You know how often Hollywood calls itself “brave.” It’s by far the most overused adjective the night of the Oscars. I love when they call an actor “brave” or “fearless” for putting on twenty pounds for a role. Heck, I put on twenty pounds last year and nobody called me brave. They call me fat.
But they love facing down the “assault” of press releases from Christian groups. They eat it up when they are able to “stand up” in the face of a “barrage of criticism” from some evangelist group.
Well, to let you know how brave Hollywood really is, check out the brave director Roland Emmerich. In his new movie 2012 Emmerich shows the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican rolling on top of a crowd of churchgoers, bishops have the roof fall in on their mitred noggins. The arms of the Jesus the Redeemer statue in Rio De Janiero fall off right before the whole thing falls over and goes boom.
And Emmerich also decided to demolish something else…but he didn’t. Wanna’ guess why?
Yahoo reports:
For “2012,” Emmerich set his sites on destroying the some biggest landmarks around the world, from Rome to Rio. But there’s one place that Emmerich wanted to demolish but didn’t: the Kaaba, the cube-shaped structure located in the center of Mecca. It’s the focus of prayers and the site of the Hajj, the biggest, most important pilgrimage in Islam.
“Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit,” the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. “But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, ‘I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.’ And he was right.”
Emmerich went on: “We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”
He kinda’ left it out. But it was crucial to the story to have a bunch of bishops crushed?
I love the part where he generalizes his own cowardice into a worldwide problem. Now, of course, he’s right in the sense that “2012” is not worth dying over. It’s not even worth the ten dollars it would cost to see it.
But the next time Hollywood thinks about praising itself itself for being brave in the face of a William Donahue press release from The Catholic League, just spare me.
I’m so upset by this that I’m going to go bravely eat some hot dogs and bravely get fat.
