Bible Movies

As you are probably aware, Easter Sunday happened a couple of weeks ago. Leading up to Easter, as you probably also know, there was a TV series called The Bible. It was about the Bible. I didn't see much of it, but I did see the bit about St. Stephen when he was stoned to death. This was one of those situations when I had to laugh in order to keep from exploding, but knew I might have to go to Confession afterwards.

St. Stephen was saying that he believed that Jesus really was God, and was getting a lot of booing and hissing for it. Then one of the booers and hissers started yelling about how Jesus' followers must be eliminated and ended with "we must stone him...WITH STONES!!" I almost went to the bathroom only not in the bathroom I was laughing so much. But I felt guilty as the dickens, especially because nobody else was laughing. I think they might have not noticed it though.

I mean, what else do you stone somebody with? I've tried stoning my kid brothers with pillows, water balloons, and pancakes, but none of those have worked.

In one of my religion classes back in junior high, we watched a movie called Peter and Paul. This movie was about St. Peter and St. Paul. At the beginning, it also featured St. Stephen and his stoning, except for they didn't really use stones; the special effect guys or whoever takes care of those things in movies apparently painted styrofoam rocky colors, so that when they hit the actor playing St. Stephen, they just bounced off. I guess that's why the dude in The Bible had to specify that in order to stone somebody, you need stones. 

And I'm not trying to make fun of St. Stephen. He was an incredible man. I'm just saying, give the poor man a break and stop making horrible movies about him. He is in Heaven, you know, so he's got close contact with God and one day he might get fed up and go up to Our Lord and say "hey, Lord, about that bloke down there...I was watching him and he's a moron. You should probably give him a couple extra years in purgatory."

When I was a kidlet, one of my favorite parts about the Easter season was sitting down with the family and watching The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. And by that I don't mean that Charlton Heston was physically with us when we were watching the movie; I mean that he was IN the movie. But anyway, a few years went by in which I didn't watch it, and then I watched it again when I was in my mid-teens and I almost threw up because it was so bad. And it didn't help that every time somebody touched Moses I kept thinking "GET YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF ME, YOU DAMN DIRTY APE!" It's especially bad when I compare it to the movie The Prince of Egypt. That movie was a cartoon and the ocean and the fire and the Angel of Death and all the plagues looked more realistic. In The Ten Commandments, the Angel of Death looked like a fart. I'm sorry to be gross, but it did.

One movie I haven't seen is Jacob and Joseph. That's a movie about Jacob and Joseph. Jacob and Joseph from the Bible, not like Jacob Black and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Apparently that's one of the worst Bible movies in Bible movie history. I wasn't there for this incident, but I hear that my Aunt Ann watched it with the folks and Jacob said this one line and Aunt Ann misheard it and thought that he said, "I am Jacob, son of Rebecca. I kill moles." Nobody knows what he actually said, but nobody wants to watch it again to find out.

I think mishearing-edness runs in the family. When I was about ten, I went to my cousin Lucy's Christmas concert in which she and the choir sang a song about "tidings of salvation." I poked my mom in the ribs and asked her, "why are they singing about dying of starvation?" Another time was when my big sister Mary was getting confirmed, my folks were sitting in the chairs in the choir loft because it was too crowded in the pews and I had an empty seat beside me. Right before the service started, a man came up next to me and said something like "can my wife sit here?" I didn't hear the first part of his sentence and thought he said something like "is anybody sitting here?" so I said "nobody." After neither he or his wife sat down in the empty seat, I realized that I must have said something wrong, and I couldn't get their attention to say that they could use that seat until the Mass was about half-way over. Very embarrassing. He must have thought I was some sort of tyrannical moron, being all like "BAHAHA!! NONE SHALL SIT HERE! HAHA!!"

I could go on about every single time I've misheard somebody and got all embarrassed because I made the wrong reply, but I'm not going to because I'm lazy and I want some ice cream.

Your servant,

Elizabeth