November 20, 2006

NBC executives have decided that Madonna's upcoming Nov. 22 concert will air without her mock crucifixion—a provocative act that's recently angered religious leaders and government officials on her tour across Europe. Prior to the decision, several religious groups in the U.S. had vowed to organize a boycott if NBC's decision had gone the other way. Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, commented, "NBC did the right thing. But the fact that they did not say why the offensive part of Madonna's concert was cut showed cowardice. What NBC should have done is to admit that since it refused to air the Danish cartoons that Muslims objected to earlier in the year, it felt obliged not to treat Christians in a discriminatory manner." Madonna insists that her faux crucifixion illustrates the themes of confession and compassion. [AP, 10/20/06]

QUOTE: "Now that so much ink has been spilled over Madonna's foreign adoption, some folks have all but forgotten about the ongoing debate over whether the Material Star should be able to crucify herself on NBC. ... There are some who say that the wise thing for Christians to do is to simply ignore Madonna's latest tirade. They say that, by drawing attention to Madonna's act, the American Family Association and other family-oriented and faith-based groups could simply be boosting Madonna's ratings. Also, liberal critics say that in a pluralistic society, people should be free to view whatever they want on television. ... [But] what if Madonna had decided to burn a model of Mohammed in effigy during her concert? Or re-enact the killing of the courageous Holocaust victim Anne Frank? Or [shoot] a statue of Buddha? I also have to wonder what some free speech enthusiasts would think if NBC aired footage of a homosexual activist being hanged? Or an abortionist being put to death in an electric chair? ... If we do, indeed, live in a pluralistic society, shouldn't religious imagery from all faiths be treated with respect?" —Nathan Tabor, a conservative political activist from North Carolina, commenting on the Madonna crucifixion controversy [crosswalk.com, 10/23/06]

Call it the Borat backlash. Even as English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's skewering satire Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan rakes in revenue (an estimated $135 million internationally thus far), some of its unwitting participants are crying foul—and filing lawsuits. Two University of South Carolina students caught insulting women and minorities in the film claim its producers intentionally used alcohol to "loosen" them up before their encounter with Borat. They've filed suit against 20th Century Fox and three production companies affiliated with the film. On a more serious note, residents of the impoverished Romanian village of Glod, which stands in for a Kazakh village in the film, are also scraping together their miniscule resources for a potential lawsuit. Villagers insist that Cohen's production company lied to them, that they had no idea they'd be depicted as incestuous rapists, prostitutes and abortionists. Said disabled villager Nicu Tudorache, "This is disgusting. They conned us into doing all these things and never told us anything about what was going on. They made us look like primitives, like uncivilized savages. Now they're making millions but have only paid us [about $3 each]." Another Glod resident, Dana Luca, adds, "We thought they came here to help us—not to mock us. We haven't got anything here. We haven't got running water. We can't even bathe. We are poor people, but we're still people." [AP, 11/13-14/06; dailymail.co.uk, 11/13/06; boxofficemojo.com, 1/20/06]

Sacha Baron Cohen, who says he tries to honor his Jewish heritage by keeping kosher and the Sabbath whenever he can, defends his raunchy work and insists that the purpose of his controversial approach is to reveal bigotry in his unsuspecting subjects. "Borat works essentially as a tool. By himself being anti-Semetic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semetism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews." [bbc.co.uk, 11/16/06; AP, 11/16/06]

Hollywood prides itself on its pro-environmental stance. Surprisingly, however, the movie industry is one of the biggest polluters in Southern California. The UCLA Institute of the Environment just released its Southern California Environmental Report Card. Among other things, the study states that movie productions full of vehicles, generators, machinery and explosions generate more pollution than the area's apparel, hotel or aerospace industries. [csmonitor.com, 11/16/06]

QUOTE: "Being in Hollywood, it's very difficult to be pro-life, and I'd been looking for a way to express those beliefs. I feel that it's an important message, because so many women are exploited through abortion, and that's an aspect of it that I feel NARAL, Planned Parenthood and NOW don't want to talk about. I feel there's a huge hypocrisy within those groups, because if you are really about protecting women and empowering women, you need to talk about the exploitive aspects of abortion, and they're not willing to do that. I'm very proud to be a part of Feminists for Life, because I think they deal with the whole aspect of being a woman. To really empower women, society needs to conform to women's needs, not try to force women to abort their children in order to conform to the needs of society." —Everybody Loves Raymond co-star Patricia Heaton [beliefnet.com, 11/06]

QUOTE: "Look, it's never clear how much a movie changes the culture that sees it. But there were many moments in the tradition of American films when entertainment and ideas were not considered to be mutually exclusive. I was raised seeing some of those movies and admiring them and believing that's a noble tradition to partake in." —director Edward Zwick, who's latest film, Blood Diamond, attempts to expose the real-world issue of Africans forced into slavery to support guerilla warfare in the diamond-rich country of Sierra Leone [Entertainment Weekly, 11/17/06]

In response to the growing popularity of mobile text messaging among teens, officials governing New Zealand's national high school exams have decided to allow abbreviated "text speak" on tests. Text language will be permissible for some subjects, but prohibited in others, such as English. Where such abbreviations are allowed, students will be given full credit as long as an answer "clearly shows the required understanding." [AP, 11/13/06]

A government-commissioned study of Internet search-engine queries found that 1.7% of all Web sites catalogued at AOL, MSN and Yahoo are sexually explicit, compared to slightly fewer, 1.1%, of Google's indexed sites. Researcher and UC-Berkeley statistics professor Philip B. Stark also found that about 6% of search engine queries result in at least one explicit Web site, while the most popular searches generate pornographic sites 40% of the time. Filtering software, according to the study, successfully blocked porn 87% to 98% of the time. [AP, 11/15/06 stats]

QUOTE: "I see [evangelical Christians] not as shapers of American culture, I see popular culture shaping them. Evangelicals are different from fundamentalists who reject popular culture because they think it is corrupt. Evangelicals don't want to reject the world, they want to persuade others to the way of Jesus and engage other people in their religion. Embracing popular culture has allowed them to do that." —Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe, commenting on the increased attention given to Christians in pop culture, which has resulted in a $4 billion religious entertainment industry [chicagotribune.com, 11/12/06 stats]