Satanic Critics Pan The Passion

ccording to director Mel Gibson, film critics from across the nation have proven their fealty with the dark lord Satan by panning his latest film The Passion of the Christ, a gruesome religious horror flick released to overwhelmingly negative critical response last week. This novel reaction to film criticism has raised questions nationwide over whether the 48-year-old actor and filmmaker is merely berserkly fanatical, or just completely insane. Not helping Gibson's cause is the director's non-figurative conviction that Satan tried to keep his film from being made, and might have succeeded if not for the intervention of the Holy Ghost. Unfortunately for Gibson, the Holy Ghost was unable to prevent Satan from pointing out to film critics the film's turgid tone, plodding pacing, uneven characterization and excessively pointless violence.

"They are the forces of Satan or the dupes of Satan," Gibson offered charitably, giving non-fans the choice of being either evil or stupid.

"Holy shit was that a bad movie," disagreed Satan's minion Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times, who must've been typing his review while drenched in lamb's blood. "That piece of shit was worse than We Were Soldiers."

The film opened to sellout crowds after months of speculation that it was going to be really offensive to Jews, generated by Gibson cashing in on his "Jews Killed Jesus" Catholic offshoot faith and his father's reputation as a notorious Holocaust denier to market the film with the catchy tagline "The Jews Hate It," despite the fact that no religious groups had seen or commented on the film at that point.

In interviews, Gibson has explained that his Traditionalist Catholic faith, which rejects the Vatican's exoneration of the Jewish race for the death of Christ, grows from his bond with his father Hutton Gibson. In either a brilliant marketing ploy or disturbing evidence of inner turmoil, Gibson's answers to requests to clarify his own stance on the Holocaust have been rambling and evasive.

Unable to go five whole minutes without saying something unnervingly kooky, however, Gibson's response to New York Times writer Frank Rich's article pointing out that the director was inventing nonexistent Jewish outrage to market his film was like something straight out of The Passion itself. "I wanted to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog." Luckily for Gibson, from all reports Rich's dog is one of those "turn the other cheek" sorts who is unlikely to accuse the director of speaking for Satan.

The relentlessly masochistic tone of Gibson's film has caused some to ponder the director's obsession with torture, as evidenced by the mandatory torture sequences contained in nearly every film in which Gibson has appeared. From being electrocuted in Lethal Weapon and drawn and quartered in Braveheart, Gibson even went so far as to insist on adding an unscripted toe-smashing scene to Brian Helgeland's Payback. Though he was unsuccessful in similar attempts to add a testicular electrocution scene to the chickflick hit What Women Want, it was not for lack of trying.

Meanwhile, The Passion's large opening box office is sure to inspire imitators, and early word that such knock-offs as The Passion of the Weekend at Bernie's and Friday the 13th XI: Run, Jesus, Run are already in the works. Additional reports hint at an upcoming franchise of movies where Belgian marshal arts expert Jean-Claude Van Damme will beat the shit out of Jesus for two hours in various exotic locales. Whether the makers of those films will be able to pull off Gibson's brass-balled bluster, claiming that critics of The Passion's blitzkrieg of violence are merely deficient in character and unable to handle the power of his flawless cinema, may well depend on how closely they can duplicate that crazy look in his eyes.

Mohammed Confesses to 9/11 Attacks, “Falling Down A Lot” During Interrogations

Castro Announces 2008 Candidacy; Clinton, Obama Drop Out of Race

Conditions at Walter Reed Upgraded to “Nightmarishly Clive Barker-esque”

Unveiling of First Black Disney Character Raises Some Concerns

Well, I'm not quite sure how it happened, but another baseball season is upon us. It keeps coming back, like crabs, or that movie about the dog and cat that got lost and came back like crabs. But however it came about, we have to deal with it now, and the best way I know how is in detailing how much everyone is going to suck this year.

Let me get my first 2006 prediction out of the way early: Everybody is going to lose a lot of games this year. Take that to the bank. Even the best team in the league is going to have their pants handed to them at least sixty painful times this season. Sixty long, excruciating, face-first swan dives into mountains of Chihuahua shit, guaranteed. That's the dirty little secret about baseball that the league doesn't want you to know: Everybody stinks.

So the real debate is over who's going to be the least embarrassing team to follow this season, pretending like you've been a fan for years while your hometown nine brings new levels of meaning to the phrase "forcefully violated."

For starters, everyone's favorite dickweed, A.J. Pierzynski, hopes to lead his Chicago White Sox to a repeat of last season's improbable championship run, a feat made more difficult by the unlikelihood of the stars being lined up in asshole favor two years in a row. My prediction is the Bite Sox win six games all year. Some may find this unrealistically pessimistic, but they just don't play the Royals enough times for me to hope for better. Sorry, Sox fans, I'd fear your reaction if most of you weren't already safely behind bars.

Then of course there's the Yankees, but like I said, the assholes of the world used up all their good karma last year, which also bodes poorly for the White House in 2006. Once the Yankees' old-as-Moses rotation goes down in flames by mid-season, Yankee fans will be wishing for Small Wang, and that's never a good thing. Better to cut your losses and start rooting against the Mets now, Yankee fans.

Everybody loves the Cardinals, of course, and by that I mean everyone in St. Louis, by decree of the king. Didn't know St. Louis had a king? They're lousy with kings down there, so much so that they have to start handing out qualifiers, like "King of Beers" and "King of March-June." Slavish devotion to the Cards is required of everyone in St. Louis, as their city crumbles around them, but nobody in the rest of the country gives two shits on a bun. The rest of us settle in to watch the Cardinals stomp so much ass during the regular season that by the playoffs they're tired and roll over like Beethoven on recalled vertigo medication.

The Red Sox replaced a guy who looks like Jesus with a guy who sounds like cereal, which is only a good trade if the Jesus-looking guy is the dude from Blind Melon. Spoiler: It wasn't. While they were at it they tarred and feathered Edgar Renteria and smuggled him out of the city in a burlap sack, all for playing shortstop the whole of last season with a catcher's mitt. They brought in Josh Beckett to complete their impressive collection of "pitchers who once stomped the shit out of the Yankees but aren't that good any more." And as a final touch, they were able to trade the guy from Linkin Park to the Reds for Willy Mo Pena, all because some guy from the Twins doesn't like hitting.

As a side note, I'm sure the thought has crossed all of your minds that they should just fold the Twins and Reds together, either ending up with an unstoppable juggernaut or else a team that can't pitch or hit, depending on how the meld works out. Entertaining either way, I say: Either we get a team that will pants the Yankees big-time or somebody to fool the Marlins into thinking they have a chance, which would be funny in its own way.

So who wins this year? What's the name of that minor league team that started selling those bacon cheeseburgers on a donut? No, I'm not avoiding the question, I'm just hoping to convince my heart to put me out of my misery before I have to sit through another entire goddamned 12,078 game season. Seriously? You want a straight answer? All right: Barry Bonds wins, at least until a vain, insufferable steroid monster bursts out of his chest five years from now and starts talking about OBP and bitching about the media. Already happened? Well then, I guess we all lose.

º Last Column: Joy in Mudville (Thanks, A-Rod)
º more columns

"When I was a young boy, no older than 24, my uncle asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He said "Sampson, I want you to touch me right here between my testicles until I tell you to stop."

My answer that day, as it always had been, was that I planned on being a Viking.

Most laughed when I gave this answer, the same way they laughed when I said I'd be the first man to ride a cheetah at the Indy 500. In retrospect, it looks like they got the last laugh on that second part, thanks to restrictive poaching laws that came into effect in the 1940's. But I never cared. "Let them laugh," I'd say to myself. "Maybe they'll laugh so long that I'm the only one who ducks for cover when we get bombed to death by the Chinese." This would make them laugh even harder, and from then on I resolved to think personal thoughts to myself, rather than speaking them aloud.

Most thought that I would eventually give up my dream of being a Viking, as I grew older and wiser in the ways of the world. Many would have bet money on it, had the Hartwig clan not been genetically incapable of winning a money wager. But they were, as was evidenced the year dad bet the family car and the rights to my brother Goose on "Fat Charlie" Walker taking home the gold in the 50-yard dash at the 1952 summer Olympics.

But I proved them all wrong in the autumn of 1961 when I showed up at Minnesota's training camp wearing a ceramic helmet I'd made myself and gave them the best ten minutes of my life, in an effort to make the team. I may have been driven into the ground like a tent peg, but it was still a dream come true and sweet redemption in the eyes of all the Hartwigs who had looked at Sampson L. Hartwig cockeyed for years.

Later I learned that everyone thought when I said 'Viking' that I meant the guys in the big boats with the horned hats and such, and I understood why they were laughing."

º Last Column: Different
º more columns