Friday, March 16, 2007

Robert Novak at the Newsweek/Washington Post blog On Faith, complaining about the treatment of Catholics in American culture:

In the recent film Elizabeth (about Queen Elizabeth II), a Catholic priest and emissary from the Pope who is smuggled into England is shown beating to death with his bare hands a young Protestant nobleman. Can you imagine a rabbi treated that way by Hollywood?

Er...:

Early in his filmmaking career, Allen made Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)"(1972). The film consists of a series of satiric sketches on sexual subjects. One sketch presents a game show called "What's Your Perversion?" The contestant, old Rabbi Baumel, is allowed to act out his fantasy. He is tied to a chair with a silk stocking and whipped by a beautiful blonde, all the while watching his wife eat pork.

Yeah, that's much more respectful.

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(Novak link via TBogg and Whiskey Fire. Just for the record, the "recent" "Hollywood" movie Elizabeth was made in 1998; it was a co-production of England's Channel 4 Films, England's Working Title Films, and the then London-based PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, and was directed by Shekhar Kapur, who was born in what is now Pakistan.)

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And Tom reminds me in comments that Novak has his roman numeral wrong -- the Elizabeth of Elizabeth is, of course, Elizabeth I, not Elizabeth II. I assumed Novak knew this was a period piece, but who knows? Maybe he actually thinks it's about the current queen.

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