Michael Medved Quotations

Look, this is not a movie for kids. It is a movie that does put that violence in context and it shows the idea of sacrifice, and it emphasizes -- in a way that I think a lot of people don't expect -- that this sacrifice, this death, this suffering was chosen by Jesus, at least according to the Gospels account.

Simultaneously, the movie business now experiments with a colorblind approach to casting.

For several decades, Hollywood has tried to ignore the increasingly overwhelming evidence that edgy, adult-themed entertainment usually constitutes a bad investment and a sucker bet at the box office,

I think it combines an outrageously obvious agenda with outstanding artistry.

I saw a great film over the weekend.

March of the Penguins, ... the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.

The real problem in America, though, isn't so much the low quality of TV, it's the high quantity of TV. People watch too much altogether.

The subtitles work very well and what it creates is a feeling of authenticity which is extremely unusual in any sort of biblical account.

The standard entertainment industry reaction to Hollywood's box office slump reveals the same shallow, materialistic mindset that helped create the problem in the first place.

A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders.

A lot of the red-state, blue-state clich?s are stupid and misleading. A lot of people were stunned at how well 'The Passion of the Christ' did in San Francisco, in Madison, Wis., in Philadelphia and New York.

It's a very well-made film and extremely well-acted, (and) it's one of the few movies out there that's worth talking about. The film's outrageous, obvious agenda was combined with real artistry.

For many celebrities, securing the public's votes can prove even more reassuring than winning an election by members of the Motion Picture Academy.

It's ridiculous. Everyone knows about this movie because of relentless publicity, not great controversy or popularity. I have to remind myself it's a good movie.

It's time to acknowledge that the TV ratings adopted more than eight years ago have proved to be a shabby, irrelevant, hopelessly confusing failure.

The message is that this (infidelity) is different because the characters are gay and just being true to themselves. If that's the standard of one's behavior, then anything is excusable.

We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it

Conservatives, despite their increasingly powerful presence on cable TV and talk radio, feel excluded and disregarded by the longstanding preponderance of liberal voices on public television.

The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

The bottom line is not money but some sort of demonic compulsion that drives these people to lash out against Jesus Christ, against Christians, and against anyone who holds to a sincere belief in God, in spite of the fact that it is going to cost them tens of millions of dollars to do it. They are driven to 'make a statement' regardless of the consequences.

Asking Hollywood to begin to show some restraint and balance in its antireligious fury is not the same as suggesting that the industry must transform itself into an agency for advancing the Word of God.

My objection is not that it's pro-gay but that it appears to be anti-marriage.

Savvy observers occasionally note television's resemblance to the weather: Everybody loves to complain about it, but nobody can do anything to fix it.

My four years at Berkley represent two of the happiest weeks of my life.

An important film that must be seen. Saving Lincoln is moving, ingenious, original and impressive.

If we wait for the entertainment industry to change its fundamental values, we may be waiting a long time. But we don't have to wait another day to scale back our own private consumption of television.

You can put your TV in the garage, avoid movies altogether, and use earplugs to spare your hearing from the sounds of hip-hop or heavy metal, but these forms of entertainment will still change your life through their influence on everyone else in society. Though you may struggle to protect your own kids from music that encourages violence or drugs or irresponsible sex, you can't possibly protect them from all the other kids in your community who have received full exposure.

This is what many people in the movie industry don't get: when you express hostility to conservatives, many Americans feel that you're expressing hostility to them.

Michael Moore became an industry hero and the most visible symbol of the Hollywood left.

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster.

It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.

Hollywood's persistent hostility to religious values is not just peculiar, it is positively pathological.

The movie industry has ignored the success of films that look favorably on faith with the same sort of self-destructive stubbornness that has led to its continued sponsorship of antireligious-message movies.

The twentieth century provides little or no evidence in any corner of the globe to support the contention that religion causes most human conflict.

Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign raises a series of fascinating questions, the most perplexing of all being why an international star of his stature would ever want to run in the first place

For many celebrities, securing the publics votes can prove even more reassuring than winning an election by members of the Motion Picture Academy.

If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot,

This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood.

The truth about Hamas and Islamic Jihad is that they don't prevent Israel from existing or even flourishing, they prevent Palestine from coming into existence

Unfortunately our children today seem to spend less and less time with their overworked parents, and so they draw more information about the world from the images on movie and TV screens. The true power of the media is the ability to redefine reality, to alter our expectations about what constitutes normal life. TV and the movies have abused that power by advancing the notion that wholesome, ordinary happiness is impossible.

Frightening media messages...pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives.

People.. .love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was It a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler sorry? ?No. What solved Hitler was violence.

Ronald Reagan, of course, was a Republican governor of California who went through a painful defeat in the 1976 presidential race before winning four years later

It wasn't that expectations changed. But [teens] went from general expectations of success to having no idea of the right thing to do. In the '60s there was a strong prejudice against careerism. We were self-indulgent and self-destructive.

Why is it offensive to portray a creep and a murderer as a homosexual, but totally acceptable to present him as a religious Christian?

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.