My daughter works at our small town movie theater, and she’s got the inside scoop: apparently the locals are boycotting The Golden Compass. Attendance is down, almost the only people going are university students, the owner has had calls from people in the community complaining about the movie. Darn. I guess the theater should have booked Mel Gibson’s Passion again — that thing hung around forever here, and had loads of people showing up every night.
Ah, rural America.
Here’s an interesting take on The Golden Compass: it’s a Protestant movie. I can see that.
I suspect that many reviews of this movie are going to begin with some variant of the sentiment, “I was disappointed.” This one is no exception. It’s just not a very good movie; it’s one that packed in lots of miscellaneous detail from the book it is based on, but thereby threw away the core of the story … and it shows. It’s a movie that races along inventively, but futilely, leaving you wondering at the end what the point of all the rushing about of armies of strange characters was all about.
Here’s what CNN says about The Golden Compass:
Culture: A star-studded, big-budget fantasy film released for Christmastime features religion as the villain. Hollywood is collaborating with a militant atheist British children’s book author to indoctrinate children.
Gregg Easterbrook (you already know to expect drooling idiocy) babbles without comprehension. Bill Donohue, of course, thinks it is a plot to corrupt children.
Get real. This movie isn’t going to convert anyone to atheism. It’s a fantasy story. It’s got witches and talking bears in it. It’s going to generate about as many new atheists as Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy generated converts to worship of Eru and the Ainur. It has the nicely appreciated sop to secular interest that the author is an atheist who has no respect for Christian mythology, but this is not a propaganda film — it’s entertainment. If your child’s beliefs can be shattered by a CGI polar bear on a movie screen, you’ve got bigger problems than this one film.
I’m going to go see The Golden Compass this weekend. If it’s a philosophical tract rather than an adventure story, I’m not going to enjoy it much.
And those of you who are upset that religion is one of the villains in this movie — get used to it. Religion is a villain in real life, too.
Although if you’re at work, it probably isn’t a good idea to crank up the volume. Unless you work in a lab, in which case your colleagues might join in on the chorus.
I’m very much looking forward to the opening of The Golden Compass at the end of this week — and we’re even getting the premiere here in little ol’ Morris. I’m having mixed feelings about the way it’s getting enlisted in the culture wars, though. It’s a fantasy movie, and it’s ultimately going to succeed or fail on its merits as entertainment, not its ideology.
Still, I have to like the attitude in this Mark Morford column.
It’s this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit. Don’t you agree?
The movie is a pawn in the War Against Religion, whether we like it or not. It better not suck.
The lesson is that you should never, ever give a network executive control of your fate.
Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”
How can you not like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor? Obviously, Groening and Co. should have just sent the execs a two hour preview clip of HypnoToad, and gone ahead and done whatever they wanted.
At least the good news is that Futurama is coming back for one more year.
Here’s a fun little toy from the Science Museum — use a little physics and logic to bounce a ball into a target. Don’t show it to the kids or they’ll take the computer away from you!
(via Unhindered by Talent)
A few little videos by way of the marvelous Kevin Hayden:
Ladies, did you know that you are just like a cardboard box? We’re supposed to treat you delicately and with respect, just in case you’ve got something in your uterus. If you’ve had a hysterectomy or you’re menstruating, though, and we know the box is empty, well, we don’t have to worry about you so much.
Guys, did you know that you are followed everywhere by a mob of enthusiastic, hyperactive sperm? I love how both sexes can be objectified by the functions of our gonads.
I’ve shown the video for this one before, but I’m going to do it again just because I love the New York Dolls and this will put you in a happy mood for a Monday morning. Here are the New York Dolls performing “Dance Like a Monkey” live:
Listen to Roy Zimmerman’s characterization of “Jerry Falwell’s God” — I think I read something very similar in Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Only milder, and not as musical.
(via God is for suckers!)
