movies
oracknows | April 24, 2008Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually…
oracknows | April 23, 2008I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan.
Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument:
The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…
laelaps | April 21, 2008It's Monday morning, three days after the opening of the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, and everyone seems to be talking about whether the film can be considered to be a success or not. Wing Nut Daily says that it was a resounding success (despite coming in at #8), while many of my fellow science bloggers don't see it that way at all. I guess it all depends on what your definition of "success" is.
The numbers that have come in so far indicate that Expelled took in about 1.2 million dollars on Friday, which quickly dipped to $990,000 on Saturday on $958,000 on Sunday, making the total…
mikethemadbiologist | April 18, 2008Film critic Roger Ebert has been fighting cancer, but he's getting back to work:
On April 1 Roger Ebert published a letter to readers of The Chicago Sun-Times that was essentially a farewell to the long-running, widely syndicated weekly program that has made him not simply the best-known movie reviewer in America, but the virtual embodiment of this curious profession.
But the real news in Mr. Ebert's letter was his return to regular written criticism. A recurrence of cancer of the salivary gland in the summer of 2006 might have left him unable to speak -- a problem recent surgery failed to…
purepedantry | April 17, 2008Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page.
The movie is about a rather odd literature professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, (Quaid) who is exhausted by the difficulties of academic life. His oft-obnoxious daughter (Page) obsesses over getting into college and feels superior to others due to her intelligence -- as is clearly evidenced by her high SAT scores. Wetherhold is a widower, and since the death of his wife he has been supported by his daughter. When he falls…
oracknows | April 15, 2008As you may know, Ben Stein's execrable crapfest of a movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, slimes its way into theatres on Friday. From my perspective, the biggest, most vile lie pushed by Ben Stein and produce Mark Mathis is that it's a direct line from their hated "Darwinism" to the Holocaust, as I've pointed out twice before, but another major theme of the movie is that the poor, "truth-seeking" intelligent design creationists are ruthlessly "expelled" by those (pick one or more) atheistic/Stalinist/Nazi Darwinists.
Fortunately, there is a resource to counter Ben Stein's lies (and,…
oracknows | April 13, 2008Well, I'm here in sunny San Diego and about to head on over to the convention center to check out the day's festivities and to make sure to check out a friend's poster this morning. (If anyone reading this is attending AACR, you might recognize me by the Plexiglass box full of multi-colored blinking lights and the bad attitude who will have a propensity to whip out a laptop and blog if he finds interesting science to blog about.) The flight sucked, as usual. I was stuck in the middle seat, and the guy on one side of me looked like a bodybuilder and was suitably wide. It occurred to me that…
laelaps | April 9, 2008The reviews for Expelled are starting to come in, and even FOX News' Roger Friedman has panned the film. You'll have to scroll down a little bit to see the review (Mariah Carey's new album beat Stein in terms of importance), but here's a snippet to give you an idea of what Friedman thinks of the creationist film;
The gist of Stein's involvement is: He's outraged! He believes in God! God created the universe! How can we not avail our students of this theory? What do you mean we're just molecules?
What the producers of this film would love, love, love is a controversy. That's because it's being…
oracknows | March 29, 2008Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about "intellectual oppression" by those evil "Darwinists" directed against any valiant "intelligent design" creationist or anyone else who "questions" Darwin and (2) lots of blaming the Holocaust and other atrocities (but mainly Hitler and the Holocaust) on "Darwinism," replete with lots of shots of Nazis, Ben Stein clumsily emoting…
oracknows | March 24, 2008I really didn't want to get involved with the whole "framing" debate again. For whatever reason (and they are reasons that I've failed to understand), the very mention of the word seems to set certain members of the ScienceBlogs collective into rabid fits of vicious invective that leave rational discourse behind. And, yes, I know that by saying that I risk setting myself up as a target of said invective, but I don't care. It must be the natural cantankerousness that my low level death crud is inducing in me or maybe it's a lack of judgment brought on by large doses decongestants and…
oracknows | March 22, 2008The other night, I wrote about how the painfully inept and just plain dumb actions of the producer of Expelled!, the neuron-apoptosing movie that's basically an extended argumentum ad Nazium against the dreaded "Darwinism" that blames Hitler, Stalin, and, apparently, puppy hatred on Charles Darwin himself. Basically, the producers were having one of their private screenings (although how one can call a screening for which almost anyone can sign up on the web "private" is beyond me), and, by serendipity, the screening happened to be in the Mall of America on the Thursday before a large atheist…
oracknows | March 20, 2008...to see Expelled!
In perhaps the funniest incident I can recall involving a fellow ScienceBlogger since there has been ScienceBlogs, earlier this evening scourges of "intelligent design" creationism P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins went to see a screening of the antievolution pro-ID creationism movie Expelled! in the Minneapolis area. The guards recognized P.Z. and wouldn't let them in the movie.
They apparently didn't recognize Richard Dawkins and did let him in to see the movie.
Let's get this straight. The producers scheduled a screening in the Minneapolis area on the same weekend that…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2008tags: Harry Potter, Warner Brothers, movies
Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe, right) watches as Professor Dumbledore (Richard Harris) looks at the newly renewed Fawkes the Phoenix in Warner Bros. Pictures' "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
Image: Peter Mountain, Warner Bros.
Have you heard the latest about the upcoming Harry Potter movies? It turns out that the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be made into not one, but two movies. My first reaction? Hollywood is getting more greedy than even I thought was possible.
According to my sources, part one of Harry…
oracknows | March 2, 2008As I mentioned in January, everybody's favorite blog mascot has seemingly undertaken a new career in show biz. In fact, he's become a big movie star, even popping up in some fairly avant garde movies.
This month, however, he's popping up in a most unexpected place: In one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time:
Even better, though, there's something that my readers would most definitely appreciate. You--yes, you!--can, if you so desire, peruse the various movies that EneMan is slated to appear in through the course of 2008 and vote for your favorite at EneMan Goes to Hollywood.…
oracknows | February 16, 2008Must. See. This. Movie.
It doesn't matter that Harrison Ford is 65 and getting a bit long in the tooth for the whole action thing. I need my fix.
oracknows | February 10, 2008Nooooo!
Why do I do it? Why? It only raises my blood pressure and probably contributes to atherosclerosis, stress, and all sorts of other things likely to shorten my lifespan. But I do it anyway. In my interest in Holocaust denial, I keep an eye on a fair number of Holocaust denial and white nationalist (or, as I like to call them, white power rangers) sites. It's usually the vile stuff that you'd expect, replete nasty and vicious attacks on Jews, blacks, or any other race that is "destroying our nation" or race or worse, diluting it out with all sorts of horrific multicultural miscegenation…
pontiff | February 5, 2008"Jumper" is a new movie about a man (okay, Hayden Christensen, aka Anakin Skywalker) who can teleport himself anywhere just by thinking about it. Quantum teleportation is a procedure where quantum information can be transported using entanglement and a few bits of classical communication. The distance between these two is, *ahem*, rather large. The New York Times today has an article about an event at MIT (that other institute of technology) which brought together the director of Jumper, star Hayden Christensen, and MIT professors Ed Farhi and Max Tegmark.
The article is fun, with the…
oracknows | February 3, 2008It's Superbowl Sunday. Even someone who's not much of a football fan and who doesn't really care much one way or the other about either team can't help but get caught up in the hype a little bit. In any case, there seems little point to doing any serious blog posts today, given that (1) it's a weekend and traffic plummets on the weekend and (2) it's Superbowl Sunday, which leads me to expect that traffic will be even lower than a typical Sunday. Oh, and also because I just learned that Hitler was a Cowboys fan:
I've posted a parody of this particular scene from the German movie Downfall…