Good and evil, slugging it out.

Christopher Noxon, writer of one of the earliest (and still, one of the best) pieces on Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, opens another in Salon with a bang:

Mel Gibson is on the TV, squinting straight into the camera, talking about ... me.

No, wait, this is even weirder: He's talking to me.

And he's pissed.

Gibson then went "ballistic" on him, right there on Fox, back around the time his article appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and Noxon is still wondering, "So which is it: Is Gibson a master marketer or a conspiracy-minded ideologue? After a year of reporting on and following this remarkable story, I still can't decide."

The enigma has taken to airwaves most recently in an hour-long talk with Diane Sawyer and Heather Havrilesky casts an amused but far from smirking look. Gibson on evil: "It's the thing you can't see. I'm a believer, by the way. So if you believe, you believe that there are big realms of good and evil, and they're slugging it out." Havrilesky: "He's talking about Disney and Comcast, right?"

Meanwhile, at Movie City News, David Poland calls - quite rightly, it seems, too - for the firing of FoxNews.com reporter Roger Friedman (background) and Gary Dretzka's mind boggles at the media blitz.

For those who can't afford to subscribe (or simply won't), Matt Langdon - who also has excellent entries on documentaries and recently released DVDs, by the way - helpfully excerpts a LA Times piece on Jim Caviezel, who plays the Messiah and is a devout Catholic himself.

Posted by dwhudson at February 18, 2004 3:30 PM