You’ll have to click on the image below to watch the video, which is legitimately clever and funny. Christianity takes a few hits, but I don’t know of any Christian who can’t laugh at his or herself as long we’re not — per the usual — being singled out by cowardly satirists posing as “ballsy.”

Thankfully, that is certainly not the case here and as expected, the very same leftists who would praise the bravery of anyone trashing Christians, are now screaming “Islamophobia!”:

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Gothamist:

While Leary is probably trying to shock his fans out of their pre-holiday stupor—fueled by a never ending stream of wallpaper Christmas tunes—we had a very tough time sitting through this particularly xenophobic one-note joke.

Islamophobia Watch:

A jaw-droppingly Islamophobic video has been posted by Irish-American comedian Denis Leary on WhoSay. Some years ago Leary took a firm stand against Mel Gibson’s antisemitism. But apparently crude anti-Muslim stereotyping is fine with Leary.

Please note that neither one said anything objecting to Leary’s shots at Christianity.

Who’s the “phobe” now?

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Editor’s Note: Please welcome Kate O’Hare to the pages of Big Hollywood. As a longtime fan of her television coverage, it’s a real privilege to have her as part of the family. — JN

Perhaps the most direct TV reaction to 9/11 was the FX drama “Rescue Me,” starring Denis Leary as Tommy Gavin, an out-of-control member of the FDNY’s fictitious Ladder 62/Engine 99. It aired its finale on Sept. 7, but I wasn’t there.

I was there when the show began strong in 2004, with Tommy dealing with stress of 9/11, both the horror of the event and the guilt over surviving when his cousin and best friend, Jimmy Keefe, didn’t. It was irreverent, often profane (as much as ad-supported basic cable could bear), raucous and full of moments of dark humor and heroism. I once asked some Los Angeles firefighters about it, and they said it was tame – so I never doubted its veracity in portraying the secret lives of the FDNY.

But, as many Hollywood things do, it went too far, too weird, too vicious, too strange – especially in its portrayal of Tommy’s faith, which vacillated between “Father Ted” and “The Omen.” And it was way too hard to believe that women would fall that hard for Tommy Gavin, over and over again (they may fall for Leary, but he doesn’t just wear Denis Leary’s face, he IS Denis Leary, famous comic and actor).

Having been in New York in Oct. 2001 and seeing the memorials everywhere to the fallen firefighters and police, and then joining them again in Manhattan for the first St. Patrick’s Day Parade since the Towers fell, I wanted so badly to keep loving “Rescue Me.”

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Back before the show “Rescue Me” went completely off the rails, there was a great episode where Denis Leary and the boys in his firehouse were ordered to go to sensitivity training. The training session went awry when the racially-mixed fireman started keeping score on which ethnic group had the most offensive nicknames. They were talking volume and level of offense taken at the utterance of such epithets.

Me and my racially group of friends had these same kind of conversations, except that we weren’t racially mixed, we were a bunch of young dumb white guys. But I had black friends confirm our findings: there’s not really a racial epithet you can sling a white person’s way that carries the venom that a word used over-and-over-again by rappers carries for African-Americans. But my thinking has evolved.

There is a word you can call a white person that carries with it all sorts of horrible implications, and that word my friends is RACIST. (more…)

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dreamworks Animation have definitively proven that Digital 3-D is a blockbuster format. Not only has Monsters vs. Aliens seized a monstrous $58.2M in opening weekend ticket sales, Real-D (the technology provider) and Dreamworks have revealed that $25M or so of that gross was generated specifically from 3-D and IMAX 3-D. Fox is reporting that fully 43% of the total take was from the estimated 2,218 Digital 3-D screens.

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS tore up the box office this weekend - especially in 3-D

That means that the Per Screen Average for the movie in 3-D was about $11,700, while the 4,800 or so traditional 35MM 2-D engagements had a Per Theatre of just an estimated $4,780. Exhibitors who figured out a way to overcome the credit crunch and pay the estimated $100,000 to convert a traditional theatre into one that can show Digital 3-D made a killing this weekend.

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