COMM 101 & COMM 228 IMPORTANT!
No class tomorrow (Monday). I will spend the day meeting with groups in my office (410 Burton Morgan). See Equipment/Meeting Calendar for details.

Happy fifth birthday lil' Meg!

Alex fires back:

This bizarre hatred of The Passion is getting out of control. Is it really that hard to believe that someone would want to make a movie about the Christ that didn't try to bring him down in some way? Most Christians that I talk to say the movie was extraordinary and powerful. Non-Christians hate it. Imagine that. First they attacked it as anti-Semitic, (a ridiculous claim that has since been dropped). Then they said it was bad because Mel's dad is a fundamentalist (and yes, probably a nut). Then they tried to make Mel look like a fundamentalist idiot. Then they attacked the movie for being too violent. Since when did the media start worrying about stuff being too violent? This is the same group of quasi-intellectuals that enjoy the Vagina Monologues and thought it ludicrous that anyone would be offended by Janet's nipple. All of a sudden they change their tune and say that this movie is too violent? Since when did they step up in favor of censorship or moral standards? I wonder if that Jesus guy has anything to do with it? Now, with the link that Gilbie posts calls it anti-gay, or "sadomasochistic male narcissism" and then infers (as far as I can tell) that Mel and the crew are all repressed homosexuals. Is this truly the level of debate that is going to rage around this movie?

[(Clever Title)]

Christopher Hitchens, reviewing "Passion" in Slate, pulls no punches. His critique is so powerful that I am choosing to quote it en extenso:

This may seem like an oblique way in which to approach Mel Gibson's ghastly movie The Passion. But it came back to me this week that an associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I've since had that confirmed by other sources. And, long before he emerged as the spear-carrier for the sort of Catholicism once preached by Gen. Franco and the persecutors of Dreyfus, Mel Gibson attained a brief notoriety for his loud and crude attacks on gays. Now he's become the proud producer of a movie that relies for its effect almost entirely on sadomasochistic male narcissism. The culture of blackshirt and brownshirt pseudomasculinity, as has often been pointed out, depended on some keen shared interests. Among them were massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, an obsession with flogging and a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews. Well, I mean to say, have you seen Mel's movie?
Last Wednesday, the Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver posted a sign on its roadside marquee. It read "Jews Killed the Lord Jesus." This pigsty of a church has, I think you will agree, an unimprovable name. But its elders, or whatever they call themselves, can't have had time to see the movie, which only opened that same Ash Wednesday. Nor, I think it safe to say, had they chosen the slogan only on the spur of the moment. No: They had been thinking this for quite a long time and were emboldened to "come out" and say so under the cover of a piece of devotional cinematic pornography. Some of us saw this coming. In America, I hope and believe, the sinister effect will be blunted by generations of civilized co-existence. But think for a moment what will happen when Gibson reaps the residual and overseas profits from screenings of the film in Egypt and Syria, or in Eastern Europe, where things are a bit more raw.
Apparently seeking to curry favor, Gibson announced a few weeks ago that he had cut the scene where a Jewish mob yells for the blood of Jesus to descend on the heads of its children (a scene that occurs in only one of the four contradictory Gospels). Gibson lied. The scene is still there, spoken in Aramaic. Only the English subtitle has been removed. Propagandists in other countries will be able to subtitle it any way they like.

Thanks to Logan's Lurch.