Last week, Roger Ebert finally got around to destroying reviewing Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Ebert’s rant is as cerebral as it is merciless, and it’s worth a read even if you haven’t seen the film. He makes some good points about how the film completely misunderstands the concepts of probability and selection, forming flashy but ultimately useless argument.

Ebert’s rage is thinly veiled. He’s obviously upset that clear logical fallacies can go unnoticed by so many people. Sure, misreading Darwin while attempting to refute him is a lame move when engaging in scientific debate, but the practice is quite common when it comes to filmmaking. When movies deal with evolution, there’s an unspoken understanding that they can completely distort the theory beyond recognition. It’s kind of like calling someone a pedophile during a Friar’s Club Roast, everyone knows it isn’t true, and it’s all in good fun.

When you look at it in this way, Expelled is just the latest in a long line of films that distort the theory of evolution to make a buck. Here are 5 more that are guilty of crimes against the origin of humanity:

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How did Bill Maher and Larry Charles get religious figures to agree to be interviewed on camera by the notoriously hostile-towards-religion Maher for their upcoming doc Religulous? According to an interview the comedian gave Patrick Goldstein, they didn’t:

It was simple: We never, ever, used my name. We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’ … The crew would set up and at the last second, when the cameras were already rolling, I would show up. So either they’d be seen on camera leaving the interview and lose face or they’d have to talk to me. It was like–’And now here’s … Bill!’ You could usually see the troubled looks on their faces.

This method calls to mind two recent films: the Charles-directed Borat, which used these deceptive documentary tactics within the framework of fiction, and Expelled. The extent to which the producers and star Ben Stein misled some of their interview subjects caused a minor firestorm––which didn’t do anything bad for the film’s box office, but certainly damaged the credibility of the filmmakers and their argument.

I’m fairly certain Bill Maher doesn’t care about ethical credibility––he’s probably primarily concerned with getting a punchline by any means necessary. But *I’m* kind of concerned about this growing trend of deception in ostensible non-fiction. Or maybe I just didn’t think Borat was that funny. Thoughts?

The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!

• The Onion’s Amelie Gillette mocks Ben Stein for equating intelligent design to punk-rock rebellion. You know, just like we did two whole months ago. Flattering!
• Scientific American has put together a list of Six Things In Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know. Ominous, right? Most damning, as far as I’m concerned: the film’s selective editing of a passage written by Charles Darwin, in order to suggest that Darwinism is fundamentally responsible for the Holocaust. Via Digg.
• The National Center for Science Education has put together a site called Expelled Exposed, with details on the producers’ quasi-ethical interview tactics, and fleshed-out stories on “what really happened to the people [the film claims] were persecuted for their views.” Via Kate Coe.
• Fox News gossip columnist/finger-on-the-pulse cultural critic Roger Friedman lashes out at Expelled for being “sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring)” and declares that Stein “is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.” After pausing twice to make fun of Ben Stein’s “whiny” voice, Friedman rails against the release plan for the film, which will put prints in front of “rural and poor” viewers at the expense of the Beverly Hills elite. “If I lived in the Deep South, I’d boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated.” Hint hint, Mississippi!

From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promoting Expelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.

Anyway, back to the point…

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• Are you ready for Children of Men: The TV Series? John Brownlee isn’t! Alfonso Cuaron’s film is “genre-defying masterpiece, exactly as long as it needs to be, every shot and line perfect,” he writes at Sci-Fi Scanner. “So obviously it requires weekly extrapolation to dilute the effect.”
• “It dawned on me as I was getting started that there is an important piece of information that many of you younger Pajibans may not be aware of. It saddens me to think this might be the case, and thus this review is given another purpose: to perhaps educate y’all. Because you see, here’s the thing: Eddie Murphy used to be funny.” Dustin Rowles watches 48 Hours with a hangover.
• Tee hee. Critic of Creationism/science blogger PZ Myers was banned from a screening of Ben Stein’s anti-Darwin propaganda film Expelled, but was told his guests could attend. One of Myers’ guests? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, whose arguments the film basically exists to refute. Via Boing Boing.
• Andrew Bujalski has moved to Austin. He doesn’t know when his next movie will be finished.

Above: a nearly eight-minute “trailer” for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-Darwinism documentary starring and produced by Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein). The independently-financed doc will hit theaters in mid-April. According to Variety, Stein and friends have hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing firm behind The Passion of the Christ, who are the go-to guys for projects looking to tap into the elusive but potentially lucrative Christian conservative market.

What’s interesting is how aggressive the film seems to be about appealing to the audience’s latent desire to rebel against the establishment. The trailer focuses on Darwin-defaming scientists and professors who have been “shunned and discredited” for “suggesting that we aren’t merely mud animated by lightning after all.” Stein works hard to paint these guys as outlaws whose ideas are so “dangerous” that a giant conspiracy has sprung up to suppress him, led by insecure bureaucrats like…Richard Dawkins? He even warns the viewer that the very act of watching the film “could land you in a heap of trouble.” Sounds sexy, right?

I assume the hope is that college kids are so eager to embrace anything that has anything to do with saying “fuck you” to authority, that they’ll hop on the intelligent design band wagon just to be contrarian. And who knows…there isn’t any decent music for kids with a hardon for rebellion to get behind these days, maybe they’ll buy the Nixon speechwriter-as-institution smashing rockstar just out of desperation.

Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:

My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.

Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:

But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.

The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.

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