No, it’s not The Ann Coulter Story.

The movie is We The Living, based on the Ayn Rand novel of the same title.  Rand said that We The Living “is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write.”

Conservatives and libertarians have long lamented the scarcity of movies that depict the evils of communism.  Let’s see, there’s Doctor Zhivago, The Killing Fields, The Lives of Others, and… and, well, now there’s We The Living — a long-lost classic filmed in 1942, and now available on DVD for the first time ever.

WTL takes place soon after the Bolshevik takeover of Russia (which Rand experienced as a young woman).  The stunning Alida Valli plays Kira, a fiery college student who detests the communists ruining her country.  (Valli is perhaps best known to American audiences for her indelible performances in The Third Man and The Paradine Case.)

Kira’s formerly bourgeois family struggles to survive as the government outlaws most private trade, rations food and shelter, and implements health-care death panels.  (Okay, I might be confused about that last part.)

Life is a grind for all but the politically privileged.  The masses endure shortages and injustice, while well-connected Party members enjoy special treatment and profit from corruption.  Everything is politicized:  the economy, education, even science (as Party officials inform Kira and her fellow students).

But some forces override politics and even good sense.  At college one day, secret police officer Andrei (Fosco Giachetti) overhears Kira pouring scorn on Bolshevism.  Instead of arresting Kira, the officer is smitten with her.  In turn Kira develops a respect for Andrei bordering on love, despite their ideological differences.

Shortly thereafter, Kira has a chance encounter with the handsome, mysterious Leo (Rossano Brazzi), a free spirit like her, hunted by the authorities.  Kira and Leo have an immediate, almost animal chemistry.

This is one of the most affecting scenes in the movie, an instance of “love at first sight” made credible by the sublimity of the acting.  When they agree to see each other in a month in the same spot, you can’t wait for that month to pass so you can see what happens next.  From here unfolds a tragic romantic triangle marked by jealousy, deception and sacrifice.

WTL has some of Rand’s most layered characters.  In her later work, a character like Andrei the communist might be portrayed as an unalloyed villain.  But in WTL, Andrei gradually reveals a sensitive and decent humanity at odds with his repellent politics.  (Who hasn’t encountered such paradoxes in real people?)

The story behind the movie is nearly as remarkable as the film itself, further proof there is little daylight between fascism and communism.  (Jonah Goldberg, call your book editor.)

We The Living was made during World War II in Mussolini’s Italy, of all places.  The government warily allowed it to be filmed as a propaganda vehicle against the Soviet Union.  But when Mussolini realized the movie was a critique not only of communism but of all forms of statism, he banned it from theatres, where it was a smash hit.

The government rounded up and destroyed all copies of the film – save one, the original negative, which was secreted away.  As we are informed by the fascinating documentary (included among the DVD extras), the film’s reels languished unseen for decades until Rand’s attorneys went hunting for it among the Italian film community.

Duncan Scott, who produced the DVD release, explains how as a young editor he talked his way into recutting and subtitling the film alongside Ayn Rand herself. WTL had originally been released as two separate films.  They combined them, trimmed away some of the excess, and removed or redubbed pro-fascist propaganda speeches inserted at the insistence of the authorities.

Scott tells how in the original version, Andrei delivered a heated diatribe against the evils of capitalism.  Needless to say, this speech didn’t exactly belong.  Not content merely to change the subtitles, Scott actually hired a sound-a-like Italian actor so he could redub the voice track in Italian to match the new subtitles.

Unfortunately the digital transfer was done in 1987, and the cost of a high-definition remastering was prohibitive for this DVD release, so the picture quality isn’t quite as crisp as one might wish.  Nevertheless, it is completely watchable.

Considering the circumstances under which We The Living was made and later restored, this inspiring classic is a tremendous achievement, and a worthy addition to every liberty-lover’s DVD library — and to the too-brief list of films exposing the pitfalls of socialism in whatever form.

The Nobel Prize Committee announced today that it is awarding the Prize in Medicine to Jimmy Duncan, a senior at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, for getting a 97 on his bio-chem final.

“The Committee felt that Master Duncan has shown great promise with his outstanding grades,” said Dr. Leif Quisling, chairperson of the Nobel Prize Committee.  “It is our fervent hope that this award encourages him to do great things in the future, such as find a cure for cancer.”

The committee was first alerted to Jimmy Duncan when they came across a YouTube clip of Duncan’s class presentation on his career goals.

“We were particularly struck by his unbridled optimism,” said Dr. Quisling. “Duncan closed his passionate talk with these inspiring words:  ’And we can end cancer in our lifetimes if we all work together really, really hard!’  It is exactly those kind of empty platitudes that impress this committee. Far more so than anything so gauche as actual achievement.”

Mr. Duncan was somewhat blase’ about the news.  “I was lying in bed playing a little X-Box before heading off to school when my mom yelled, ‘Jimmy, you’ve got a phone call from Stockholm!’  It was pretty cool, yeah.”

Dr. Quisling acknowledged that the committee was inspired to award prizes prematurely after giving President Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize the year before, despite the fact that nominations had been closed only 11 days after he entered office.

“In Barack Obama’s case, we figured that if the American people were willing to hand over the U.S. presidency to someone who hasn’t accomplished much, why not give him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’s done anything, either?” Dr. Quisling said.

As for Jimmy Duncan, 17, he says he’s “psyched” about the Nobel Prize.  “I should be a shoo-in now to get into Harvard,” he said.

“By the way, I’m not going pre-med anymore,” Duncan volunteered.  ”Now that I’ve got the Nobel in Medicine, why bother?  I’ll just invest my prize money in a diversified fund and I never have to work another day in my life.  In fact, I may just skip Harvard and go to a party school.  Arizona State, here I come!”

We contacted Dr. Quisling’s office for a comment on Duncan’s change in plans.  Nobody returned our calls by press time.

Related stories:

UC Berkeley takes cue from Nobel committee, teachers award grades based on students’ hopes, not results

True story:  As a young man just out of law school, I was consumed with politics.  I even went to work on the Hill (Capitol, that is, Washington, DC) and in journalism.  But at some point in the ’90s, my interest faded away.

Francis Fukuyama wrote a then-notorious book called The End of History, published in 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse.  He argued that the age-old ideological struggles over what constitutes the best form of government were over, and the undisputed universal champion was Western liberal (in the classic, free-market sense) democracy.

I grew up during the latter stages of the Cold War, when the existential threat of nuclear war hung over and colored almost everything.  It made politics seem vital to one’s very survival.  And I found the debate between capitalism and communism hugely compelling.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the (apparently) decisive victory of free markets over collectivism, politics lost its import and thus its grip on my attention.  But I didn’t miss it at all.  I was perfectly content to retreat to the status of a casual spectator, and to focus on more aesthetic matters.  I wrote screenplays instead of news commentary, gladly.

But Fukuyama and I were wrong.  9/11 proved it.

On that fateful morning, my phone rang a little after 6 AM.  A friend who’d recently moved to Boston insisted that I turn on the TV, despite the early hour.  The second plane had just hit the second tower.  And we were at war with a strange new foe.  (Which turned out to be an age-old foe, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

As for many others, my world changed that day.  I was dragged back, kicking and screaming, into the maelstrom of politics.  History had risen from the dead.

I knew the Internet well, but I’d largely avoided political websites.  That changed on 9/11.  I studied topics I wish I never needed to know about.  I got involved again.

I discovered another book that emerged in the ’90s, in part as a response to Fukuyama’s thesis.  It was called The Clash of Civilizations, by Samuel Huntington.  He agreed that the age of ideology was over, but argued that fault lines over culture and religion would deepen and become a greater source of conflict.  And he believed one of the principal fault lines of conflict would lie between Muslim and non-Muslim civilizations.

Huntington was remarkably prescient.  But I would add this:  I don’t think the struggle over ideology is over.

The collectivists are by no means through.  As wrong as they are, their message is too seductive to die forever.  They will always be around, in one form or another.  And I see them now joining forces, dangerously, with some of the West’s cultural adversaries.

History will never end.  We were fools ever to think so.  One evil perishes; another rises in its place.  That’s what 9/11 taught me.

One of my artistic heroes is J.R.R. Tolkien, whom I believe has much to say, albeit obliquely, about our present state.  I close with a quote from one of his letters that I oddly find somehow comforting:

“Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

While some narrow-minded philistines complained, the artistic establishment heaped praise (and money) on these and works like them. The National Endowment for the Arts was so impressed with Serrano’s work they granted him $15,000 courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. For his effort, Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award.

Other recent Turner Prize honorees include Damien Hirst, whose works feature livestock suspended in formaldehyde, and Tracy Elmin, whose nominated work was an unmade bed. The Turner Prize is named in honor of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), renowned as the original “painter of light” (pace Thomas Kinkade). (One of the Stuckists, a group of anti-conceptual figurative painters who demonstrate annually against the Prize, puckishly said, “The only artist who wouldn’t be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner.”)

Art and Popular Culture defines “transgressive art” as: “art forms that aim to transgress; i.e., to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities.”

The French, naturally, have a phrase for it: “Epater la bourgeoisie,” or to shock mainstream sensibilities. Or as Andy Warhol put it, “Art is what you can get away with.”

Hirst, the formaldehyde artist, said early in his career, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off.’ But after a while you can get away with things.”

And oh boy, did he. Hirst holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist. His Lullaby Spring, a medicine cabinet filled with pills (and not even real ones with pharmacological effects), sold at auction for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar. And in two auction days in 2008, Hirst sold $198 million worth of, well, stuff.

The key phrase, however, is “what you can get away with.” And this is determined by the artistic establishment. Shocking the middle classes is one thing. Shocking the art establishment is quite another. And when those sensibilities largely overlap, as they do in these early, halcyon days of the Obama administration, then woe betide anyone who dares to draw outside the lines set by the media-education-government complex.

A year after 9/11, Hirst said, “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

Indeed, the post-9/11 era produced a veritable flowering of transgressive political art, most of it directed at one particular individual hated by the artistic establishment: George W. Bush. When it came to Bush, to go from Warhol to Cole Porter, “anything goes.” No depiction was too grotesque.

Since most artists are highly constrained by political correctness of the leftist sort, when it came to depicting Bush, the constraints fell away, and an almost ecstatic cruelty was unleashed. Years from now, the art it produced will be an embarrassment to its creators (if it is remembered at all — never underestimate people’s ability to forget their mistakes).

Much has been made of the recent poster popping up around Los Angeles depicting President Obama as the Joker.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said: “Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery, it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

My own quibble with the poster isn’t the subject-matter, but that the depiction is a bit stale (the Joker is so 2008) and the caption is too on-the-nose. I would have liked a little more wit or wordplay in the caption. (Perhaps we should have a caption contest?)

Nevertheless, anybody who’s subscribed to Vanity Fair or watched The Daily Show has no standing to express outrage at the Obama Joker poster (or to object to any fatuousness). And whatever you think of the poster, its creator has more cojones than all of the anti-Bush comedians, artists and columnists put together. Because artists and other cultural figures today are more like the sheep preserved in that Hirst glass case pictured above than they care to admit.

So what follows is a refresher course on the level of respect artists held for the office of president during Bush’s tenure, a rogue’s gallery of bad taste:

Here’s the illustration (done by Drew Friedman) that Vanity Fair posted on their website, almost exactly one year before the Obama version appeared:

And here are some comments on the Vanity Fair site:

“Great stuff from the talented Friedman (as always).”

“Very good!!!”

“Brilliant and profound.”

(Unbelievable as it seems, I don’t think they were being sarcastic.)

Then there’s the ultimate online insult, so heinous it has its own law (Godwin’s). Search “Bush as Hitler” on Google images and you get more than 1.6 million results. One of many:

And remember the ever-popular “Bush as chimp” caricatures? (These were the very height of Shavian wit.) So many to choose from, here’s just one:

Speaking of “on-the-nose,” a Google image search of “Bush as devil” turns up more than 3 million hits. Here’s one:

And if a single evil metaphor isn’t enough for you, there are numerous mix-and-match combinations, such as this mash-up of Bush as Hitler and Satan:

And let’s not forget this tastefully done portrait. It first appeared as a cover for the Village Voice and then popped up on countless T-shirts, posters, and even an episode of HBO’s “True Blood”:

If you prefer a healthy dollop of racism in your mockery, you don’t have to look further than this cartoon, which oh-so-cleverly tweaks Bush’s Secretary of State:

The LA Weekly didn’t much care for the Obama poster (despite their past championing and displaying of similarly tacky anti-Bush propaganda). Their blogger commented (weirdly), “The only thing missing is a noose.” Of course, when the noose was on Sarah Palin’s (boo! hiss!) neck, they thought that was just (and I quote) “Super!”

One of the cardinal sins a leftist can commit is to “Other,” which is “the demonization and dehumanization of groups.” Postmodernists like to make much of this, blaming the West for “othering” minorities, foreigners, and Asians, among other people. (Of course, they never mention that the reverse is usually even more virulent.)

As the pictures above demonstrate, in the past eight years, what the left has done to Bush, and to Republicans in general, is to “other” them: to demonize them, to treat them like some alien entity that is less than human, undeserving of common decency.

And what the left experience, when they see the Joker posters pop up, is what psychologists call “projection” — the tearing-down process they subjected Bush to, they fear will happen to their hero. They fear that Obama’s opponents will succeed in reducing their icon to a laughingstock like Bush was (and is — for now).

To paraphrase Obama’s erstwhile spiritual advisor: The cultural establishment’s chickens have come home to roost.

John is like Charlie Brown and the football — forever doomed to dislike these movies, but he keeps coming back for more. Because the “Harry Potter” films are made for the books’ readers, period. In fact, you might say it’s a unique genre unto itself.

Let me attempt to head off the expected response to this: a movie should stand on its own, without requiring familiarity with the source material. Ordinarily, I agree with this. And I agree that the “Harry Potter” movies would probably be better off if they tried harder to satisfy this rule.

But it seems as though the filmmakers made a conscious or semi-conscious decision at some point early on to make these movies for the readership, not for the general public. They’re really cult films. And with such lavish budgets, if they were based on any other source material, they’d be a financial debacle.

But the “Harry Potter” series, as one of the biggest-selling of all time, is a very big cult indeed. And so, rather than drastically slash and retool the original stories, they tried to maintain fidelity to them, at the expense of comprehensibility for the non-readers in their audience.

Heck, I have trouble following the movies’ complex plotlines myself. And I’ve read all of the novels. I can’t imagine trying to grasp all those story threads without the benefit of the books.

For the most part, I just sit back and bask in the eye candy of the rich sets, costumes, locations, and special effects. As an unabashed Anglophile, I reveled in the magnificent British cast, glittering with such acting jewels as Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Helena Bonham Carter, Jim Broadbent, and David Thewlis. In particular, Alan Rickman’s delicious performance as the slithery Snape is alone worth the price of admission.

But I do agree with some of John’s criticisms. The movie is too long (what movie nowadays isn’t?) and probably tries to cram in too much detail from the novel. Of course, when adapting a 652-page book, you have to make many judicious cuts in what to transfer to the screen, but some of the choices seemed odd.

Some major plot points are quickly glossed over, while inconsequential events are dwelled on out of proportion to their significance. For example, they spend what feels like a quarter of an hour on Hagrid weeping over a dead giant tarantula, which has virtually no bearing on the story. But they leave out key elements of the ending, which renders the movie’s ending more emotionally flat than the book’s.

One more note on the film: While recent entries in the series have (understandably) taken a turn toward the dark, this latest contains some truly humorous moments, usually revolving around Ron’s and Harry’s romantic interests. Jessie Cave as the girl with a massive crush on Ron is especially amusing.

Now, on to another point about “Harry Potter” and culture in general:

Earlier this week Big Hollywood linked to an article on the Newsbusters site, which took note of an organization styling itself the Harry Potter Alliance. This group is trying to organize Harry Potter fans into an army of little left-wing grassroots activists.

Take a glance at some of the issues they address and it’s nearly indistinguishable from the Daily Kos: Darfur, Don’t Buy New Stuff, Fair Trade, Global Warming, LGBT, No New Stuff (it’s listed twice), Poverty, Rwanda, “WaldeMart,” etc.

I’m not entirely surprised by this development. What I was disappointed in, however, was the Newbusters correspondent’s reaction. Instead of critiquing the Alliance’s mostly boneheaded interpretations, he mocked the very idea of taking books and movies seriously.

“You know that some people have no lives when they take a movie and/or book and use it as a template for their lives,” he writes.

Instead of telling people to ignore the impact of popular culture (a quixotic effort if ever there was one), why not present an alternative view? In the case of “Harry Potter,” it’s a cinch to counter the HPA’s dubious lefty inferences with the ample conservative themes woven throughout the books.

For instance, I’ve always thought of the rise of Voldemort as a symbol for terrorism. And the way the media and bureaucracy in the “Harry Potter” books try to hush up or downplay the threat of Voldemort seems so reminiscent of our own feeble institutional responses to the rise of Islamist terror. It’s certainly a more apt analogy than the Harry Potter Alliance’s wan attempt to link global warming and commercialism with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (and what does that remind you of?).

And any attempt to link “Harry Potter” with a critique of capitalism is just risible on its face. Is there a more robustly commercial enterprise than the Harry Potter machine? In the books themselves, there are numerous joyous references to the act of commerce. Ron Weasley’s twin brothers’ dream is to own their own shop, and one of the great pleasures detailed in the books is shopping for, yes, “new stuff” like wands, candy and Quidditch broomsticks.

As for the series’ underlying critique of conformity, one could just as easily argue that trying to indoctrinate kids into the prevailing leftist ethic is more conformist than conservatism, which is hardly the orthodoxy in the Age of Obama. For example, when even major broadcast networks such as NBC are hosting “green weeks,” how can anyone claim that concern for the environment is an edgy, unconventional stance?

I don’t mean to pick on Newsbusters, as a dismissive attitude toward pop culture prevails among most conservatives. But if conservatives truly want a place at the table again, they’ve got to take culture seriously. Winning elections isn’t enough. If the last nine years haven’t taught them that, nothing will.

It’s a sequel of sorts to The Gathering Storm, known informally around my home as the Greatest Churchill Movie Ever Made. And in answer to the first question on your mind right now, no, the new HBO/BBC co-production is not quite as good as Gathering Storm. (But then, we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that nothing ever will be.)

Partly it’s Albert Finney’s fault. They say nobody’s perfect, but they haven’t seen Finney play Winston Churchill. (He most deservedly won both an Emmy and a BAFTA.) You’ve heard the phrase “tears of joy”? A largely alien experience to me, a pretty stoic, manly guy. Alien to me no more, my friends, once I watched Gathering Storm for the first time.

I regret to report that Brendan Gleeson, who essays the role in the sequel, gives it a yeoman’s try, but can’t quite measure up. There are simply more and richer layers to Finney’s performance, perhaps due to nothing no less unfair than a longer and more experienced life, even (dare I say it, oh what the hell) more talent. Janet McTeer, who plays wife Clemmie in the new movie, fares better, nearly matching Vanessa Redgrave’s marvelous performance in Gathering Storm. (Why, they even look alike.)

Into the Storm tells the story of Churchill’s personal life and struggles during World War II. Perhaps the best moments surround the genesis of some of his most famous war speeches, snatches of which we are privileged to hear. The film also portrays Churchill’s wooing of Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin and the shifting dynamic between the three world leaders.  And it swoops in and out of such meaty moments as the evacuation of Dunkirk, the debate over suing for peace, the Battle of Britain, and the D-Day invasion.

As you can probably sense by now, the movie’s brazen ambition is its Achilles heel, as it attempts to cover far too much ground in less than two hours. It threatens to devolve into a greatest-hits medley of World War II, dangerously close to eliciting that story note every screenwriter dreads – “it’s episodic.” (Interestingly, the screenwriter, Hugh Whitemore, is the same for both films.)

The film tries to stitch these moments together with a frame tale involving Churchill and his wife waiting for the results of his re-election bid following the war. But it’s more distracting than helpful (except for the truly moving final scene — wait for it, you’ll be glad). It’s sometimes difficult to figure out what time period we’re in, mixing flashbacks into a breakneck race through five of the most eventful years in history. Perhaps the filmmakers would have been better served if they zeroed in on one major event or turning point instead of trying to have it all.

After the guns were silenced, Churchill penned a massive six-volume history of the Second World War. Gathering Storm was based in part on the first (and eponymous) volume of that classic series. Into the Storm skims through the other five volumes in the same amount of playing time. HBO needed more than 11 hours to get the Band of Brothers from Camp Toccoa, Georgia to Berchtesgaden, Germany. Surely Churchill’s leadership throughout the entire war deserves its own mini-series, too. (What do you say, HBO, huh?)

The Gathering Storm wisely concentrated on a key but less scrutinized part of Churchill’s life: his quixotic struggle in the 1930s to alert Britain, still reeling from the First World War’s horrors, to the growing menace of Hitler’s Germany. It also more organically wove his family life with the relatively focused plot. The relationship between Winston and Clemmie, for instance, was far more developed in the prequel, and the film was better for it.

The parallels of Finney’s movie (released in 2002) to our then-contemporaneous debate over the Iraq War are unmistakable. Sometimes I think the best movies made about the war on terror were Gathering Storm and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002 too, oddly enough).

I sincerely hope my paeans to Gathering Storm haven’t at all discouraged you from catching Into the Storm. (Yes, all this “Storm” talk is making my head spin, and it’s beginning to make my bad knee ache too.) I’m sure I’m being unfair to the upstart Storm, since I’ve watched its predecessor so much. In time I may grow to love the sequel just as much. After all, it’s an era of hope and change, or so I hear.

In any event, if you have any interest in World War II history, you truly won’t want to miss it. While not quite HBO’s finest hour, Into the Storm is a very good 100 minutes.

While we’re on the general subject, I’d like to mention a recent documentary mini-series that came and went on PBS last month, World War II: Behind Closed Doors. It focuses on the relationship between Churchill, FDR, and Stalin. But it also extensively covers the Katyn Forest massacre and other atrocities committed by the Soviets.

My jaw dropped as I realized that a PBS program – PBS! – was actually spotlighting the duplicity and brutality of the Soviets. The Nazis weren’t the only evil stalking Europe during the ’40s. I never thought I’d see the day when the mainstream media would begin to acknowledge the horrors inflicted by the Soviet Communists on Poland (while the other allies looked away, to their eternal shame). Watch these programs if they’re re-run on your local PBS station, or rent or buy the DVDs.

The implication is that the filmmakers made this movie just so they could tell a ripping good yarn. Stipulating for the moment that it is a good yarn, there’s no way to show that the filmmakers were indeed fully cognizant of their movie’s cultural impact. There’s no way we can get inside their minds, right?

Hassassin Assassin

Well, I’ve figured out a way to do just that. No, I don’t have ESP or a special mind-reading device. But I do have common sense (pace my wife).

Now, whenever someone adapts a book into a movie, it’s instructive to examine where the movie differs from the book. If the movie version alters a key detail in the book, you can’t blame the original author for that decision. It’s clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers.

One key difference between the book and the movie here lies in the character of the Assassin. Simply put, he’s the bad guy. He is the one who actually commits all of the brutal, sadistic murders that take place in the main plot.

But in the original novel, this character is identified as “Hassassin,” a member of the original Islamic cult of the same name (and the origin of the modern English word “assassin”). He’s described as a misogynistic, “mahogany-skinned” Middle Easterner.

In Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, the murderer is an albino member of Opus Dei, an actual Roman Catholic society. That character is kept entirely unchanged from book to movie. (Offending both Opus Dei members and albinos, incidentally.)

But in Angels & Demons, Howard decided to change the murderer from a Muslim Arab motivated by a centuries-old sectarian grudge, into… a nondescript Dane motivated by mere money?

You tell me, who is more fascinating? A member of an exotic, age-old secret society seeking revenge? Or just another white guy who’s only in it for the Euros? From a creative standpoint, it’s a no-brainer. The villain is a key element of a great story. Try to imagine Star Wars without Darth Vader, or The Dark Knight without the Joker.

Unless you are concerned about something other than mere good storytelling. Howard obviously had no qualms about offending Opus Dei or albinos, which is why the villain in The Da Vinci Code stayed the same from novel to film. But something made him radically refashion the murderer in Angels and Demons.

There’s only one plausible explanation for this change. The filmmakers wanted to protect the image of Middle Easterners. They know that how you depict people, even in a fictional movie, has an impact on our society’s views.

Sure, one character alone won’t make a sea-change, just like one movie may not transform the world overnight. But the cumulative impact of our culture is unmistakable. Culture is to people what water is to fish. Culture shapes the way people live, think and believe far more than does politics.

Does anybody honestly doubt that Hollywood is acutely aware of its power to shape public opinion? This very website is predicated on that (well-founded) assumption. Why do you think the Oscars persistently award the most progressive or liberal movies?

And why do you think Hollywood made a seemingly endless stream of anti-war movies during the peak of the Iraq conflict? After the first few bottomed out at the box office, they knew it was a financial loser. And yet they persevered in throwing more and more anti-war and anti-military movies into the cultural mix, like so many suicidal kamikaze planes.

And why do you think the advertising industry exists? If a 30-second commercial can change people’s shopping habits, what do you think a two-hour movie or 10-year TV franchise can do?

Let me stress that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. If you want to make money-losing message movies, knock yourself out. One man’s ham-fisted, vomit-inducing, over-the-top message movie is another’s deep, socially relevant, life-changing event. Just don’t tell me that you had no idea your movie might have any social impact.

So, who’s being naive here? The people who say, “It’s just a movie”? Or the ones who understand there’s usually an agenda?

Check out this typical comment at my second-favorite blog created by Andrew Breitbart:

“We need to keep an anti-religion mindset in the popular culture if we are going to continue to fight Christian and corporate fascism. Any suspicion we can cast onto Christianity, or any other brand of guilt and fear-inducing magical thinking, gives the corporate and religious oligarchs one less weapon they can use to manipulate us with. – Retrofuturistic”

And the Guardian, hardly a defender of the Faith, posted this headline: “Angels and Demons WILL damage the Catholic church.” (Emphasis in original.) It went on to argue (approvingly) that the movie will “fuel the belief that Catholicism is incompatible with modernity.”

In interviews Brown (and the filmmakers) say that his books are meant to get people talking, to ask questions. Rather than lead to more clarity, however, the countless mistakes, deliberate or otherwise, create great clouds of confusion.

Art historians have to wearily explain to their students, “No, Bernini wasn’t a member of the Illuminati, nor did he hate the Church. In fact, he was a devout Catholic who prayed for hours a day.”

Instead of teaching something new and true, they waste valuable lesson time debunking falsehoods, clearing weeds instead of planting new seeds. Just as bad currency drives out good, junk history pollutes minds instead of enlightening them.

One of the main attractions of Brown’s books, and the movies based on them, is the transcendent beauty of a culture once called Christendom. The tragedy is, Brown and Howard are exploiting this beauty, while at the same time contributing to its downfall.

Do you ever wonder why most modern and post-modern art and architecture seem so empty and cold, even alienating? Do you ever wonder why the art and buildings preceding the rise of Modernism are so much more inspiring than what has come since? Perhaps it’s because contemporary art and architecture are the products of a culture that has rejected sanctity, eschewed sacredness.

As philosopher Roger Scruton writes in the latest issue of City Journal:

“The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.

“Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being.”

Increasingly, modern man is akin to a barbarian tribe camped out in the decaying city of a once-great civilization, gaping incomprehendingly at the exquisite ruins in their midst, admiring them while not having a clue as to how to recreate them (or at least, how to recreate the conditions that made them possible).

Many here who said they wanted to see Angels & Demons despite the negative reviews cited the beauty of Rome and Vatican City as the main attraction. Isn’t it ironic that the movie is profiting from this awesome splendor, while viciously chomping on the hand that created that art in the first place?

I’m a fan of Ron Howard. I’m also a Roman Catholic. So when Howard recently defended his upcoming film, Angels and Demons, on the Huffington Post from criticism leveled by William Donohue of the Catholic League, I sat up and took notice.

Here’s an understatement for you: Not everybody likes William Donohue. Whereas some admire him as a passionate defender of the faith, others view him as a hectoring, self-righteous censor, with a tendency to get red-faced and a bit shouty when locking horns on one of the ubiquitous news talk shows.

Howard, of course, is always calm and collected. Besides, he’s Opie; and who doesn’t like Opie? So I enter this fray with the greatest trepidation, fully expecting to regret every minute of it.

Howard’s panoply of defenses included that familiar old warhorse: don’t knock it if you haven’t seen it. Ordinarily I have a lot of sympathy for such an argument. In this case, however, Howard’s new film is based on a novel of the same name first published nine years ago. And it was written by Dan Brown who also penned The Da Vinci Code, which Howard rather faithfully (no pun intended?) adapted into a movie with the same star (Tom Hanks). So, score one for Donohue.

But this isn’t about Howard vs. Donohue, as entertaining as that MMA match may be. It’s about Angels and Demons, alighting in a theater near you May 15.

A few years ago, intrigued by the fuss surrounding The Da Vinci Code, I read Angels and Demons. Why? Code was still in hardback, and Angels was only $7.99. I wasn’t about to give Brown the satisfaction of my $24.99 — not that I think his bank account noticed.

Later, I watched Code on cable (once again, not eager to give my money to an arguably anti-Christian work. So I think I’ve got sufficient standing to comment.

Reading Angels and Demons, I wasn’t so much struck by the work’s bigotry as by how badly it was written. The cliched style is the literary equivalent of cotton candy. And for someone with so much animus toward religion, Brown employs the deus ex machina more frequently than the Old Testament.

But more disturbing is Brown’s commingling of fact and fiction disguised as fact, aimed at convincing his readership that the Catholic Church is vehemently, even violently anti-science, and therefore anti-progress and anti-reason.

By fiction disguised as fact, I don’t mean standard historical fiction techniques like creating new characters against a backdrop of actual historical events. I mean massively altering or fabricating historical events and chronologies. For instance: virtually every historical fiction writer fudges dates a little, but Brown shifts key timelines by more than a century.

Perhaps Brown counts on most of us to be too lazy or obtuse to fact-check his work on the Internet. And judging from his hordes of unquestioning fans (and, usually, myself), he’s probably right.

[SPOILER ALERT: The rest of this article contains spoilers. If you don't like spoilers and haven't read or seen Angels and Demons yet, then you shouldn't read further. On the other hand, maybe you should read on, because at least you'll be armed against the falsehoods that pervade Angels. It's up to you.]

So, I got off my duff (a matter of speech — I actually sat on my duff throughout this ordeal) and actually (gasp) looked up some of the claims Brown makes in Angels and Demons.

Here are just a few inaccuracies (hardly an exhaustive list) I picked up in several exhausting minutes on the Web:

Brown claims: Copernicus was murdered by the Catholic Church.
Fact: Copernicus died quietly in bed at age 70 from a stroke, and his research was supported by Church officials; he even dedicated his masterwork to the Pope.

Brown claims: “Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency.”
Fact: CERN, the lab which plays an important role in his story, actually debunked this claim on their website: “The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion of the invested energy back.”

Brown claims: Churchill was a “staunch Catholic.”
Fact: Any history buff could tell you that Churchill wasn’t Catholic, he was Anglican; nor was he particularly religious. The only things Churchill was staunch about were cigars, whiskey, and defending the British Empire.

Brown claims: Pope Urban VII banished Bernini’s famous statue The Ecstasy of St. Teresa “to some obscure chapel across town” because it was too racy for the Vatican.
Fact: The statue was actually commissioned by Cardinal Cornaro specifically for the Cornaro Chapel (Brown’s “obscure chapel”). Moreover, the sculpture was completed in 1652 — eight years after Urban’s death.

Brown claims: Bernini and famed scientist Galileo were members of the Illuminati.
Fact: The Illuminati was founded in Bavaria in 1776. Bernini died in 1680, while Galileo died in 1642 — more than a century before the Illuminati were first formed.

This last falsehood bears further examination, because the Illuminati are so integral to the plot of Angels and Demons. The great Baroque artist Bernini is also a central figure in Brown’s tale.

It may seem like a small “white lie” to change the timeline so drastically, and to make Bernini a key player in an Illuminati plot against the Catholic Church. But Bernini was an extraordinary Baroque artist who deserves better than Brown’s treatment.

Imagine that someone made a film that portrayed Steven Spielberg as a closet anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Movie fans would be justifiably outraged.

But Dan Brown wrote a book (soon to be a movie!) identifying another great artistic virtuoso, Bernini, as a secret atheist who hated the Catholic Church. In reality, though, Bernini was a devout Catholic who went to mass every day and pursued the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which include up to five hours of daily silent meditation.

In one of the movie trailers (since taken down — I wonder why?), Tom Hanks chastises Vatican officials — “You guys don’t even read your own history!” — for not knowing about “La Purga,” the branding and execution of four Illuminati scientists in 1668.

The irony’s so rich, it could pay off the national debt. Because, you see, it’s Hanks’ character who doesn’t know his history. Repeat after me: there were no Illluminati before 1776. (Of course, that’s just what they want us to believe! Mwu-hahaha!)

Most of Brown’s historical misrepresentations tend to malign Christianity or the Catholic Church in particular. If these were just haphazard mistakes, you’d expect roughly half to be positive. But the book’s agenda clearly is to tarnish the Church’s image.

Some might argue that the Church has done a good enough job of that on its own, what with the Crusades, the Inquisition, the child-abuse scandals, and other shameful episodes in its past. Brown is like the cop who plants evidence on a suspect because he thinks he’s guilty. If his case against the Church is so strong, why make things up?

Nevertheless, Ron Howard encourages William Donohue to see the movie version of Angels and Demons for himself. The only reason that could make a difference is if the movie tones down some of the anti-Catholic aspects of the novel. So perhaps that’s a kind of acknowledgement that the book was too harsh, and the movie will, indeed, be different.

Well, there is one area, apparently, where we already know the film will stray from the novel. One of the bad guys is the Hassassin, whom Brown described as a “mahogany-skinned,” misogynistic Middle Easterner. According to the movie’s IMDb page, however, the actor portraying this character is… Danish.

His character name is altered from Hassassin (related to the Persian term for a Muslim sect) to the more generic-sounding Assassin. Some on the IMDb message boards suggest that the filmmakers changed him from a Middle Easterner because they were afraid of potential controversy.

So let’s get this straight: It’s okay to bash the Catholic Church as a violent institution opposed to reason. But don’t you dare make one bad guy (out of several) a Middle Easterner.

Why? Because Catholics may gripe, write letters, boycott, even sic William Donohue on you. But they won’t riot. And they won’t behead anybody.

To quote one of my favorite movies, “How do you like that? I buried the lead.”

Part II to come later…. Maybe….

People are still buzzing about Barack Obama’s apparent “dis” of Gordon Brown last week, when the British prime minister paid his first official visit to the new president at the White House.

Brown presented Obama with the following gifts:

• An ornamental desk pen holder made from the oak timbers of Victorian anti-slaver HMS Gannet. (Which reportedly delighted Obama, who placed it on his Oval Office desk.)

• The framed commission for the Gannet’s sister ship, the HMS Resolute; the historic Oval Office desk was a gift from Queen Victoria, carved with wood salvaged from the Resolute.

• A first-edition set of the seven-volume classic biography of Winston Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert. (You may recall the minor foofaraw that broke out when Obama returned a Churchill bust that Britain gave the White House in the wake of 9/11.)

So, what did Brown receive in return?

Would you believe, a boxed set of DVDs?

Well, you should, because that’s what Obama gave him — 25 classic American movies on DVD that one probably could have rummaged from the Best Buy bargain bins for under $100. (At press time, I was unable to confirm the rumor that Michelle Obama threw in a pair of Snuggies.)

Didn’t Obama promise greater multilateralism and “smarter” diplomacy? That exchange seems more unilateral than the Iraq War. They say Tony Blair was Bush’s “poodle.” I shudder to think what this makes Gordon Brown.

Do I sense sabotage at work within Obama’s ranks? If I’m not mistaken, the State Department is in charge of diplomatic protocol. And who’s in charge of the State Department?

Oh, right.

In an exclusive, Big Hollywood obtained a copy of the Amazon gift receipt from an anonymous source (*cough* Hillary *cough*). Below is a facsimile of the receipt which includes personalized comments by the gift-giver.

AMAZON.COM PRIME MEMBER