Christian right goes to war with Ridley’s crusaders

[emad]

April 24, 2005


John Harlow, Los Angeles



CHRISTIAN conservatives in America are marshalling their forces against Sir Ridley Scott’s forthcoming crusader epic, The Kingdom of Heaven, claiming the film is insulting and unfair.

Scott, 67, received death threats from Muslim fundamentalists during filming in Morocco two years ago when King Mohammed VI, who admired his earlier work, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, lent him troops from the royal bodyguard.

Yet it is Christian hostility that may ultimately prove more damaging at the box office. A spate of hostile reviews that are due to appear in the increasingly influential religious press this week will urge America’s 80m born-again believers to avoid the £100m film.

Scott said he has tried hard to be fair to both sides in his film, which depicts the 12th-century battle between Muslims and Christians for Jerusalem. He even employed Grace Hill Media, a Los Angeles public relations agency that markets potentially “troublesome” films to increasingly influential Christian opinion-formers. It organised a private screening earlier this month for Christian journalists at which Scott spoke.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1582399,00.html

[billbuckhead]

1. I wish Ridley Scott well

:popcorn: Many of my favorite movies were done by him, especially Bladerunner, Thelma and Loiuse. Gladiator

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. I wish Ridley Scott would stop making crap movies.

Hannibal was the biggest piece of shit ever.

[leesa]

3. Makes me think he exposed a little truth about these 'christian' types

running around. It's what they want to happen now and it probably showed the brutality of both sides.