Catholic League president William Donohue commented today on how movie reviewers assessed “The Magdalene Sisters”:
“Imagine an anti-Semitic director who admits he packed into one movie every anti-Semitic theme he could draw on and then gets an anti-Semitic duo to distribute it. Next imagine film critics taking the anti-Semitic propaganda at face value and then offering anti-Semitic remarks in their reviews. Fat chance. For example, there will never be a movie about Jewish slumlords in Harlem or Jewish managers of black entertainers in the 20th century. If there were, and if it were to present a wholly one-sided portrait of the worst excesses of how some Jews exploited blacks, the ADL would be up in arms. And rightly so. But luckily for Jews, this is not likely to happen. Catholics are not so lucky—they have to endure Catholic-bashing directors like Peter Mullan shopping his anti-Catholic script to anti-Catholic distributors like Harvey and Bob Weinstein, only to have it reviewed by anti-Catholic critics. Here are some of today’s reviews:
· “Mullan has been criticized for condensing the extreme abuses of asylums into an overloaded melodrama, and he does, but I don’t fault him for it.” “The whole system was sadistic and indefensible, and the church…deserves the scorn that Mullan and his fine cast heap on it.” (New York Daily News)
· “For some, the asylums were like a roach motel—girls checked in, but they never checked out, except 40 or 50 years later, in a pine box.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
· “Mullan transcends genre labeling by delving into the ways in which moral fascism debases its practitioners as it lays bare the human limitations of its intended converts.” (Newsday)
· “You’ll walk away amazed at the heartlessness of the people running the asylums and wondering how such a gruesome practice could have existed into the late 20th century.” (New York Post)
“These reviewers have a deep-seated need to believe the worst about the Catholic Church. They’re the ones who need to check into the asylum.”
