Anything that p*sses off the mad mullahs is worth seeing twice in my book. In addition to seeing cool special effects you can set 10th century heads spinning in blind hatred as you enjoy a doomsday fantasy!
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An excellent reason to see ‘2012’November 20th, 2009 |
 25 comments to An excellent reason to see ‘2012’ |
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I haven’t read any positive reviews of 2012 but was planning to see it anyway because the special effects in the trailers are awesome. This just gives me yet another reason: anything that annoys the mullahs is worth doing.
I do have a question though. The linked article contains the following quote: ” ‘The controversial things about the film are, first, in Islam doomsday should not be visualised or predicted, it’s the secret of God,’ council chairman Amidhan told AFP.” OK, I understand that we’re not supposed to create images of Mohammad because somehow that’s “idolatry”, which every right-thinking person knows is bad. But this is the first I’ve heard about a prohibition on visualizations of doomsday. Where does that come from? Are they just making this stuff up as they go along? Or is there some “master list” of these prohibitions so we can know how to avoid* inadvertant transgressions against the Religion of Peace?
OK, that’s three questions.
* Wink, wink.
Best (tweeted) review of 2012 I’ve seen so far: It’s a movie about special effects in the future.
Laird, in Judaism depictions of any living creatures are prohibited, and I am almost sure that it is the same in Islam. But then it doesn’t mean that they can’t also make stuff up as they go. Not that we should care one way or the other.
Maybe Emmerich has upset the mullahs, but he didn’t do it deliberately as he tells us in this Guardian interview.
But all is not lost for brave Sir Roland…
Yeah, he has real balls. The only way that Brazilian Catholics will threaten him is if he tries to walk home from the Rio nightclub after dark alone.
And Laird, I suspect the reason there’s no one fixed list is because they know that some of us might possibly go out of our way to offend them. Not that I would ever bring my BLT and my dog to a mosque or anything, or endorse the notion that the war will end when there is a topless bar where the Kaaba stands now. (And I certainly do NOT have a stack of singles waiting for that last occurrence!)
I’m no great fan of movies that use special effects in lieu of plot but SWMBO is insistent we go and watch it this evening.
At least now I can take some consolation in the fact that my $7 is going towards the worthy cause of pissing off some contentious bastards. This has cheered me right up.
No money for a coward that destroy Christian symbols and refuses to do the same for Islamic ones.
Well that didn’t work very well. With all these religious places popping up, I assumed the director must have been suggesting religion had had an important and positive effect on civilisation and thus it was sad to see all these iconic religious sites getting destroyed. Either that or he just likes blowing things up, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Until after the film’s over and you realise you can never get that two and a half hours back.
I wouldn’t sit in my armchair and sneer at his cowardice. He may well would have had a fatwa issued on him if he went with that plan of his. At least he is honest about it: he never uttered any of the “Islam is religion of peace” nonsense, he basically just admitted to being scared, for which I certainly cannot blame him. And it’s not as if he “sacrificed his artistic integrity”: the guy makes big-budget B movies and obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is refreshing.
Nah, no interest in this flick whatsoever.
Oh, I don’t know. Roland Emmerich’s as a director has taken an already silly and formulaic genre (the disaster movie) and taken it to ludicrously over the top extremes beyond the imagination of directors from previous eras. As a consequence, I find his movies to be rather fun. I haven’t seen this one yet, but I probably will at some point.
I would go if someone paid me $7 a minute.
No money for a coward that destroy Christian symbols and refuses to do the same for Islamic ones.
Amen. Emmerich is a committed atheist who goes out of his way to destroy Christian icons. And apparently, everyone who prays in the movie (and who wouldn’t, frankly, in an end-of-the-world scenario?) gets immediately wiped. Say what you will about Islam, but its over-the-top bullying of fatwas and violence had its desired effect. Not one peep from the coward Emmerich, whose pandering only contributes to Islam’s tendency to bully Western Civ.
Alisa, you are correct. Only Allah can make a living creature. (Never mind that statue horses and porcelain cats are STATUES and DECORATIONS, not living beings. Details, details, details.) This is why fairly recently, the Islamic vandals cut the noses off beings depicted on Buddhist temples in, I believe, Cambodia.
Du-uh.
Verity:
Are you sure this is the real reason? I’d like to think that they were not that silly. OTOH, I am not sure how this came about in Judaism either. The common wisdom has it that this was supposed to prevent idolatry, but this would be just as silly: people could still worship whatever, without creating an image of it.
Does all really have to be about religion?
Alisa, you will not find any Orthodox Rabbi who will say it is forbidden to depict any living thing whether in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters beneath. It is forbidden, simply, to perform any acts associated with worship on connection to an image or to have anything to do with images that are used in such a manner. (You’re also supposed to destroy them unless some property violation is involved or it will lead to you getting duffed up or something). A literal reading of the Ten Commandments might lead you to think otherwise and it is claimed by some historians that there was a blanket prohibition during Maccabean times, but that is neither here nor there.
For an example.
It’s also specifically forbidden, for example, to set up a pillar or plant trees for the purpose of worship, but, luckily, Jews may build pillars and plant trees.
Verity: Oh, I dunno, while we can’t make living things, we can certainly manipulate the heck out of ’em.
And if Islam is allathat strict, maybe they should start banning Muslims from playing WoW, seein’ all them creations of new and novel life forms, such as the night elf mohawk.
You gotta pity ’em fools.
One reason I hope my venture gets moving is so I can move to Laramie and make sure I am armed full time so as to make sure I can handle the problem should one of these religious relics take umbrage at my statements about the fact that all religions are rather silly and theirs is even worse.
Good idea Dale, although I doubt it’s the religious relics you would be worrying about.
Gabriel: I doubt you will find any images of anything in places like Mea Shearim, for example. Of course the whole thing is a distortion of the original intent, but this doesn’t mean that people cannot distort and go on distorting. What about the dairy and meat thing?
Wonderful paintings, BTW. But would I be very much off if I guessed that most of them are from the Haskala period?
I’ll be giving this film a miss. Disaster movies are increasingly all morphing into the same thing these days.
I’ll rather spend my cash on renting out Clint’s recent wonderful “Gran Torino”.
I agree Jonathan, although I wouldn’t compare Emmerich to Eastwood (duh), but rather to someone like, say, Tony Scott. Not a disaster genre so much, but still just as blow-them-up special-effects heavy, and just as light-weight as far as actual content, plot, characters etc are concerned. The big difference being that Scott’s movies are fun, while Emmerich’s are excruciatingly boring.
Needless to say, Gran Torino is a gem, and I am going to miss Eastwood very much.
Alisa, I’ve only been to Meah Shearim twice, but I can tell you from personal experience that it’s absolutely normal and unremarked upon in Stamford Hill to have pictures depicting people (usually rabanim) and animals.
It’s true that not a great deal of representational Jewish art survives from prior to the *Haskalah*, but that is partly because about half of all Jews lived in Islamic countries where it was culturally not the done thing, Ashkenazim tended to be poor and ascetic and most of it was lost one way or another. However, numerous examples of illustrated Haggadot for example survive.
Again, I make no comment on the original intention of the commandment, I only observe that under normative halacha it is not forbidden to depict people or animals in art, there is nothing in the talmud to suggest it is and no Rabbi, however charedi, says otherwise.
Gabriel: you have ignited my curiosity, and I am going to get to the bottom of this one day – thanks!