The Passion of the Christ Trailer

Apple.com has posted the trailer for Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ. I discussed the contraversy around the film at some length a month or so ago. The film has apparently been renamed - it used to simply be The Passion, then The Passion of Christ, and now it's The Passion of the Christ. I think the addition of "the" in the title is fairly significant - the language now tends more towards what scholars use rather than people discussing Christianity in a casual manner.

I still have very high hopes for this movie. If anything, the trailer shows some nice costumes and sets.

Speaking of movies, I got up bright and early this morning to head down to the University District because a arthouse cinema there was having a movie poster sale. I was hoping to score a Blue Velvet or Lost Highway poster, but no dice (did get the Naomi Watts Mulholland Dr. poster though). There was a long wait - it took me about an hour from the time I arrived to get into the poster room - and I couldn't believe how many people were buying ten, twenty, and even thirty posters. There were some big movies in there, and quite a few artsy ones, too. They advertised two Seven Samurai posters (how cool would that have been?) but of course they were gone by the time I got there. So, too, was the Kill Bill poster. But, I managed to get an awesome poster from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, so it was a good time.

Then, I bought comics. The big news at the comic shop wasn't the comics, but the Book of Erotic Fantasy, a D&D supplement featuring rules for sex, and lots of full-color photographs of goths in various stages of undress. When I saw a preview of this item at GenCon (being sold from a booth whose main draw wasn't fancy banners or artwork, but the girls in corsets manning it), I thought that it was basically a gimmick to sell low-quality bullshit to lonely gamers. After having seen the finished product, I stand by that opinion. The rules inside aren't practical for most role-playing games (unless it's just you and your lover playing "the elves get it on"), and the sticker "indended for mature audiences" seems more like a joke, because the entire thing reads like a wink-wink, nudge-nudge dick joke. I read most of the comics on the bus ride home as I tried to forget about the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I'm more than a hundred pages into Love in the Time of Cholera. Maybe the fifth time was the charm, because I'm really digging it.

And, in the "Civilization Takes One More Drunken Step Towards the Brink" category, Apple.com also posted the trailer for Garfield. If someone told me they were planning on sodomizing my childhood with a chainsaw, I wouldn't be as miserable as I was after watching that trailer. It certainly makes my habit of eating Cream of Mushroom soup (cold) out of the can seem less pathetic. Speaking of which...

What I'm reading: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
What's playing: The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin
Movie: Anything but Garfield. Seriously.