It shouldn’t really be a surprise that News Corp is creating a division within its Twentieth Century-Fox film studio called FoxFaith to produce and promote faith-based films.  Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are known for finding niches to exploit.  Personally, I see nothing wrong with this.  It wouldn’t hurt Hollywood to make more family films that don’t include sexual innuendo, violence, and disturbing imagery.  The irksome thing about this article is that, as usual, Hollywood is using Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ as the reason for Fox’s decision.  First, let’s be clear about this:  Fox is doing this for one reason only and that’s to make money from an untapped market – that’s it.  Second, using Passion of the Christ as an example of the resurgence of faith-based movies is disingenuous.  No one had heard of or cared about this film until Gibson used the concerns of the Anti-Defamation League to drum up a false controversy, and then use churches to fan the flame of that fake controversy.  It’s an anomaly, no more.  How many faith-based films have been released, before or since, that have been a success – even when you consider the DVD market?  Zip!  The only films of this type to be moderately successful are the two movies based on the Left Behind series.  That being said, I applaud them for making this move.  It’s an untapped market and we need more family fare at the box office.  But don’t kid yourselves; if News Corp doesn’t make money off this venture, FoxFaith will disappear.

I’ve said my piece about the stupidity of the Pope’s comments concerning Muslims and Muhammad, accepted the opinion of others that it was taken out of context, but now I really just have to laugh.  A group of Turkish workers are asking the government to arrest Pope Benedict XVI when he visits their country in a few months.  This is exactly what I was harping about before.  Granted, this man said something stupid, but the reaction of some Muslims has been equally stupid.  First of all, there is no way a country is going to arrest the man who leads one of the world’s largest and most influential religious groups – no way in hell. Second of all,

Turkey is trying to get itself admitted to the European Union and if they want that to happen they need to realize in a free world people get to say stupid things – even stupid things we don’t like.  Get over it.  Debate the issue all you want, but get over it.