Saw the following in a piece by one Colin McEnroe, reprinted in THE FUNNY TIMES (March '08 issue, page 20):
"THE GOLDEN COMPASS. That sounds like something . . . bestowed by angels and buried in a hillside in upstate New York, but it's actually a movie starring Nicole Kidman.
"The movie is based on a series of books by Philip Pullman. Some religious groups claim the books are full of Pullman's atheist, humanist rejection of all religion. And that the moviemakers took all that stuff out so the movie would sell better. You'd think that would make the atheists mad and the religious people happy, but it's the other way around, because the religious people worry that children will like the movie and read the books and decide God does not exist. Because children are shallow and untrustworthy, and you can't rely on them to just watch the movie and not go sneaking off to the library later on."
--somehow that last line's neat reversal of the complaints of generations of English teachers really gets the absurdity of the boycotters' position to me.
Speaking of THE GOLDEN COMPASS, the film is continuing to do so well overseas that the studio may go ahead and make the sequels despite their disappointment at the first installment's making "only" about seventy million dollars in the U.S. (as opposed to nearing three hundred million abroad). According to Kristin Thompson's always informative blog, a key factor will be how well the dvd does when it's released at the end of April. If so, the boycotters will have to get ready for another round, if they can distract themselves from the presidential election for long enough to do so.
For more on the story (and the continuing saga of New Line's dissolution), see
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=226
and
http://www.kristinthompson.net/blog/?p=233
--JDR
Bomb Cyclone
34 minutes ago
3 comments:
While the "last line's neat reversal" no doubt gave its author a satisfying tingle, it is also pure straw-man (and a remarkably absurd, condescending, and insulting thing to charge). The problem that Christian critics of the series have with the toning down of the first movie is _of course_ not that children will read, but that it is designed* to lull _parents_ into a sense that the series as a whole is as (relatively) inoccuous as the first movie. Which it can hardly be, given the plot and tone of the second, and esp. of the third, installments.
*That is, in part: it was also clearly intended to help the movie _make more money_; but that would also further the prospects of the rest, and still more polemical, of the films being made.
The more I re-watch the movie, the more I love it. I was wondering when someone else was going to make the Book of Mormon connection!!
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