Mary, Mother of Jesus (1999)

hyped garbage

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

...if you are theirs fan.or if the religious films are yous favorite genre. because the only virtue of film is to do a larger portrait of Mary. not uninspired, not without few special notes but not real convincing. Christian Bale has the bad luck to be associated with too many great roles for be more than another actor acting Jesus. and the story is far to be different by many other adaptations.in fact, the presence of the lead actors, only the presence, represents the good point of the film. and, sure, the obvious desire to do a decent work. and if it is not easy to define it more than a memorable movie, the cause is only the impressive number of the films about The Savior.

Mary, Mother of Jesus was interesting, but as a Christian I just couldn't stomach more than an hour. In the movie when Mary told Joseph she was pregnant, Joseph replied, "you are dead to me". That just sounded inappropriate. Soon after there was a scene with Jesus as a boy. Of course little is known about Jesus as a child, so I wasn't surprised when artistic liberties were taken for that period of Christ's life. During this time of the movie a boy began to bully the young character of Jesus. The larger boy said something such as "You think you are so much better than everyone else", and then punched 'Jesus' in the nose. His face was bloody. That too, was inappropriate. In the Bible it is written about Jesus, "He shall give His Angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone". If God would protect Jesus even from tripping over a rock, then most certainly He would have protected Jesus from getting punched by some little punk. Jesus suffered as God ordained it so (scourging, crucifixion). I have a problem with films that try to portray Christ and just make a mess of doing so, always adding in something distasteful. Any movie that would attempt to punch the face of God... is definitely not worth watching.

When I watched it, I was filled with expectancy of a well-written and well-acted movie. The movie was well acted. The actors and actresses did a good job, especially Christian Bale. But the movie itself struck an ill-placed chord in me. The producers and directors made this movie the Hollywood way. There were many things that wasn't right, that didn't come from the scriptures. They could've followed the biblical story of Jesus and Mary and Joseph better. That's just my opinion.

This TV-movie is well-intentioned but mechanical. I knew from the opening that there was a problem with the production when the opening narrative was printed on the screen and read at the same time with a voice that sounded like the station-break announcer.The film just goes through the motions and gives us every cliche of second-rate Biblical movies including Jesus as a fair-skinned Anglo-Saxon. Christian Bale does what he can with the material but is terribly mis-cast. His mother is presented as a politically-correct feminist who apparently is responsible for Jesus' teachings and parables which were, according to the plot, the bedtime stories she told Jesus when he was a child.The sets and costumes are good, but the performances are flat and perfunctory. What we get here is a shallowness reminiscent of school plays. The Gospels are condensed into a 2 hour TV movie that has the profundity of a Readers' Digest version of the Bible.