Avoiding the sophmore slump is always a challenge. Fortunately, James Pinkerton has a can’t-miss (in more ways than one) suggestion for an equally controversial follow-up movie for the makers of Death of a President:
So for the next number, I suppose that Finch and his close colleague, director Gabriel Range, will make an even more vivid and lurid movie. How ’bout, say, a movie featuring the Prophet Mohammed doing something, well, unspeakable? Or maybe just showing him as an ordinary human, doing ordinary things? Such a picture would get some buzz, stir up some controversy — wouldn’t it?
But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that hypothetical Islam-bashing, or even Islam-historicizing, film to be made or shown. As we have seen, there’s plenty of evidence that the “Death”-men, Finch and Range, are cine-provocateurs, happy enough to see Bush endangered. But there’s no evidence that either man wishes to see his own life endangered.
Finch and Range know that vast majority of Americans won’t like this film; even as they hope that a small minority of Americans will make it profitable for them. To make money, and to make a splash, they are willing to hurt American feelings. But hurting the feelings of Muslims who might kill them in retaliation? That’s a different story. That’s a movie that will never be made, at least not by these two. These blokes might be cool with murder, but they are definitely against suicide.
No wonder their box office is down: like the art world, Hollywood really is astonishingly conservative and reactionary these days.
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