I can remember exactly what was reported. Mel Gibson claimed to be upset about the people describing his film as anti-semitic, and requested input from various people. I remember a lot of things which were discarded (my favorite suggestion was that he should end the film with a caption along the lines of "thousands of Jews were crucified each year by the Roman empire ... but only one came back" or somesuch).

Now, this is an important topic for some, so I'm going to be clear, I'm paraphrasing this line, but the line which was cut was something along the lines of "Let his blood be on us and our children" or some such. I know that the gist of the line was Caiaphas taking responsibility for Jesus's death, and that the reason it's such a controversial line is that anti-semites take it as confirmation that current-Jews are, indeed, responsible for the death of Christ. The Catholic Church feels that this line is unneccessary for passion plays, inconsistent with the teachings of the Church, and promotes anti-semitism.

In light of all this, Gibson voluntarily chose to cut the subtitle (though leaving the line in), either because he genuinely isn't anti-semitic and was upset at the accusations that he was, or because he is anti-semitic but is trying to hide it by stamping out the more obvious examples in the film. [For the record, my opinion is the former, but I know there are people who believe the latter as well.] I'm assuming, since you have no other examples, that either there are no other examples or that the other examples would all be in line with this, ie: questionably anti-semitic + ultimately unneccessary for the film = cut.

Perhaps you could explain the bizarre definition of censorship which you are using? Even better, perhaps you could explain how a subtitle for a line which you already know the translation of would even be neccessary?

Actually, wait, I've got an even better one:

If that's your definition of censorship, why would you want *any* subtitles on the film? Unlike your "known fact", it's actually highly documented that Gibson's intention was to release the film without subtitles of any kind, and he only put them on after a lot of pressure from distributors to make it more marketable. So wouldn't the "uncensored" version have no subtitles?

EDIT: If I hadn't spent too-long writing this, I'd have beaten popcorn to making that point...

If you're putting yourself out there by running a website and can't take criticism, you might as well quit now.

Quite ridicoulous. Mel was pretty vocal about not caving into anyone regarding this film. For you to make assertions with no facts is irresponsible.

Yeah, how dare anybody point out that there are plenty of disreputable websites out there who make up fake covers in order to get more people to visit their sites! How dare he arrogantly point out that this happens all the time? What an arrogant, Irish bastard.

That said, I'm a bit surprised that people expected a cover which was anything other than the poster; I assumed (rightly, it looks like) they'd go for a "less is more" type thing, since everybody's already aware of it anyway.

"Higher powers" forced Mel to censor this cover. Thats a fact!~

If there were NO subs I don't think it would have made any money at all

The blood line is one line that’s taken out. And notice in the movie, there's quite a few lines where the Jews speak but nothing is displayed.

Yea I heard about the possible “thousands” quote being inserted at the end. Thank God that did not happen.

No, it was never in. Like any movie, it got test-screened, previewed whatever. Things go in and out of movies all the time. Mel made a decision for (a) the translations to be showed and (b) that line to be cut, it was his film, and no studio was telling him what to do.

So it was some wack ass Jewish group with agenda saying something should be in. It probably was never seriously considered, but I can't say for sure, becuase I ain't Mel Gibson.

We weren't and aren't talking about money. You claimed it was censorship that he chose to make a change to his original intention, we pointed out a significantly larger original intention which he *factually* compromised on.

Notice in the movie that there are quite a few parts where people speak and nothing is displayed. Notice that Mel Gibson didn't want the movie to have subtitles at all, because he wanted the performances to speak for themselves, and thus, notice that the movie *only* adds subtitles when it's not immediately obvious what the people are saying. There are dozens of asides which are untranslated, most of which have nothing to do with Judaism at all.

Actually, no, it was proposed by a Jew whom Gibson had specifically invited to an advance screening because he respected him and wanted to get a Jewish opinion on how to make the movie less susceptible to charges of anti-semitism. Gibson even claimed to like the idea, though I assumed he was just being polite.

The line remains in the movie when spoken in aramaic, but the subtitle was removed. Also, it's quite interesting that the Catholic Church feels the line is unnecessary since it's a direct quote from the Bible. There are seemingly a lot of lines in the Bible the Catholic Church feels are unnecessary, just as there is a lot of stuff NOT in the Bible that the Catholic Church finds pre-eminent.

Why has this suddenly become an agenda thread, filled with arguments and half-truths from uninformed posters?

BACK ON TOPIC:

So, the cover eh?

Looks good to me.

'sides, if you don't like it, make you own damn cover..

(a) davisdvd is widely acknowledged as one of the most useful information sites around. No DVD aficionado in his right mind would want it to disappear.

(b) What DonnachaOne did was not criticism. It was an innuendo-filled jump to conclusions, based on his perception of conduct in DVD sites (although he doesn't know a thing of the specific track record of davisdvd) and on the DVD art looking too much like the poster, so it must be fake, right? Right? As for the absence of the DVD logo, just go to thedigitalbits (who BTW has posted the exact same cover art) and see how much of the upcoming DVD art is missing the logo.