30 Pieces of Silver

Link: http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/22/leisure.gibson.reut/index.html

I look forward to the release of Passion. I wonder if it is going to be released under the guises of the normal Hollywood machine. It certainly looks that way.

All the hoopla and fear of what the release will entail, I suspect, is overblown. It is just a movie. Maybe a great movie, about a great mystery, but it is still a movie.

You would think though, given the subject matter, and the passion of Mel Gibson, that it wouldn’t even be released at all. Rather, it would be shared with the world.

When I put a lot of my LP’s onto CD’s a couple of years ago, one of them was Jesus Christ Superstar. It didn’t come out very well. It is so old that it has sides 1 and 4 matched on one LP, and sides 2 and 3 on the other. This, back from the days when LP’s were played on a drop spindle… Hmm, no wonder the iPod is so popular. The ability to play music for hours on end was lost when we made the move to high fidelity.

Anyway, when I happened to be in a record store I looked up the cost of the CD. The good news was that it had been digitally “remastered.” The bad news was it cost $50. So much for “licensing”, I knew I wasn’t going to get a deal repurchasing music that I already owned. That street only goes one way.

We know about this story of Jesus, and all the other great religious tales, because men spent their days and nights hand-copying these stories down through the years. In many cases, their whole life was dedicated to it. I feel happy for Mel Gibson that he finally got to use modern technology to tell the story that was burning in his heart.

Still, I remember standing in the store, and looking at the $50 price tag, and wondering to myself, “What Would Jesus Do?”

I didn’t buy it.