Paul O'Donnell: June 2008 Archives

Next to the eternity of the afterlife, does screen immortality really count for much? Not in the view of the Roman Catholic Church, apparently. Approached by director Ron Howard and his Sony Pictures production team, the church refused to allow the director to shoot the "The DaVinci Code" prequel "Angels & Demons" in two of its Vatican City outposts, Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria, both of which appear in Dan Brown's novel. Neither "DaVinci" nor "A&D" conform with the RC view of Jesus as a chaste, not to mention childless, divine being.

While you can't fault the Vatican's principled stand, PR types might take issue with its strategy. The original "The DaVinci Code" movie overcame Vatican opposition and miserable reviews to rack up 3/4 of a billion dollars in box office. More importantly, the churches in question are so beautiful that they would be bound to lure unchurched souls, despite the politics of the "Angels & Demons" plot. In other words, if you got it, flaunt it.

For more on the controversy, click here.

Don't you hate when your parents try to be cool and get on MySpace? Mel Gibson's father, Hutton Gibson, famous for his crackpot Catholicism and his doubts about the historicity of the Holocaust, has reportedly erected his own page on the social networking site (or "A Space for Friends").

Mel, who has problems of his own, is likely too old to be embarrassed by his 89-year-old dad's boasts ("author ... WWII veteran ... 'Jeopardy' champion").

The only person who might lose some cred is Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican congressman and presidential candidate, who the senior Gibson touts as the answer to the world's woes in two videos he's posted. He doesn't explain why he believes in Paul, but allows a creepy virtual simulacrum of the candidate to do its own talking. Not that Paul minds being associated with hard-liners like Gibson, but the page also honors the departed Democrat Robert Kennedy.

M. Night Shyamalan's movies—"The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," "Signs"—have been touted to me as spiritual explorations posing as standard supernatural thrillers. I've always seen them the other way around: the aliens banging on the roof, the spooked-up kids, the "Twilight Zone" plots all came with precious little to say about the nature of life or heaven: no more than, say, "Pulp Fiction," and Lord knows nobody's got Quentin Tarantino down as a spiritualist.

Actor Stephen Baldwin lives on the skinniest edge in Hollywood. Though he has a recognizably significant movie to his credit ("The Usual Suspects"), these days he's more often associated with the slacker classic "BioDome." He's even more famous, however, for being the little brother of Alec. As a Christian, his evangelical standing is propped precariously on a series of Skater-for-Jesus videos that, if they've sold hundreds of thousands of copies, don't exactly advocate casting off the yoke of the world to live in the serenity of Christ's peace. With that kind of margin to play with, why does Baldwin insist on showing up at Rehab, the sarcastically named, alcohol drenched, hedonistic pool party in Vegas?