Scads and scads of emails from all over the Land of the Free, home of the…Brave? Naive? Naively brave? Science illiterate?
All of it about Expelled. Well, almost all of it. Trudy from Sorrento wrote to say how happy she was she’d ignored my suggestion (made on K-92 FM Friday AM) that she skip 88 Minutes. She and her son found it "suspenseful." An Al Pacino movie that opens weak and gets terrible reviews across the board because it isn’t suspenseful, but it takes all kinds.
No, most of this mail and commentary is about Expelled, which Monday the American Humanist Assocation took a shot at today…"Can Ben Stein be serious? Sadly, he is!"
Expelled’s reviews were almost uniformly scathing. Christianity Today liked it. They had the right credentials to get into screenings of it. And they’re pandering to their demographic, and we all know what happened to the Catholic News Service critic who didn’t pound The Golden Compass into the pavement. I mistakenly lumped Nell Minow into this group on first glance, but she panned the picture, too. Apologies.
Interesting that some publications fell into that Premise Media marketing trap. Deny access to YOUR critics so you end up using one of THEIR choosing. Premise Media got away with that with The Passion of the Christ. Lots of papers ran minister’s reviews of the movie. A very small number of those collar-wearing Christians even caught a whiff of its anti-Semitism and other "issues." Most did not, merely echoing Premise’s premise, that this truly is the word of you-know-who.
But from Kansas to California, Detroit to Dunedin, Columbia S.C. to Columbia Mo., outraged parishioner’s and would-be science-debunkers fired off their angry notes about Expelled. Shockingly, a couple had actually seen the movie. Shockingly, to a one they all invoked An Inconvenient Truth, Michael Moore, that John Kerry doc from last election cycle, and so forth. (thanks to college media for that image.).
Note to EVERYbody who keeps saying "but you didn’t hold An Inconvenient Truth to the same standards." The facts, the data, the observable changes in the planet make Inconvient more truthful by the day, a truth some of you can’t get your heads out of the sand or elsewhere long enough to acknowledge. But then, you’re still questioning EVOLUTION.
Bad enough they have opinions on a new movie they haven’t seen. What they’re REALLY mad about is earlier movies they haven’t seen. Most of them, anyway.
Long, rambling, bile-filled screeds which aren’t worth reading, much less posting here. But comment away. I’ll post them for a day or two longer. No, Casey, you don’t get to blizzard my blog with your many versions of the same inane ignorant argument. One comment per customer.
Which is why I think it’s probably time to close down comments on the various Stein posts here, as the movie didn’t do well enough to hang onto screens when Harold & Kumar, Baby Mama and in two weeks, Iron Man roll into theaters. It’s old news, passe, and people who keep re-arguing Dayton, Tennessee’s great claim to fame are boring and myopic and make one fear for the republic. So comment away for another day or two, but I really don’t have the time to keep posting them (takes about a minute per comment, thanks Typepad!) on a dead subject. Your musings no longer amuse me. And if you want to keep arguing it, lpadron and Casey et. al., get your own blog. This is a MOVIE blog.
Me? I just sail out into the Indian River, taking care to note the evolutionary advantages and disadvantages of cormorants, the evolutionary struggles of manatees (too slow to get out of the way of power boats, just as flatulent as their cousins, the cow), and come home to sit and watch the latest National Geographic special rounding up more, newer evidence of global warming.
Moving on…
"If you do only one thing this year, evolve."
- Lily Tomlin, Actor/Director/Producer (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe)
