Category: Culture

Celestial Pictures is restoring and rereleasing 75% of the Shaw Brothers library on DVD. Alas, they’re all region 3 DVDs. If only I’d just purchased a region-free DVD player…

Oh, wait. I did.

Who doesn’t need more books? Lorem Ipsum, the hot new used bookstore in Inman Square, is throwing a grand opening party this Friday at 7 PM. My brother made their bookshelves. They have a blog. They’re cool. See you there.

Hey, look — liberal talk radio.

That actually fits the pattern. The news media is slanting increasingly conservative, but the entertainment media is darned liberal.

Moriarty reviewed The Passion over on AICN; unlike most of the Passion reviews on AICN, his was fairly negative. I note his review not because of that directly, but because of some of the replies to the review:

“Most movies that are made in Hollywood are anti-white? Hollywood is controlled by jews. Most Hollywood movies have British and German villains. Blacks are overrepresented on TV. They’re either seen as the “victim” or superior to Whites. Blacks are NEVER portrayed negatviely, whereas whites are always the villains. Clearly this is anti-white racism at the hands of Hollywood jews.”

And:

“Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate and betrayed by the Jewish people… Sorry to say but thats basically what you get when you look at the different books of the Bible. The Romans may have done the crucifying, but the Jewish people ultimately turned their backs on Him. Oh and as for Moriarty talking about how Pilate was softened because of when the books were written so as to not anger the Roman occupiers… well yeah I saw that History Channel documentary too about 4 weeks ago….. Just because its on television deosn’t make it true, that was a small group of historians conjecture about the crucifixion. Bottom line, if you’re Christain you already know this story, and are just glad that someone made a high-quality version of it to help explain one small bit of our faith to others. If the details are hard to swallow, well history is a bitch sometimes….”

Those are only two replies out of quite a few. Most of them are thoughtful, interesting, and not racist or anti-Semitic. But it’s the two guys out of a hundred who will take the movie as affirmation of their racism that I worry about.

William Cork is keeping a very good blog on The Passion. I pretty much concur with his thoughts on the movie, which are summarized here.

I still think Mel Gibson is a well-meaning individual, but until he takes a deep breath and acknowledges that his father is a lunatic and that his movie is going to inspire hatred, it really doesn’t matter what his motivations are. Take a look at some Hutton Gibson quotes from the link above (via Orcinus):

“I don’t know what their [the Jews’] agenda is except that it’s all about control. They’re after one world religion and one world government. That’s why they’ve attacked the Catholic Church so strongly, to ultimately take control over it by their doctrine and make one world religion and one world government.”

And:

“To a Jew a Christian commits idolatry every time he looks at a crucifix and says a prayer. You know they’re in control and they’re going to get in control the way things are going. Because they get all of our people…They killed several generations of us Americans [referring to WWI and WWII] … The Jews weren’t in the army much in WWI that because they were fomenting a revolt in Russia. America had no right to fight in foreign wars.”

This is purely and utterly sick. Expect to see more of it. The white supremacists are coming out of the woodwork on this one; the silver lining to all this is that it’ll get some of them out from under their rocks.

The Apprentice has been pretty much enh for a couple of weeks — one team was clearly better, and they were destroying the other team. There was some amusement value from watching Jessie stab Kristi, and then get fired the next week. (Kristi: “What should I do?” Jessie: “Oh, don’t say anything until Mr. Trump talks to you.” Kristi: “OK!” Later, Trump: “You’re not very assertive, Kristi. You’re fired.”)

Oh, and the bit where Troy carefully manipulated the Fab Five into giving him a good item for a charity auction? That was great. He told the camera what he was gonna do and say, he did it, and it worked like a charm. But there weren’t a lot of good moments like that.

This week, on the other hand, ruled. It was a nice simple contest; the two project leaders negotiated for their choice of two apartments, each team renovated the apartment they wound up with, and the side that got the best percentage increase over the base lease price for the apartment won. For the first time, you had two contestants negotiating with each other, and Troy destroyed Katrina. In the end he got what he wanted by the flip of a coin, but I’d say he still wound up with an advantage because Katrina was seriously pissed off about it. If he’d lost, he would have shrugged it off.

Side note: the real question was not which apartment looked nicer, but which apartment had a lower base lease price. A hundred dollar increase over the base price means a lot more if the base lease price is low. Because the show isn’t really about business, nobody mentioned that.

Tammy sucked down the loss for being disloyal, which is a recurring theme. Also because she’s been startlingly non-effective in general, but mostly because she wasn’t loyal to her team.

It’s getting down to the smart people. Right now I’m betting on Troy and Amy, or perhaps Nick. Most likely winner is Troy, because he’s a very good manipulator. He had a better chance before Amy wound up on his team, though; he was going to slip right through till the end but now he has real competition on his team.

Why are you not reading Broog’s film criticism? Do you not know what it is that you are missing?

The mighty cinematic edifice which is the human Jackson’s rendering of Tolkien’s classic novel grinds to its imperial conclusion in the third film, “Lord of the Rings: The Fat Jolly Hobbit Saves Middle Earth And Everyone Is Nice To His Whiny Friend”. The movie follows the exploits of Sam as he hauls his limp and apparently pointless companion across the dark desolation of Mordor, struggling against hunger, despair, orcs, giant spiders, Gollum, and what must surely be an overpowering desire to slap Frodo until he resembles a hubcap.

Now you have no excuse.

“Dave Sim is the only person out there who can tell us what it’s like to self-publish your own wholly idiosyncratic black-and-white comic book for 25 years straight while delivering massive polemics on esoteric issues, and from points of view that most people find indefensible. He’s a wholly unique individual. And while you could argue that EVERYONE is wholly unique, and I’d have to agree, that doesn’t mean they have wholly unique things to say. Dave does.”

My college friend and housemate Tasha works for The Onion A.V. Club. (She writes reviews, conducts interviews, and generally gets to live a life full of interesting people and things.) She spent a chunk of yesterday trying to convince Dave Sim to let her interview him, and then blogged about the phone conversation. It’s brilliant.

I got three comments (on the same entry) in my Livejournal mirror encouraging me to go see The Passion of the Christ. This does not, in fact, convince me to adopt the recommended course of action.

This is pretty much the sort of thing that I anticipated: I don’t think Mel Gibson set out to make a dangerous movie, but I thought that it was the kind of movie that would encourage poor behavior unless he took counterbalancing steps. Spam comments aren’t dangerous, but they do show a distinct disregard for social mores. I expect more of the same, and possibly darker actions. Call me a cynic.

(Anonymous comments are still enabled over there, and I still don’t track IP addresses there, but I do screen anonymous comments. I won’t screen anything but spam.)