Fan Fare

Fans seek midnight romance under light of “New Moon”

Fans lined up Thursday night at movie theaters to be among the first to get bitten by the “New Moon” phenomenon, the sequel to last year’s “Twilight.” The vampire romance movie ended up setting a box office record of $26.3 million for those midnight screenings by drawing fans like the ones profiled in our Fan Fare video below.

Who will go to “New Moon?” Lots of teen girls, for sure, but also moms who are into the story, young women and the men they drag along on dates. Those groups are expected to snap up tickets to the tune of about $100 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices this weekend. That’s a lot of howling at the “New Moon.”

“New Moon,” of course, has generated plenty of buzz. Tracking firm Trendrr said that in the last three months, more than 100,000 “New Moon” related videos have been added to YouTube.com. Trendrr also said that on Thursday, Twitter.com received more than 91,000 posts related to “New Moon.”

But despite all that popularity, the Vatican is not on-board. This week, an official with the Catholic Church called the film “nothing more than a moral vacuum with a deviant message.” This despite influential film critic Roger Ebert saying that the “Twilight Saga is an extended metaphor for teen chastity.” Who to believe?

For the uninitiated, “New Moon” is the second installment in the “Twilight” franchise based on the books by Stephenie Meyer. In the books and the movies, high school student Bella Swan (Kristen Stewartin the films) falls in love with the vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). But in “New Moon,” there’s another boy competing for Bella’s affection, and that is werewolf Jacob Black, played by 17 year-old actor Taylor Lautner, photographed above at right. As a result, some fans going to “New Moon” are on Team Edward and some are on Team Jacob. As if any fan support is going to change which way Bella’s vampire-loving heart really leans.

Check out the video below.

from FaithWorld:

This time around, Dan Brown hero is Vatican ally

After exposing a Church cover-up in "The Da Vinci Code," symbologist Robert Langdon returns to the big screen as an unlikely Vatican ally in the latest movie adaptation of a novel by author Dan Brown.

"Angels & Demons," again starring Tom Hanks as Langdon and directed by Ron Howard, premieres in Rome on Monday at a theatre a mile (0.6 kilometer) away from Vatican City. It's due to open in the United States on May 15.

In the film, Langdon is recruited by the Vatican after the pope dies and four cardinals tipped  to succeed him are kidnapped. Langdon races through the "Eternal City" deciphering clues linked to a centuries-old secret society, the Illuminati.

"He is not the man the Vatican trusts -- he is the man the Vatican needs," Howard said in production notes for the movie.

The Vatican deeply disapproved of" The Da Vinci Code," especially its portrayal of the life of Jesus, and the Archdiocese of Rome refused permission for "Angels & Demons" to be filmed in historic churches there, forcing the crew to recreate them in Los Angeles. The Vatican has declined to comment on reports it would call for a boycott of the new film.

When "Angels & Demons" actor Ewan McGregor and actress Ayelet Zurer posed for a photocall in Rome with actors dressed as Swiss Guards, they had to do it in a deconsecrated church.

But director Howard says it's not anti-Catholic and thinks that "Catholics, including most in the hierarchy of the Church, will enjoy the movie for what it is: an exciting mystery, set in the awe-inspiring beauty of Rome."

from FaithWorld:

Vatican forgives John Lennon for “more popular than Jesus” quip

When John Lennon said in 1966 that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus," there was a furious reaction in the United States. Dozens of radio stations in the South and Midwest banned Beatles music and some concert venues cancelled scheduled appearances by the band. Their manager Brian Epstein quickly flew to the U.S. to try to quell the storm. Soon afterward, Lennon told a news conference in Chicago that he was sorry for making the comparison, although he added he still thought it was true. The Vatican, as far as I can see from online archives, stayed silent and aloof even thought it could hardly agree with or approve Lennon's message.

When the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano came out with a nostalgic look back at the Beatles on the 40th anniversary of their 1968 White Album on Saturday, it lead off the article with Lennon's famous quote and promptly shrugged it off. "The remark by John Lennon, which triggered deep indignation mainly in the United States, after many years sounds only like a 'boast' by a young working-class Englishman faced with unexpected success, after growing up with the legend of Elvis and rock and roll," it wrote. The Beatles' music was creative and original, even more so than their haircuts and clothes, and has stood the test of time, it said. The Italian-language original has now been overtaken on the OR website by the latest edition, but an English translation will certainly pop up somewhere (on Zenit?).

At the risk of possibly over-interpreting an arts page story, I wonder what all this says about the ridiculing of religious leaders. The uproar back in 1966 was mostly from the U.S. "Bible Belt" and the Vatican seems to have been quiet. Would it be the same today? At the Catholic-Muslim Forum in Rome three weeks ago, the two sides agreed in a statement about religious minorities that "their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule." Muslim countries, which were not very vocal on the international scene back in the 1960s, are now working hard at the United Nations to push through a global blasphemy law.

What do you think would happen today if a rock band claimed to be more popular than Jesus? Or Mohammad?