPen
EH, but there was a black backlash after Roots......
I think sometimes seeing an emotional depiction of something is more compelling than just an intellectual understanding of it.

That's true too. But emotions might have still been somewhat raw during the time "Roots" <a href=http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0075572/ target=new>aired back in 1977</a>, if only because the race equality movement was only about 20-30 years old. Blacks still felt (hell, we still feel sometimes) that they were being treated as second-class in American history; this just showed it to everyone from a different angle. But I doubt if you were racist beforehand *cough* Sloats *cough*, that watching this movie suddenly made you feel sympathetic to the plight of Africans and their descendants.

By comparison, this is supposed to be a retelling of events that happened:

A) halfway across the world (yes, Africa is halfway across the world, you yahoos, but "Roots" focuses on what happened during America's slavery period)
B) over two millenia ago

Also remember, this mini-series aired back before cable was commonplace, so everyone tuned in. <i>The Passion</i> is, by its very nature, an art house flick. What sort of distribution will it get? How many people will actually sit through a film done entirely in Latin and Aramaic, when they don't know what anyone is saying?

And granted, I'm sure Mel Gibson is trying to be as accurate as possible, but there are limits. <i>The Ten Commandments</i> was a great movie, but hardly accurate, because no one who was alive back then can verify. Hell, even <a href=http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0055774/ target=new>Barabbas</a> was a fine Biblical flick, but how true could it have been? It was about a man who basically everyone knew from about 5 lines of text in the Bible. When making a movie about any historical or literary figure, the film <i>has</i> ot be taken with a grain of salt, unless that person is there to tell the story in their own words.