Bill Donohue will remain un-laid:
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Director Ron Howard on Tuesday defended his
film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown’s “Angels &
Demons” from criticism that it smears the Roman Catholic Church,
heightening an ongoing battle over fictional depictions of the Vatican.
Howard, who also directed the 2006 movie adaptation of “The Da Vinci
Code,” posted a blog at The Huffington Post website saying that neither
he nor his new movie “Angels & Demons,” which debuts in May and
stars Tom Hanks, are anti-Catholic.
“And let me be a little controversial: I believe Catholics,
including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for
what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of
Rome,” Howard wrote.
Howard’s post came in response to an opinion piece in the New York
Daily News by Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for
Religious and Civil Rights, last week. Donahue accused Brown and Howard
of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”
Last year, the Catholic Church refused to let “Angels & Demons”
be filmed in churches in Rome because of the Vatican’s outrage over
“The Da Vinci Code.”
My chief problem with “Angels and Demons” (the book, natch, nobody’s slipped me a screener or anything) is that like “The DaVinci Code” before it, it’s such a gigantic piece of shit. I’m a card-carrying confirmed member of Donohue’s cannibalistic crucifixion cult, so I’m as available as anyone to get offended by depictions of the Roman Catholic Church as a power-mad conspiracy-driven sinkhole where decency and faith go to die and power goes to become exalted through corruption, yet I remain unoffended by the work of Dan Brown because it’s such fucking CRAP.
Honestly. When The DaVinci Code was first published there was this huge scandalous nonsensical brouhaha, and it enraged the shit out of me, mostly because it was billed as this groundbreaking work of religious blasphemy, and in reality it was this cheap, pulpy, kind of sad book sold to people who don’t really know much about religion or faith.
It violated Athenae’s First Rule of Being An Asshole: If you’re going to be offensive, make it fucking count. There wasn’t anything alleged in TDC that hasn’t been well-known to basement-dwelling nutbars for decades, not to mention actual Biblical scholars. Shock the shit out of me, you mean Mary Magdalene might not have been a whore as we know whores today, that her role in Jesus’ band of merry men might have been deliberately dumbed down and obscured to preserve an all-male priesthood? Get the fuck out. Apparently I was supposed to be scandalized by this accusation which no one had ever made before except for everybody ever. Unfortunately I’d readthis, and so my outrage was focused on Brown ripping off Laurie King’s idea and hoping she’d sue his irritating ass.
The real reason I lack outrage, though? The fucking earth is caving in right now. Iran’s about to go all nuke-tastic, apparently Venezuela can kill us all with books, everyone I know is either out of a job or about to be, and every day children starve to death all over the planet and get blown up by land mines and don’t have access to schools and get married off at the age of seven to creepy old dudes who may or may not be related to them but want to rape them no matter what. Every day this occurs. There is no shortage of shit for Catholics to do. It’s not like we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs.
Yet what Donohue, a man with an enormous microphone and a willing audience of the easily led who apparently hang on his every word, wants us Catholics to get morally outraged about is a movie made from a crappy book which last I checked has killed exactly nobody. That’s a much bigger scandal than anything Dan Brown’s admittedly limited imagination has cooked up to date.
A.