George Carlin just passed away. Some of his standup is absolutely brilliant. His “religion is bullshit” routine is classic and his stuff on abortion is hilarious as well:
So, anyone want to place a bet on how long it is before people are spreading death-bed conversion stories about him via email?
Well, I went and saw Expelled. I was not impressed.
The first thing that wasn’t impressive was the fact that the theater had the reels out of order. The first two reels were swapped, so there were no opening credits until a third of the way through the movie (right before they mocked panspermia). That’s not the documentary’s fault, though.
The film opens (for most people, anyway) with a discussion of those who’ve been “expelled” by the “Darwinian establishment” for their pro-ID ways. Unfortunately for Stein, he’s almost entirely wrong about these cases. Everyone likes martyrs, but there aren’t any to be found here.
The film talks all the leading lights of the Discovery Institute and the ID movement along with prominent anti-religion scientists. I characterize them like that for a reason, which I’ll return to in a moment. As other reviews have noted, the film’s lack of any real discussion of ID or evolution is striking. People say it’s science, it’s creationism, it has good supporting evidence, it doesn’t, etc, but there’s not discussion of any of those points. Granted, this is a pro-ID documentary and there really isn’t any pro-ID evidence, but you’d think they’d at least attempt to make the case that ID is a legitimate theory, rather just asserting its legitimacy. No one coming out of that film will have any idea if ID is any more credible than holocaust denial. Also, David Berlinski is sitting in the worst chair for talking head footage. Sit up, dammit.
The flow of the film is somewhat incoherent. We bounce around from talking to IDists, scientists, talking about court cases, watching Ben Stein in Germany, etc, all interspersed with footage from the Soviet Union and the Nazis. Much of the film’s message consists of demanding an open debate in academia about ID. Then they starting talking about court cases over the content of science classes in high schools. They avoid explaining how the two are related in order to pile it on as more suppression of ID. Then they go off and discuss how Darwinism inspired the Nazis. Is the message that we need open debate or that Darwinism causes evil? Of course the connection of Darwinism and the Nazis is quite dishonest. Anti-semitism and selective breeding existed long before Darwin. Science gives us descriptions of the mechanisms of how the world works. A scientific theory does not tell us how to act. It’s a description that’s either true or not true. What made the Nazis so bad was not what scientific opinions they held, but how they acted on them and other beliefs. The documentary could have criticized replacing morality with science, but it didn’t. It criticized Darwinism when it was used for illegitimate purposes.
There’s always lots of controversy about how scientists should engage the public on scientific issues like ID, which is grounded in religion. Someone like Dawkins is an outspoken and very open atheist. In the film he reads a passage describing the Hebrew god from The God Delusion. It’s one of my favorite quotes from the book, but it’s not likely to win anyone over. A similar situation exists with P.Z. Myers and Daniel Dennett, though Myers was very soft spoken and Dennett’s comments were limited. This is sort of an issue, but I don’t think it matters in the end. We who dislike religion should talk about it and we have every right to be angry. What does matter is the dishonesty in using almost exclusively outspoken non-religious scientists as the other side in the movie. Talk to someone like Ken Miller? That would just upend their entire argument. Science has certainly deconverted a lot of people (me included), but you don’t have be an atheist to be a successful scientist. You just can’t ignore the facts and try and publish papers that argue for your religious views and expect scientists to have much respect for you.
In any case, the film does appear to be a flop. I went to a late showing, but there were only four people in the theater, at least three of which weren’t there looking to be convinced of anything. I mean, I assume the guy behind the two of us who called Eugenie Scott a “fucking cunt” was already on a side. I know little about filmmaking, but my brother, a film student, said the documentary appeared to be shot by a “third grader with down syndrome,” so I don’t think it was good from a technical standpoint, either. The documentary is very much the Michael Moore formula, with interspersed animations, footage of the documentarian in his search for truth, attempted gotchas, and entering some place uninvited only to be kicked out. None of it’s done particularly well and with the content being mostly lies and distortions, it doesn’t add up to much of a documentary.
I haven’t read any of the books in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but I have to say, The Golden Compass looks like a real winner. How can you go wrong with talking polar bears (called “ice bears”) and anti-religion overtones (I assume those haven’t been cut out entirely)? Also, I believe I saw James Bond talking to a tiger in the preview. And Sam Elliot. In a fantasy movie.
This is so going to flop.
Back of the Bioshock box:
…genetically modify your own DNA…
I can see the look of disappointment on your faces. But but, I only wanted to modify my own DNA, not genetically modify it.
1. Old people: I know what a record player is. I’ve seen one, I’ve listened to music on them, etc. Lots of younger people have seen them. Your nostalgia for antiquated technology isn’t particularly cute; you don’t have to call attention to it every time you mention it in a story.
Not sure what brought that on, exactly.
2. I thought a comment made on this post was quite funny. If you pray for the death of someone, isn’t that equivalent to attempting to hire a hitman, which is a crime? I mean, if you take the idea that a god answers prayers seriously then it follows, doesn’t it? It’s a pretty amusing gotcha, I must say.
3. Bresnan has 54 minutes to not make me pissed at them. I wonder what the odds are…
My boredom this weekend caused me to go out and rent 300. I also saw it when it was in theaters, which is becoming more and more rare for me. I wasn’t impressed with it then and it hasn’t aged well at all. Am I alone in this feeling?
Don’t get me wrong, the movie is visually stunning. The action and style are incredible. It’s just that everything else is bad. The story, the characters, the dialogue…much of it is cringe-inducing. Or laugh-inducing, which in a movie with very little intentional humor, isn’t a good thing. I don’t really care about the purported historical inaccuracies; I know very little about the events or the Spartans. Though, the condescending remark about Greek “boy-lovers” was funny, considering pederasty is known to have been very much a part of Spartan culture.
Beats me. Everyone else seemed enthralled by the movie.
Speaking of movies that came out two weeks ago, Hot Fuzz is also out on DVD. First hour fifteen or so: somewhat funny movie. Last 45 minutes: one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
Since I haven’t posted anything of substance on here for quite a while, I thought I’d continue the trend.
I was in Hastings yesterday browsing around when some lady came up to an associate (or whatever the hell their employees are called) and asked if they rented VHS tapes. The answer was, of course, no and all they had on VHS was in a bin at the front. I happened to be standing at the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray case, so I found that a little amusing. Partly because I like to feel technologically superior and partly because she was looking for an obsolete format and I was looking for a format that could be obsolete in the near future.
Since I got a HDTV, I’ve been watching more TNT than normal, through their HD offering. One of the oddities of that channel is their incessant promotion of a show called Saving Grace, which premiered not long ago (I think). The premise is apparently that Holly Hunter gets a guardian angel and life lessons ensue. I don’t know why remaking Joan of Arcadia deserves this kind of hype, but there it is. TNT also apparently believes I want a little pop up of Holly Hunter on the bottom of the screen every so often. I don’t. She’s not in Law & Order, so she shouldn’t be making appearances except during commercial breaks.
Perhaps that would be tolerable if they didn’t crop and stretch most of their content to fit the 16:9 HD resolution. My TV is perfectly capable of that; it’s not, however, capable of un-fucking up movies I might want to watch on that channel.
At least I can watch Firefly in HD on UHD and L4yer Cake on HDNet Movies.
I think this is amusing. The Second Circuit court of appeals overturned an FCC ruling about “fleeting expletives” and called them “divorced from reality.” Here’s one of the offending comments, at the Golden Globes:
After U2 frontman Bono said “This is really, really, fucking brilliant. Really, really, great” during an acceptance speech during the 2003 Golden Globe Awards televised live on NBC, the FCC was hit with a complaints from the Parents Television Council.
The FCC’s enforcement bureau said Bono’s comments didn’t describe “sexual or excretory organs or activities.” Martin says:
Martin also believes that the Court is the entity with a tenuous grip on the real world. “The court even says the Commission is ‘divorced from reality,’” argues Martin. “It is the New York court, not the Commission, that is divorced from reality in concluding that the word ‘fuck’ does not invoke a sexual connotation.”
Alright, show of hands: how many of you thought of sex when reading Bono’s comment? Now, put your hand down if you were already thinking about sex. Yep, exactly no one is left. I think reality has spoken. I mean, what, is Bono saying that whatever award he received is brilliant like sex? That’s just not a word I would use to describe that activity.
The Secret is apparently quite popular now, but I think the Amazon page is perfect. The two spotlight reviews both give it one star. The second one is particularly entertaining. The movie is apparently so stupid it produces rational thoughts from left-wing conspiracy theorists. Now that’s bad.
