Posted 9:49 AM by magnu231
Puritan Comeback

Paul Verhoeven (and no, I don't care whether that's spelled correctly) is blaming the poor showing of his latest piece of celluloid excrement, Basic Instinct 2, on "puritanical America". I hope everyone can see through his claim in this area. Paul, guess what, your movie is terrible. Sharon Stone is old. And you've never made a good movie. Ever. The public spent money back in the day, when your prurient foolishness was "fresh". It isn't anymore. It isn't a rise in puritanism, but the fact that your movies, which used to be excitingly "naughty" back in the day, now are firmly established as "old hat". And now that you've got nothing new in the area of eroticism or gore, there's no other reason for the American public to see your movies. Frankly, there should have been no reason to see your Hollywood abortions in the first place. Because you are a terrible filmmaker.
But on a related note, I think the claim that America has "turned Puritanical" censoring its artists and returning to McCarthyism is ridiculous. It's based on reasoning as follows: our President occasionally references God in his speeches, therefore, he's a religious nut (because only nuts reference God). Because he's a religious nut, his decisions are based on his nuttery (has anyone asked him yet if he can be unbiased on religious matters, give that he's religious? That'd be a great question.) Therefore, any decisions made by anyone in the government are based on religious quackery, because Bush runs the government. Because the government does or should run the country, anything that happens in the country can be laid at the Presidents door. To sum up, anything that happens in America, whether the failure of a horrible movie that happens to contain nude women old enough to be my mother, or the censuring of a talkshow host who hasn't yet progressed the 4th grade in terms of humor (not that there's anything wrong with that), must be the result of rampant religious McCarthyism. But hey, let's not print any cartoons that depict Mohammed. Because then Muslims will be perfectly justified in violence and rioting. We shouldn't have goaded them into it.

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