Jonathan, it would seem that only some movies build an audience over time. Check out the Annie Hall entry at imdb.com: $38 million is pathetic.

(Granted, Allen may be an exception to all rules: To date, Hannah and Her Sisters, one of the most overrated films, never mind Woody Allen films, of all time—who talks like that?—is his biggest grosser, at a paltry $40 million.)

If you look at a list of Best Picture winners, though, most have been money makers. The art-house film seen by only New York and L.A. types has been the exception. The reason No Country for All Men has done as poorly as it has, given all the hype, is that it, too, is vastly overrated. It has all the dramatic power of a broken hip. Barden’s Boris Karloff impression was as amusing as it was threatening, and the distancing effect the Coens’ have been praised for, as if it were intended to express the the quotidian nature of crime in the 1980s, was merely dull. I don’t think audiences were put off by the violence and the matter of fact, almost philosophically detached way in which it was expressed, but because everyone in the film seemed bored by it.

So I think this year’s selection of less-than-blockbuster selections for Best Picture (Juno’s being the exception) is an aberration.

I don’t know when they launched it, but the New York Times has put a very nifty graphical representation of box office returns up on its website. If you’re looking to waste an hour–and get a sense of how longevity and opening weekend have changed in importance in the industry—you could do worse than playing around with this.

That’s the title of an article by Heather Mac Donald in the current issue of City Journal, just made available on their website. It’s a painfully honest look at sex on the modern american university campus, with all the internal contradictions that it brings with it. Along the way, you’ll read about college administrators who try to hide the statistics about rape on their campus…because they’re too low. (You’d think they’d want to publicize these numbers, demonstrating how safe their campus is. But no, it indicates a repressive environment where rape victims don’t feel safe to come forward.) You’ll also read about NYU’s efforts to educate on “abstinence”:

In a heroic effort at inclusiveness, she also provided a pamphlet called “Exploring Your Options: Abstinence,” but a reader could be forgiven for thinking that he had mistakenly grabbed the menu of activities at a West Village bathhouse. NYU’s officially approved “abstinence options” include “outercourse, mutual masturbation, pornography, and sex toys such as vibrators, dildos, and a paddle.” Ever the responsible parent-surrogate, NYU recommends that “abstinence” practitioners cover their sex toys “with a condom if they are to be inserted in the mouth, anus, or vagina.”

Here’s how the article opens; it’s well worth reading.

It’s a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic—but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No: it means, according to the campus sexual-assault industry, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

Speaking of motherhood…

Have you seen the over-the-top article in the Nation about Conservative Christian fears about demographic collapses and efforts to win the various culture wars by out-populating the enemies? Ross Douthat described the article with this: “the piece basically reads: Patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy, Catholic evangelical fascist, Mussolini Hitler, racist racist racist. I guess The Nation knows its audience, but still …”

For one alternative view on being a serious Christian and a mother, you might want to check out this blog, “Building Cathedrals: Building When No One Can See.” It’s put together by some friends of mine, all of whom did their undergraduate work at Princeton, and now, apparently, have bought into patriarchy and fascism. Here’s how they describe their project:

Seven young, Catholic mothers who graduated from Princeton University, seeking to build our families just as the architects of the great cathedrals built their detailed masterpieces: day by day, stone by stone, with attention to details that only He will see.

Seven bachelors degrees, four advanced degrees, and nearly 200 combined months of pregnancy have only convinced us of how much we have left to learn in matters of faith, family and vocation. We adhere wholeheartedly to every doctrine of the Holy Catholic Church, but the details beyond that, from co-sleepers and breast pumps to schooling options and professional life, are grounds for robust discussion with like-minded friends. Nothing written on this blog is intended to incite maternal guilt, anger or to advise on medical or legal matters. Virgin most prudent, pray for us!

Yep, Steve, that Feuerherd column is idiotic. Ramesh Ponnuru had a nice reply here.

As Ryan notes, the Catholic Church, according the Pew report, has lost the greatest number of believers in recent years. But the “unaffiliated” . . . faith? denomination? ecclesial community? . . . has burgeoned to 16 percent of the U.S. population, making it “the country’s fourth-largest ‘religious group.’” As the ever-estimable New York Times hastens to assure us, “The rise of the unaffiliated does not, however, mean that Americans are becoming less religious.” It just means that more people are getting up (or not) on Sunday mornings and professing faith in “nothing in particular.”

Here is the breakdown: About 39 percent of “unaffliliated” consider themselves secular unaffliliated, 36 percent are religious unaffiliated, 15 percent are agnostic, and 10 percent are atheist. Encouraging to note is that, looking at the population as a whole, this means just 1.6 percent, or one in sixty Americans, are professed atheists. Moreover, as Pew observes, the “unaffiliated population has . . . one of the lowest retention rates of all ‘religious’ groups” and is primarily comprised of adults between eighteen and fifty. Only time will tell whether this now-young, growing sector will change their tune . . .

“Credo in nihil particularum…”

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League (of which I am a proud member) issued a press release yesterday attacking an idiotic column by one Joe Feuerherd that appeared in the Washington Post. In that column, Feuerherd blasted the Catholic bishops of this country for supposedly telling him who to vote for under pain of eternal damnation. Donohue’s press release is, on the whole, excellent, but it makes a lamentable slip in the following passage:

Feuerherd would have us believe that the document [of the bishops] lists as “intrinsically evil” such things as “abortion, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.” He is twice wrong. The document does not call either stem cell research or same-sex marriage “intrinsically evil.” There are eight acts which merit that label: abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, the destruction of embryos, genocide, torture, racism and targeting noncombatants in war.

The sloppy wording of the last sentence makes it sound as though only eight things are “intrinsically evil” according to the teaching of the Church and her bishops, and that same-sex marriage is not one of them. But that is obviously untrue; there are many things besides those eight, such as murder, adultery, blasphemy, and incest. The list is much longer than eight. And since the list would clearly include homosexual activity, it would logically also include so-called “same-sex marriage.”

What Donohue presumably meant to say was not that “There are eight acts which merit that label,” but that “There are eight things that are so labeled in the bishop’s document.” But even if he had been more careful in his wording, and written just that, what would have been the point? The particular document of the bishops may not explicitly list “same-sex marriage” as intrinsically evil, but the Church’s clear teaching is that such arrangements are indeed evil and intrinsically so.

One has the uncomfortable sense that Donohue sees the adjective intrinsically here as merely an intensifier, like unspeakably, and wants to take pains to make clear that the Church does not put “same-sex marriage” in the same list of horribles as torture and genocide. But intrinsically means simply intrinsically. An intrinsically evil act is one that is objectively wrong in and of itself, and which therefore can never be justified by circumstances or consequences.

That being said, it is wonderful that Donohue took on Feuerherd, who is obviously a dolt.

The Telegraph reports:

An artist killed herself after aborting her twins when she was eight weeks pregnant, leaving a note saying: “I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum.”

Emma Beck was found hanging at her home in Helston, Cornwall, on Feb 1 2007. She was declared dead early the following day - her 31st birthday.

Her suicide note read: “I told everyone I didn’t want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does.”

Yesterday, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a new study, the “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.” It’s a fairly comprehensive study, coming in at 148 pages and featuring 35,000 interviews. The basic gist is that religious life and practice in America is robust, diverse, and fluid. 85% of Americans are affiliated with a religious tradition, only 4% report themselves to be atheist or agnostic, 44% of adults have changed the religion/denomination of their youth, and the largest “winner” in the religious marketplace is the unaffiliated. (”People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group.”)

The report also has interesting data on “next-generation” religious views (one quarter are unaffiliated) and the break-up of American Protestantism (now accounting for only 51% of the population—and the demographics aren’t looking good: “more than six-in-ten Americans age 70 and older (62%) are Protestant but that this number is only about four-in-ten (43%) among Americans ages 18-29″). One factoid immediately jumped out at me: “While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. These losses would have been even more pronounced were it not for the offsetting impact of immigration. … Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic. This means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics.”

You can read Pew’s summary of the report here, the AP’s coverage here, and the LA Times here.