I've never read Brideshead Revisited. I wasn't even born when it was on TV. I know nothing.

That said, I can predict, with absolute certainty, that somebody is going to read about how THE CHURCH is against the new film and they are going to demand I explain why and they are going to say "It's only a film."

Da Vinci Code, Northern Compass (or whatever)... it's always the same.

How dare they.

No, I mean really, how DARE they?! Imagine if someone did a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and it ended up savagely racist? That's what they've done here. A profoundly Catholic novel, in this "adaptation", Brideshead Revisited is viciously anti-Catholic. They turned a movie about God and the soul, into a lurid love triangle between a homosexual, his sister and a hapless hunk. It's lame. It's bad.

...

I could cite probably twenty examples of the film's anti-Catholicism. But let me just use one of the most egregious. In the book, the Flyte family basically opposes Julia's engagement to Rex. In fact, the catchesis of the moral pygmy Rex Motram, who as a purely materialist capitalist is in Julia's words, "half a man", takes up the whole mid-point of the book. The family is seriously worried about Rex's lack of "spiritual curiosity," but Lady Marchmain respects her daughter's freedom too much to interfere in her daughter's marriage. Then, when it is discovered that Rex had been previously married and divorced, the Flyte family vigorously opposes the marriage and eventually Julia is cut off for leaving her faith to marry a divorced man.

In the movie, when Charles asks Julia why she married Rex she basically says that her mother forced her to do it because Rex was a rich Catholic.

Ya see what I mean?

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Usually when this kind of thing happens, I feel obliged to read the book and I have to force myself through bazillions of pages of banal tedium.

On this occasion, word on the street says that it's actually a good book.