Word: passional
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...France about just how the American election system works," says Catherine Croisier, a professor and researcher at the Center for Trans-Atlantic Studies in Dijon, a unit within France's élite Sciences Po graduate school. "This time, people are getting interested in the race, and with far greater passion thanks to the tight battles and strong personalities involved...
...powers of social engineering. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Charlize Theron have taken pay cuts and strolled red carpets for features that further humanitarian or political agendas. Big-name directors have put their reputations on the line, and rich men have risked fortunes for passion projects. This spring there are at least eight projects with a strong social agenda hitting theaters from such noteworthy filmmakers as Errol Morris and Morgan Spurlock as well as from message-movie newcomers like Ben Stein...
...then there's An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore's 2006 slide-show passion project made $24 million at the U.S. box office--no threat to Harry Potter but a blockbuster for a documentary. Covered in newspaper style pages and on entertainment shows, it received more than four times as much media attention as the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which, shockingly, was overlooked by E! More than 1,000 people in the U.S. were trained to give Gore's presentation, 110,000 teachers downloaded a curriculum, and the movie became part of the syllabus in some schools...
Some issue movies have become for liberals, who are more than twice as likely as conservatives to say they prefer documentaries, what talk radio is for conservatives: a way of rallying the base. Many follow the pattern of the $370 million--grossing 2004 juggernaut The Passion of the Christ. Fewer than 0.1% of those who saw the film said they became Christians as a result, according to a Barna Group poll, but 18% of the audience said some aspect of their religious behavior changed--mostly praying and attending church more...
...brink of another ruinous civil war, but for the country's basketball fans, there are more important things to worry about. Forget the office pools and the social networking for big-game tickets so common in the U.S., particularly during "March Madness"; such is the passion of the Lebanese fans that at their games, riot police and the occasional armored personnel carrier are as common a sight as cheerleaders...