The Lashin' of the Christ

Here's a catty little comment from Salon's review of The Passion of the Christ:

We see the Pharisees (it's not hard to notice that all of them have conveniently Semitic hooked or bulbous noses straight out of central casting) agitating for Jesus' blood, and most of the crowd (in the parlance, they're called "rabble," the better to underscore their boorishness and separateness from the true Jesus lovers) seem to agree with them.

But why? The best we can figure is that Jesus is a rebel who, with his message of love and brotherhood (useless business, that), has somehow disrupted the natural order of things. (You'd think he was half of a gay couple trying to get married or something.) A few people, such as the dewy Mary Magdelene (Monica Belluci) and, of course, Jesus' own mother (Maia Morgenstern), gaze at him adoringly, and with great apprehension over what they fear will happen to him next. (The women have very little to do in this picture other than to show anxiety and tearful empathy and to mop things up with little cloths, suggesting that as far as women's roles are concerned, Catholicism hasn't changed a whole lot in 2000 years.)