Yesterday, we spoke about Lady GaGa being a motorbike. Apparently, the image (pictured right) is her new album cover and… well… it is fair to say that it isn’t in-line with her usual arthaus image.

With GaGa gathering up bug-eyed devotees like some kind of rampaging pop-missionary, there are those who are howling with rage!

A lot of fans really aren’t too keen on this new piece of artwork, thinking that it looks like a piece of shoddy photoshoppery, while others are absolutely convinced that the whole thing is a bit of a practical joke. On top of that, the idiots from the Christian church are throwing their hands up in disgust as well.

One fan spits about the new Born This Way picture:

“This better be fake. Because I am not OK with it”

Another adds

“WTF NO”

The outpouring seems to suggest that this isn’t up to the usual GaGa standard, making us believe that she’s pranking everyone for a bit of a wheeze. Or, just as likely, she’s actually going to use if for her new LP, also for japes.

GaGa tweeted in return to the criticism:

“Can’t believe it’s here! So happy+free to finally share this w you”

This prompted even more complaining for people who don’t realise that some fine, fine albums have really dismal sleeves.

All the while, this is drumming up interest in her new song, ‘Judas’, which appeared online recently. There’s no official video yet, but apparently, GaGa will appear as Mary Magdalene. Have a listen to it here.

Of course, with GaGa being famous and tackling themes of Christianity (or indeed, just flicking the fingers up at them – who cares really?), someone had to get their heckles up.

Cue Bill Donahue, president of The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He says:

“This is a stunt… Lady Gaga tries to continue to shock Catholics and Christians in general: she dresses as a nun… she swallows the rosary. She has now morphed into a caricature of herself.”

Meanwhile, her creative director, Laurieann Gibson, spoke about the video’s potential for offence.

“It went through several changes and late-night debates because at one point, there were two completely different views and I was like, ‘Listen, I don’t want lightning to strike me! I believe in the gospel and I’m not going there.’ And it was amazing because to have that conversation about salvation, peace and the search for the truth in a room of non-believers and believers, to me, that was saying God is active in a big way. And the place that it came to is surreal. We don’t touch on things that we have no right touching upon, but the inspiration and the soul and idea that out of your oppression, your darkness, your Judas, you can come into the marvelous light. So it’s about the inspiration and to never give up… We’ve created a new Jerusalem.”

Nice timing for Easter, eh?

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Poor old Bristol Palin, she’s got a shotgun wielding nutcase of a mother, had a child with a man who has neck so red that it can’t be seen by the naked eye and, unbelievably, she failed to win some shoddy yank spin-off of Strictly Come Dancing.

In what can only be seen as an attempt to desperately claw back some semblance of dignity, dear sweet Brizzle has appeared in a Public Service Announcement for safe sex, alongside none other than Mike, “The Situation,” Sorrentino.

Yes, you did read that correctly, Bristol Palin is promoting safe sex with a man who is named after his own abdomen.

Rather predictably the word situation features heavily in the clip, and not just because the Jersey Shore star tosspot has an IQ that only allows him to repeat the words, “the situation,” over and over again whilst dribbling and staring far off into the distance.

Our intrepid heroes are seen backstage at Dancing With the Stars, talking about how they like to avoid situations whilst having situations because that situation could lead to another situation in which a final, drastically life altering, situation crops up, thereby ruining said original situation.

Get it? Neither do we.

BUT WAIT! That’s not even the most bizarre part of this travesty in the name of public service.

During the PSA we are subjected to the Situation (the numbskull with the flat stomach, not the overall circumstance Palin and Sorrentino find themselves in) trying to get his hands on Bristol’s bristols, only to be told that Palin likes to avoid those situations, because she’s all about the abs…tinence. DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE!?

HAHAHAHAHA!

The more current affairs savvy amongst you will have noticed that this PSA went viral just before the Pope announced that he wasn’t as against condoms as he was last week. It’s hard to say whether Palin and Sorrentino had anything to do with the Vatican’s decision to change its stance, but we here at hecklerspray like to think that the his holiness the Pope wears a What Would the Situation Do? wristband as he struts around Vatican City, with his slicked back hair hidden under his Papal headgear.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is the B-Palin/Situation Safe Sex PSA in all its farcical glory.

Jesus Wept.

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Whenever Ron Howard adapts a Dan Brown book into a movie, three things are guaranteed to instantly happen.

Firstly, Tom Hanks will grow a terrible haircut. Secondly, reams of fat American tourists will start plodding around wherever it’s set loudly carping on about the Catholic church because they think that listening to a rubbishy airport book on audiotape once makes them the world’s sweatiest, most badly-dressed professors of theology.

And thirdly Ron Howard will wring his hands and unconvincingly claim that he doesn’t hate Catholics. Angels & Demons is released soon, so you’ll never guess what Ron Howard has done.

The Da Vinci Code. Now that was a good film. Probably. We haven’t actually watched it. But then again we didn’t really need to, on the basis that anyone who’s even been within 30 miles of Paris in the last five years already knows the entire plot front to back from overhearing the small army of simpletons who blunder round day after day shouting things like “Ooh, Mary Magdalene was the victim of a Catholic cover up,” and “Ooh, Opus Dei,” and “Ooh, blah blah blah blah wank.”

Anyway, now the movie adaptation of the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, Angels And Demons, is about to be released. It’s bound to have exactly the same effect as The Da Vinci Code, in that everyone is going to spout badly-informed nonsense about the Illuminati until we end up punching ourselves unconscious, the Large Hadron Collider is going to become a haven for fat tourists who secretly wish they were sitting by a swimming pool somewhere and all the Catholics in the world are going to throw a massive tizzy about it.

It happened with The Da Vinci Code – plus the film was banned in Pakistan and China – and now it pretty much looks like it’s going to happen with Angels & Demons, too. The Roman Diocese had already banned the movie from filming inside any of its churches, and last week the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights wrote a newspaper article saying that Angels & Demons was a fat load of toilet and that Ron Howard was a ginger, Catholic-hating tosswhump. We’re paraphrasing.

But Ron Howard isn’t going down without a fight, so he’s written a response for the Huffington Post:

“Let me be clear: neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic… After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?”

Now that both sides have had their say, it looks like we’re all invited to take sides. So who will you pick – the large, humourless organisation that believes an omniscient fairy will let you live on a cloud if you spend your entire life brown-nosing him, or the slightly annoying ginger man who’s made a bad film based on a worse book?

It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? So we’ve decided that we’re just going to tell you ending of Angels & Demons to save you the effort – apparently it was Jesus, in the drawing room, with his holy eye-lasers.

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You don't want to get on the wrong side of the Vatican – not only does it have the power to send you to hell, but it can also deliver quite a nasty movie review, as The Golden Compass is discovering.

The Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano has launched a scathing attack aimed at The Golden Compass, and what it calls the movie's "cold and hopeless world." Quite what the Vatican's problem is with The Golden Compass, a movie about shifty-eyed bishops trying to kill children that may as well be called All Catholics Smell Of Bumholes, we don't know. But when you go and see The Golden Compass, just you remember that it isn't really the Pope's cup of tea. He much prefers Piss Crazy Lesbian Sluts 2, you see, and says it's a high watermark of the piss crazy lesbian slut genre. Or something. Possibly.

Pick a failed film. Any failed film. At random, let's choose Catwoman. Catwoman failed abysmally, and you know why? Because at no point did Halle Berry hawk up a furball shaped like a crucifix or look directly at the camera and say, "Bishops. Now they're a bunch of wankers."

Because if she had, The Vatican would have laid into Catwoman and given it enough extra publicity to make it a success. It has a history of that, you see – when the Vatican got angry at Madonna for crucifying herself in a concert, the tour went on to earn more money than any female tour before it. The Vatican tutted when Kanye West dressed up as Jesus, and he's now one of the biggest stars on the planet. And then the Vatican laid into Harry Potter, only to create such a success that people actually paid to see Harry Potter get naked and stab a load of horses in the eyes with a big metal spike.

The point is that whenever the Vatican gets on its high horse about something, it just makes people want to see it more. It even made a commercial success of The Da Vinci Code with its bitching, and anything that can make people watch a film starring a man with a haircut that dire deserves some kind of awe at least.

And now the Vatican has turned its sights onto The Golden Compass, the new movie starring Nicole Kidman as a woman whose soul has taken the form of Donald Trump's haircut. Based on the first book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass is about a world ruled by evil bishopy people and polar bears that punch each others' jaws off. It's probably the bishop bit that the Vatican didn't enjoy so much, in honesty.

Perhaps fearful that the movie will encourage youngsters to read the more explicitly anti-Catholic book that it's based on, the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano has waded in and criticised The Golden Compass to kingdom come. According to the paper:

"It's a film that leaves one cold, because it brings with it the coldness and the desperation of rebellion, solitude and individualism… In the world of Pullman, hope simply doesn't exist, in part because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events… The spectator of this film, if he is honest and gifted with a critical spirit, will feel no particular emotion, except for a great coldness — which is not only due to the polar scenes." 

That's where the Vatican is wrong, though. We left The Golden Compass with quite a strong emotion, actually – we were a bit narked that we'd paid to see a film that didn't even have a proper ending. 

But anyway, now that the Pope and his mates have waded in with their opinion it's inevitable that more and more people will end up going to see The Golden Compass. Maybe even enough of them to convince producers to turn the other two books into movies as well. You know, including the one where the main characters go up to heaven and actually kill God.

Read more:

Vatican blasts "Golden Compass" as Godless and hopeless – Reuters 

Now, the more religious of you might look at Britney Spears and think "there's a young lady going straight to hell" – but Britney Spears is determined not to go to hell, and she doesn't care how many priests she has to seduce to avoid it.

Although the whirlpool of custody cases and drug allegations and head-shaving, vagina-baring madness has overtaken Britney Spears' life at the moment, it's good to see that Britney hasn't completely turned her back on what she's good at – annoying the clergy. One of the booklet photos for Britney Spears' new album Blackout has caused controversy among Catholics because it shows Britney Spears sitting on a priest's lap in a short skirt. If anything, though, the Catholics should be pleased by this – the priest in the photo clearly isn't aroused at all by Britney Spears, and is instead wearing a facial expression halfway between "What's that smell? Has someone farted?" and "Oh Christ no, not the vagina again!"

Offending Christians is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. All you need to do is build a chocolate Jesus or crucify yourself for cash or make a film suggesting that Amelie is Jesus' granddaughter and the flurry of blustering clergymen will instantly give you all the free publicity you'll ever need.

Britney Spears already knows this thanks to her controversial role as a demented Christian on Will & Grace two years ago, and now she's getting it again because there's a picture in the artwork to her album Blackout that shows Britney Spears sitting on a disgruntled-looking priest's lap. Somewhat predictably, Catholic leaders are just as outraged as if the picture had been of Britney Spears pooing in baby Jesus' eye, as the New York Daily News reports:

Kinky photos of a half-naked Britney Spears perched on a priest's lap and leaning seductively against a church confessional sparked outrage among Catholic leaders. At least one said the saucy snapshots, which grace the singer's thumping new dance album, "Blackout," are a "bottom of the barrel" stunt from a girl who really could use some quality time spent repenting sins in a wooden cubicle. "This is all the puzzle pieces coming together. This girl is crashing," said Bill Donohue, president of the New York-based Catholic League. "She's not even allowed to bring up her own kids because she's not responsible enough. Now we see she can't even entertain."

And you know what? We agree wholeheartedly with Bill Donohue. We didn't mind seeing Britney Spears driving with her children perched on her lap. We didn't mind watching Britney Spears shave her head and attack a car and go to rehab and call herself the antichrist. We didn't mind when a judge made Britney Spears take drug-tests to prove she was capable of looking after her own children. But dressing up in a short skirt and sitting on the lap of a man who's dressed up as a priest? The disgusting witch! Let's forget all that forgiveness crap that the Bible's always banging on about and set fire to Britney's house as a punishment.

But, in fairness, we can see where these priests are coming from. If Britney Spears dressed up as a farmer for the Blackout artwork, or a chimney sweep, or a vet, those professions would be pretty riled up, too. And if Britney Spears posed for the Blackout artwork wearing the same manky decade-old T-shirt she's already worn for a month while ballooning in weight, developing all sorts of sallow skin complaints, being generally grumpy and going days at time without seeing another human being, counting all her cats as her best friends, chances are we wouldn't enjoy having our turf invaded either. 

Read more:

Catholics slam Britney Spears pix as 'bottom of barrel' stunt – New York Daily News