9:40AM Defamer Hollywood | While universally recognised as a deity in the Hollywood community, Steven Spielberg is hardly ever taken to task for squandering his limitless God-powers by using his rainbow-spewing Happy Ending Machine to neatly wrap up his movies’ third act problems instead of pointing it in the direction of a war-torn Third World nation to cease its suffering. (In his defence, he hasn’t pulled any celestial strings to salvage
On the Lot’s ratings, either.) But
Slate’s Kim Masters writes that a recent bit of well-publicised heresy by Mia Farrow, who warned that Spielberg would
become the “Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games” by taking a position as an adviser to the Olympics if he didn’t use his influence to decry China’s support of the Sudanese government, seems to have
moved the almighty auteur to intercede:
On a far more somber and urgent note, Spielberg must also figure out what to do about Darfur. That may not seem to make sense at a glance but it does in light of his role as an artistic adviser to the Chinese for the ‘08 Olympics. The Chinese have clout in Khartoum, and Spielberg, as fate would have it, has influence in China. Bizarrely, Spielberg may be one of the most powerful people in the world when it comes to pressuring the Chinese to lean on the Sudanese government.
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