Exactly. America lurches from one sensational happening to another. Before it was Janet Jackson's boob. Now the the Passion. Next couple of weeks it will something else. Maybe the movie about Troy will be the next biggest blockbuster money making movie of all time.
I have a concern that the fact that so many people have been swept up in seeing this movie says as much about the power of publicity, the dominance of the media, the culture war, and the craving for ever more sensational images, as it does about Christian piety. If the movie had been 20% less violent it would probably garnered no criticism but then maybe nobody would have gone to see it. What made it so different than other movies about the life of Christ? It was the degree of violence. Instead of being what other biblical epics were billed as "The Greatest Story Ever Told, this was the Bloodiest Story Ever Told.
That speculation ascribes as primary incentive to view a movie (and particularly, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"), "to see violence."
It's an incorrect speculation. And publicly asserting such speculation is belittling to those who have viewed the movie.
Excuse, me but it's KRAUTHAMMER who is in "high dudgeon" I'm just responding to his smear that Gibson's perpetrating a "blood libel." (Talk about hysterical rhetoric). Take you complaints about "sensationalizing" to him -- it's his sensational colum that triggered this thread.