It seems that many are having a hard time imagining how people could get so upset over a movie. Even is that movie DOES depict their most sacred symbology in a horribly demeening light. It's just a movie. Get over it.
I wonder if anybody remembers the firestorm that surrounded a movie from three decades ago.
Life of Brian.
The Pythons did a take on a story. What if Jesus had a brother. I enjoyed this movie. There was NOTHING in it that was insulting to Jesus.
I recall a march in Phoenix when the movie came to a local art house cinema. The major distributors wouldn't touch it. You couldn't go to Harkins to see that film. There were at least a hundred people out front screaming about blasphemy.
Give me a break.
It's been banned across regions of England. Only in the last few years have some townships "allowed" it's showing. I'm certain there were many towns in Kansas and other third world countries that banned it as well.
Past the jump is a passage from wiki about the controversy. I wish I could include more, but my internet connection sucks, so I'll just leave it at this ... The level of violence we've seen about a movie is most certainly "over the top", but at the risk of apologizng to the terrorists ... I completely understand why they hate us so much and why something like this would spark so much rage. AND ... it is most certainly NOT the majority of people ... it's just a very angry very vocal minority who have been victimized by words much like the right in the US has been victimized by Rush Limbaugh. The maleable mind of a terrorist ... and a republican.
Richard Webster comments in his A Brief History of Blasphemy that, "internalised censorship played a significant role in the handling" of Monty Python's Life of Brian. In his view, "As a satire on religion, this film might well be considered a rather slight production. As blasphemy it was, even in its original version, extremely mild. Yet the film was surrounded from its inception by intense anxiety, in some quarters of the Establishment, about the offence it might cause. As a result it gained a certificate for general release only after some cuts had been made. Perhaps more importantly still, the film was shunned by the BBC and ITV, who declined to show it for fear of offending Christians in this country. Once again a blasphemy was restrained - or its circulation effectively curtailed - not by the force of law but by the internalisation of this law."However, on its initial release in the UK, the film was banned by several town councils – some of which had no cinemas within their boundaries, or had not even seen the film. A member of Harrogate council, one of those that banned the film, revealed during a television interview that the council had not seen the film, and had based their opinion on what they had been told by the Nationwide Festival of Light, of which they knew nothing.
Some bans continued into the 21st century. In 2008, Torbay Council finally permitted the film to be shown after it won an online vote for the English Riviera International Comedy Film Festival. In 2009, it was announced that a thirty-year old ban of the film in the Welsh town of Aberystwyth was finally lifted, and the subsequent showing was attended by Terry Jones and Michael Palin alongside mayor Sue Jones-Davies (who portrayed Judith Iscariot in the film).However, before the showing, an Aberystwyth University student discovered that the film had never been banned in Aberystwyth, but was shown (or was scheduled to be shown) at a cinema in the town in 1981.
In New York, screenings were picketed by both rabbis and nuns ("Nuns with banners!" observed Michael Palin). It was also banned for eight years in Ireland and for a year in Norway (it was marketed in Sweden as '"The film so funny that it was banned in Norway").