The final post (I hope) will be after I see the movie (don’t make me tell you how busy I am). But I can’t resist commenting anyway.
First, Robert Musil passes along a great comment: “If you didn’t like the movie, you probably didn’t like the book.”. I bet that accounts for the skew between viewers and critics he reports – 99% positive for movie goers, 54% rotten for critics.
OK, can we officially close the Jew-hating aspect of the movie? All those religious fanatics have seen it, and yet no Jew-hating incidents — although the other fearless leader heard a claim by someone from the ADL during a panel discussion that a nice Jewish person was distressed at seeing a poster for the movie posted at a school and the person who posted it didn’t promptly remove it despite the distress. If that’s the complaint, time to move on to real outrages.
And now we have pundits (like Page and Safire – they don’t agree to often) going on record that the problem with Jew-hatred and the movie will be overseas, and not here. OK, in Europe and the Middle East there is already a lot of Jew-hatred, and the materials that float around in those locals are far more inflammatory — and unambiguously filled with Jew-hatred — than the movie The Passion. And it’s not like either of those two places are very Christian anymore, although I grant that they once were. But it’s odd that the thrust should be The Passion, and not the existing Jew-hatred in those places, like so called art, literature, or entertainment. I mean, if we’re going to talk about Jew-hatred overseas, lets be honest about it, and let’s talk about the virulent home grown stuff over there that really is far, far worse than anything Mel or his movie have even been accused of. Try Little Green Footballs if you want to find links to some real live breathing Jew-hatred.
And how about Hollywood. After giving Mel and his movie the cold shoulder, they gave a nice big wet smootchie to Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi filmmaker extraordinaire. Nice to know principle still counts for something.
When Bill O’Reilly asked him what he learned from all this, Gibson joked “have another Bible script handy because the studios are all going to want to do it now.” After the weekend the The Passion just had, they aren’t laughing at that remark in Hollywood – they’re too busy looking for Bible scripts to shoot. But not just any Bible scripts after the box office failures of Dogma and Last Temptation of Christ, but ones that ordinary Christians can identify with.
