http://www.alternet.org/members/stor...?StoryID=17970
need i say more?
Quote:
| The PR strategy obviously worked. Not only has the movie sold millions of dollars' worth of advance tickets – Variety predicts it will turn a tidy profit – but it's gobbled up acres of free publicity. Much of the mainstream media seems to have been mau-maued into treating the film as a Serious Event. Tuesday's L.A. Times took the depressingly unprecedented step of running its (negative) review on the front page, as if the film were a big news story – "Extry, Extry, read all about it: Messiah nailed to cross. Jews under arrest." The movie also received schizophrenic reviews from mainstream critics like Time's Richard Corliss, who, after beginning with obligatory praise for Gibson's integrity and craftsmanship and blah-blah-blah, makes it clear that he dislikes the film and detests its unrelentingly sadistic delight in Christ's torture. "He takes a flaying and keeps on praying," writes Corliss, who credits The Passion of the Christ with inventing a new genre – "the religious splatter-art film." |
Quote:
| For those of us who are devout nonbelievers, the international resurgence of "traditional" religion is dreadful news, whether it's murderous Islamist militants with an eye on celestial virgins, expansionist Israeli settlers who believe their God gave Jews the land, Hindu fundamentalists who burn Muslims to death in Indian religious riots or literal-minded Christians who believe their purchase on the truth overrides the Constitution (think of Judge Roy Moore and his 10 Commandments statue) or any concern about the polarizing anger their beliefs might engender. As one faithful to secular, tolerant democracy, I happily defend Gibson's right to make The Passion of the Christ and to show it wherever he can – he's entitled to his religious beliefs. But as one who thinks that Christianity is only one myth among many – "Christianism," my old colleague Michael Ventura liked to call it – I wonder whether Mel would do the same for me. |
