Posted on 05/08/2005 1:43:38 PM PDT by Simmy2.5
The lucrative summer moviegoing season suffered its worst start in years on Sunday, as the costly Crusades epic "Kingdom of Heaven" crawled into the No. 1 slot at the North American weekend box office with meager ticket sales of just $20 million.
The film, which cost nearly $150 million to produce, stars Orlando Bloom -- "Hollywood's No. 1 pretty boy," according to Rolling Stone magazine -- as a humble French blacksmith who takes on the Arabs during the 12th century.
It was directed by British filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott, who had better luck with such films as "Gladiator" and "Hannibal," and released by 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp.
Industry hopes that "Kingdom" would pull the business out a of a lengthy slump were dashed: the box office has now endured 11 "down" weekends when compared with the year-ago periods. According to tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, this ties the longest losing streak, which ran from July to October in 2000.
"Kingdom" also marks the weakest movie to kick off summer in the eight years since Hollywood decided to move the busy season two weeks earlier to the start of May from the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
Opening at No. 2 this weekend was the horror remake "House of Wax," starring ubiquitous hotels heiress Paris Hilton, which earned a modest $12.2 million. The Warner Bros. release cost about $30 million to produce.
Last weekend's champion, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" slipped to No. 3 with $9.1 million. The Walt Disney Co. release cost about $50 million to produce.
No one wants to pay $10 for a PC version of history!
This years Alexander and Troy put together. An insufferable mega-turkey.
Propaganda how?
It's nothing of the sort. Most of the Christians come off quite well. Except for Saladin, Muslims barely get any screen time.
?,.....where is,.... '9-11',.... THE MOVIE?
They've forgotten how to make these sort of films. 'Lawrence of Arabia' this ain't. Where's David Lean where you need him?
HOW and those other remakes of old horror movies are aimed at 14 year olds and no one else.
Kingdom of Heaven is designed to be a dream movie for those guilt-ridden creatures who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the nasty white men of America and Europe would back off. A dream movie for the PC establishment, except for one little detail: it isn’t true.
Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.”
Professor Jonathan Philips, author of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, also dismissed the film as history and took issue with its portrayal of the Crusader Knights Templars as villains: “The Templars as ‘baddies’ is only sustainable from the Muslim perspective, and ‘baddies’ is the wrong way to show it anyway. They are the biggest threat to the Muslims and many end up being killed because their sworn vocation is to defend the Holy Land.”
Nor does Kingdom of Heaven take any notice of the historical realities of Christians and Jews who lived under Muslim rule. They were never treated as equals or accorded full rights as citizens, and always suffered under various forms of institutionalized discrimination and harassment.
The Muslim warrior Saladin, who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187, is, according to a film publicist, a “hero of the piece.” He is one of the most legendary figures of the Crusades and in our age he has become PC as well: Saladin has become the prototype of the tolerant, magnanimous Muslim warrior, historical proof of the nobility of Islam and even of its superiority to wicked, Western, colonialist Christianity. In The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Amin Maalouf portrays the Crusaders as little more than savages, even gorging themselves on the flesh of those they have murdered. But Saladin! “He was always affable with visitors, insisting that they stay to eat, treating them with full honours, even if they were infidels, and satisfying all their requests. He could not bear to let someone who had come to him depart disappointed, and there were those who did not hesitate to take advantage of this quality. One day, during a truce with the Franj [Franks], the ‘Brins,’ lord of Antioch, arrived unexpectedly at Saladin’s tent and asked him to return a district that the sultan had taken four years earlier. And he agreed!” The lovable lug! If asked, he might have given away the entire Holy Land!
However, as I explain in my forthcoming book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades (Regnery), the real Saladin was not the proto-multiculturalist and early version of Nelson Mandela that he is made out to be by modern-day PC myth. Much is made of the fact that when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in October 1187, he treated the Christians with magnanimity — in sharp contrast to the behavior of the Crusaders in 1099. But Saladin was no stranger to massacre: when his forces decisively defeated the Crusaders at Hattin on July 3, 1187, he ordered the mass execution of his Christian opponents. According to his secretary, Imad ed-Din, Saladin “ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”
Also, when Saladin and his men entered Jerusalem later that year, their magnanimity was actually pragmatism. He had initially planned to put to death all the Christians in the city. However, when the Christian commander inside Jerusalem, Balian of Ibelin, threatened in turn to destroy the city and kill all the Muslims there before Saladin could get inside, Saladin relented — although once inside the city he did enslave many of the Christians who could not afford to buy their way out of town.
Yet despite Kingdom of Heaven’s numerous whitewashes of history and strenuous efforts to portray the Muslims of the Crusader era in a favorable light, Islamic apologist Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at the University of California, is in a froth about the film: “In my view,” he raged, “it is inevitable – I’m willing to risk my reputation on this – that after this movie is released there will be hate crimes committed directly because of it. People will go see it on a weekend and decide to teach some turbanhead a lesson.” Of course, this is less an indictment of the film than of the American people. I think it very likely that there will be no hate crimes against Muslims committed because of this film — and I hope that in that event Dr. Abou El Fadl’s reputation will be accorded the treatment it deserves.
In any event, Kingdom of Heaven cost over $150 million to make, features an all-star cast, and is being touted as “a fascinating history lesson.” Fascinating, maybe — but only as evidence of the lengths to which modern Westerners are willing to go to delude themselves.
(from Robert Spencer)
And while were dwelling on the the "Crusaders" does the movie dwell in the area of the Islamic invasion of Spain before the Crusades?
Movie tickets are just too blasted expensive. If I can't see it at the dollar theatre, I don't see it. The lone exception in the past decade....LOTR.
It focuses on what seems like about a month or so. Just before the Saladin's siege of Jerusalem.
I think that later this summer... Serenity will surprise alot of people... especially the movie studio who moved it from early spring release to late summer.
look at the bright side...they have good popcorn
I hope Hollywierd never gets it in their collective heads to remake The Abominable Dr. Phibes or any other of the classic Vincent Price films...
I also cannot stand gayboy Orlando Bloom, who has no business in a leading role. I prayed the end of his last turkey, Troy.
But its a free country. You can watch it over and over at $10 a pop. The movie is bombing at the box office and they need your money.
Wait about 2 months, and catch it for $1.50 at the second run theater. Wait a few more months and pick it up from the discount bin at Wal Mart.
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