Last week, Roger Ebert finally got around to destroyingreviewing 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:
This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. We’re re-running it because Religulous opens in theaters today.
“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
This week we have two big-time offenders: Mike Myers’ The Love Guru, which has brought concern from Hindus, because the comedy seems to be making fun of the Hindu religion; and Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons, the “sequel” to The Da Vinci Code, adapted from Dan Brown’s bestseller. Earlier this week, the Vatican banned the latter production from all Catholic churches in Rome. The following statement from Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, was a favorite quote from the story: “Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn’t necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough.”
Of course, these days, religious organizations taking offense to a movie seems so commonplace that news like this is hardly even considered bad buzz. Neither The Love Guru nor Angels & Demons will be too aversely affected by the protests or boycotts. Both films will merely be added to the following list of major offenders (in alphabetical order so as not to offend anyone who thinks one is more offensive than another), as almost a genre cataloging than an inventory of condemned.
Brokeback Mountain - Because of its promotion of “the homosexual lifestyle,” many right-wing Christian groups protested Ang Lee’s film. Most famously, it was pulled last-minute from a multiplex owned by Mormon businessman and Utah Jazz owner Larry H. Miller, though his motivation was not necessarily claimed to be religion-based. Despite there being hundreds of gay films throughout the years, because of its popularity, this one was the worst offender. …Read more
The only wide release this weekend is New Line’s The Golden Compass, which has been frought with bad buzz since its inception, and lately has been coaxing high-pitched whines from just about anyone who cares one way or another about religion, atheism, and/or the book on which its based. Variety says it should nonetheless “easily win the weekend.” The Hollywood Reporter is slightly more reserved: “Execs will need to eke out every theatrical dollar possible if this “Compass” is to prove golden, let alone any sort of franchise starter.”
Today’s writers strike update gets the best teaser ever: “Slow pace frustrating, holidays loom.”
This silly Variety article about why Oscar prognostication is horseshit lumps bloggers in the same sentence as “journos”! That’s some kind of small victory, even if it’s pejorative … right?
“Be warned: if you let your children see Alvin & The Chipmunks they will eat their own shit.” That, and three other Awful Things The New Alvin & The Chipmunks Movie Is Responsible For, courtesy of The Hater.
“I am perhaps not the best person to write about Control, and what follows is not a review.” Natalie Curtis, daughter of Ian Curtis, writes about watching Anton Corbijn’s biopic about her dad. Via The Underwire.
Film critic Annette Insdorf has allegedly been edged out of the National Board of Review, who are coincidentally announcing their annual awards this week. Jeff Wells explains why this matters.
“Yeah, I’m a lesbian. You wanna make somethin’ of it, or do you want me to help you hotwire that getaway car? That’s what I thought. Now step aside, little lady.” On the eve of Queen Latifah’s apparent coming out party, Defamer remembers one of her finest on-screen moments.
Filmdrunk has taken to calling Ben Kingsley “Special K.” I think that made me laugh a little bit harder than it probably should have.
Those who love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and those who hate it tend to use the same kind of lazy shorthand to describe its pleasures (or tortures). The story of Johan, a devout husband and family man who struggles–spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically–against his feelings for another woman, Silent Light’s languid, desperately sad narrative takes a turn towards the transcendent about a hundred minutes in, at which point I scrawled in my notebook, “Bresson in Technicolor, maybe on acid.” In my mind, this was high praise. But later in the day, I overheard another critic use a similar analogy to explain why Silent Light is, actually, “terrible”: “It’s like Diane Arbus doing Bergman, on quaaludes.” Maybe it’s just a generational thing–I’m a little too young to know much about ‘ludes–but that sounds even more appealing than what I initially came up with. Still, from here on out, I resolve to resist the dismissively simple equation of (Dead European Master + Passe Party Drug). Silent Light deserves better than that.
This was one NYFF selection that screened for the press sans a post-screening Q & A with the filmmaker, and I think it would have benefited tremendously from one. At the very least, there would have been quite a bit of value in talking to Reygadas about his process (armed with French and Dutch financing, the Mexican filmmaker shot on location in Northern Mexico’s Mennonite community, with a cast full of non-actors speaking their native tongue, the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch).
But admittedly, Reygadas would have been walking in to a tough crowd. Many critics seemingly wrote the director off after his last film, Battle in Heaven, which, in addition to sharing Silent’s ponderous pace, featured a now-infamous scene described by Gerald Peary as featuring an “unhappy, mechanical blow job ministered by a hot senorita on her numb, big-bellied chaffeur.” Peary, one of the film’s staunchest defenders, acknowledged that Heaven “grossed out many American critics” at that film’s Cannes premiere. I imagine that at least some of those who didn’t skip the NYFF screening of Silent Light in avoidance of further revulsion left disappointed when there wasn’t any. …Read more
***Lionsgate will distribute a still untitled doc about religion, shot partially in Israel and around the middle east, directed by Larry Charles (the TV vet who wrangled Borat) and featuring comic/blowhard Bill Maher. Charles and Maher promise Variety that it’s a comedy, but let’s hope the jokes are better than this clunker from Charles: “Nietzsche said God is dead, but he didn’t see the grosses for Passion of the Christ.” Ooooh, topical!
***Scott Foundas takes a look at Shortcut to Happiness, the long-delayed movie Alec Baldwin doesn’t want you to see. “Filmed in 2001, then waylaid by investor bankruptcies and other infernal torments, the result, like so many troubled A-list productions, is less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang.”
***Dig out that sequined, halter-top, parachute-pants jumpsuit–Xanadu is back! Variety says the Broadway spoof of the eyesore 80s musical is riding good reviews to box office glory. Not bad for a production featuring almost wall-to-wall ELO, but I’ll have to see it in order to believe that it’s got anything that can top the tight rope dance from the original (starting at about the two minute mark on the clip embedded above).
With Steve Carell hitting theaters today as a modern-day Noah to Morgan Freeman’s God in Universal’s biblical gamble Evan Almighty, I thought it would fun to look back on a time when Mr. Carell made a living by playing devil’s advocate … almost literally. In this clip of Carell and Stephen Colbert’s recurring Daily Show segment Even Stephvens, the two breakout stars debat Islam vs. Christianity. Colbert, who is a practicing Catholic in his personal life, argues for the Christian God. Carell’s response? “Stephen, what part of ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet’ don’t you understand?”
With all of the effort to sell Evan to faith-based groups, you’ve got to wonder why this little artifact hasn’t sparked a totally overblown backlash.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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This week we have two big-time offenders: Mike Myers’ 
The only wide release this weekend is New Line’s 
