Just got off the phone from a live eight-minute chat with Engaging Your World, a radio show on WVNE 760 am in Worcester, Mass. I don’t know whether there’s an online audio archive of these interviews anywhere, so if you find one, let me know.
They had initially contacted me some weeks ago, around the time Kingdom of Heaven came out on video, and I think we were originally going to talk about that movie, but the interview got put off and delayed for various reasons — so I basically had no idea what to expect when they called me today.
In a nutshell, the host and I talked about holiday movies, mostly of the mainstream variety — will The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or King Kong inherit the mantle of success bequeathed by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series, etc., etc. — but there was an awkward moment when the host asked about Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s upcoming “gay cowboy” movie, and whether the ads for it were sufficiently up-front about the gay content. I think the word “disgusting” might have even come up.
That’s not the sort of rhetoric I like to use when discussing this subject, so I made some comment about how Hollywood always downplays controversial elements in a film when there are millions of dollars at stake — just look at how the director and stars of the upcoming Narnia movie have gone out of their way, at the junket and elsewhere, to downplay the story’s Christian subtext and to say that you can interpret the film however you like.
I’m not sure if that’s the sort of perspective that leads to repeat appearances, but that’s the one I have, so there you go.
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