Returns.

I'll have to keep it brief today (look for "Weekend Shorts" tomorrow), but a bit of good news at least: Rick McGinnis, feisty and opinionated, and therefore, a great read whether you always agree with him or not, is back and blogging. And how. "Yes, I'm back, and yes, this is a bloody huge entry."

Luther

Brian Helgeland's The Order is the catalyst for a lengthy contemplation of "the spectre of resurgent anti-Catholicism," which is actually all the more interesting because he acknowledges that it's "a pretty toothless thing if its most visible manifestations are crap thrillers with unearned pretensions." I look forward to his comments on Mel Gibson's The Passion and wonder if we'll ever get the chance to read his take on Edgardo Mortara, a movie that was to have been based on the famous kidnapping of a Jewish boy by that name in 1858, instigated by Pope Pius IX (to have been played by Anthony Hopkins, while Javier Bardem was to have played the boy's father).

My understanding is that the movie was eventually put on ice when Film Four was shut down (though you can still trade shares in the film at the Hollywood Stock Exchange). Maybe it's just as well. The Passion has been rough enough on Vatican-Jewish relations recently and Pius IX's beatification a few years ago kicked up enough dust at the time; Edgardo would more likely rub salt into rather than heal wounds.

But what of this apparent return of religion to the screen in the wake of the wars waged by a fundamentalist Christian president against predominantly Islamic countries? Whether they take the form of "cheap thrillers" or attempts at the old-fashioned historical epic, like Luther, wouldn't it be, you know, kind of nice if, among them, there were at least one or two films that depicted the positive effect religion can have on lives? Or even a positive role model like, say, Susan Sarandon's Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking.

Stephen Holden, though, reminds us today in the New York Times that the last thing global conflict is going to be breeding, onscreen or off, is peace, love and understanding:

With religious fundamentalists of every stripe ferociously resisting globalization and modernity, variations of the same primal struggle are still being acted out all over the world. And you are likely to come away from Luther with the useful but gloomy realization that the movie's essential conflict is a never-ending ideological rift programmed into the species.

By the way. Allow me this somewhat related, though not exactly film-related, pointer: Darren Hughes, specifically, the recent entries on Edward Said and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Posted by dwhudson at September 26, 2003 6:36 AM