A Good Point About The Passion
Via Professor Bainbridge, I came across this column by Time Magazine's Richard Corliss:
A very good point. Funny how many on the left are eager to defend Howard Stern's show under the free speech banner yet want to dismiss Mel Gibson's movie as so much dogmatic trash.
I haven't seen the movie yet and won't be commenting on it until I have but I have a sense that the furor surrounding this movie is much ado about nothing.
Liberals--and being a member of the media, I of course count myself among them--can be a pretty funny bunch. When we are sympathetic to a controversial work of pop culture, we invoke the artist's right to create in an climate of total freedom, whatever feelings of outrage the work may stoke among the ignorati. (That is: other people.) When we disapprove, we talk about his responsibility to the sensitivities and sensibilities of good people. (That is: us.) So, in the aesthetico-religious sphere, we defend Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ," which portrays Jesus as a human who slowly learns he's divine, and Kevin Smith's "Dogma," a raw comedy about an abortion-clinic worker who is a lineal descendant of Jesus. ...
The latest film of faith, by the movie industry's other Church-going Catholic, Mel Gibson, has received a frostier, more fulminating response.
A very good point. Funny how many on the left are eager to defend Howard Stern's show under the free speech banner yet want to dismiss Mel Gibson's movie as so much dogmatic trash.
I haven't seen the movie yet and won't be commenting on it until I have but I have a sense that the furor surrounding this movie is much ado about nothing.
tom
pparets
The Whistler
Hairy Polemic
Chief RZ
