Antievolution & Law and Politics & Media Austringer on 09 Apr 2008 07:43 am
Flunked, Not Expelled: Not Even Fox Likes It
The FoxNews review by Roger Friedman is in, and it reads like one of those Muppets in the theater balcony wrote it. Skip past the top-of-the-page stuff about Mariah Carey. Down. Further down. Next to “Buy a Link Here”, there it is: “Ben Stein: Win His Career”.
After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.
Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely “character” for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is released.
Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.
To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in “Expelled” that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and “intelligent design” — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. You see, Stein, like some other celebrities, finally has shown his true colors and they aren’t so pretty.
There’s more good stuff. Go read.
Hat tip: Ross Myers.
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on 09 Apr 2008 at 10:24 am 1.Bad said …
There’s actually a jump link in the page that goes right to the review. As I noted though, there’s no real political crossed wires here: Friedman may work for Fox, but few people on the right would take seriously the opinion of a guy that liked Fahrenheit 9/11 and criticized Passion of the Christ. Fox’s entertainment sections are, ironically, one of the only places that isn’t doggedly conservative and right-wing.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 11:40 am 2.Amadán said …
An anti-Expelled review from Fox???
Damn, there goes one of my favourite conspiracy theories.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 12:12 pm 3.Michael said …
Here is where an influence of a label peaks into PZ blog…lol Friedman is a very far left liberal who doesn’t represent the entire FOX network. So far left at times, he has disagreed with mainstream liberals which doesn’t make him conservative by any means…
Friedman endorsed the movie Sicko which no true conservative would, and he was mad at the US government for putting HAMAS financier Cat Stevens on the no fly list. He then applauded the government for taking him off. Cat Stevens terrorist connections? Calling for someone’s death? Oh no, not in Fiedman’s review as he came to the defense of the man, but in reality there was a video where Cat Stevens is telling Muslim protesters he hopes that would burn Rushdie’s to death all over you tube.
So it was not surprising to learn that Friedman only read some of the website of “Expelled” and made his review from there without actually seeing the whole thing.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 2:45 pm 4.Chris Wing said …
Michael,
I just looked, and didn’t see one Cat Stevens video on youtube where he did anything but sing. Methinks you buy too much propaganda, sir. If there is such a video, it is not “all over youtube.”
I call shenanigans on you.
The act of seeing a movie does not change the contents of the movie. The truth is that the producers LIED to leading scientists to get them to appear in the movie, because it’s pure, unscientific bs.
Why do IDers always want to share how dumb they are with the rest of the world?
on 09 Apr 2008 at 3:06 pm 5.time flies said …
I found the movie to be very interesting.
Some interviewees come across as rather biased, but it was eye opening and well done I thought.
I can see why Richand and PZ may be worried however.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 3:32 pm 6.Dave S. said …
Still pretty much on the mark.
This movie is really shaping up to be a sorry piece of trash.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 3:45 pm 7.Inoculated Mind said …
I’m envisioning PZ Myers filming new Clear Eyes commercials. It’s perfect, replace the monotonous drolling drone with the mild-mannered squid professor.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 7:51 pm 8.Skemono said …
Their names are Statler and Waldorf.
on 09 Apr 2008 at 9:18 pm 9.pcarini said …
@Amadán
Your conspiracy theory isn’t convoluted enough then. What if Fox was behind both the movie and the bad review?
on 09 Apr 2008 at 10:08 pm 10.BathTub said …
Chris Wing,
Yusuf Islam formerly Cat Stevens gets the videos of himself discussing Salam Rushdie taken down from YouTube under false copyright claims. His opinion is well known and documented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_Salman_Rushdie
on 11 Apr 2008 at 12:14 am 11.Michael said …
Chris Wing,
I heard you sing (respond to my bog). The story of Cat Stevens was sometime ago, normally you tube will pull those types of threating videos off their server when discovered or they will also pull it for other reasons such as copyright.
In case you overlooked my statement about the video, I said…”in reality there was a video where Cat Stevens…” Notice I used the word “was” in reference to the video on you tube. I alluding to past tense not present tense. For further research, try using Google or Yahoo. I believe Wikipedia has it as Bath Tub who did his homework while washing up on the subject (did research or already known) lists the link where you can do your follow up.
on 18 Apr 2008 at 6:57 am 12.Avian Transportation Theory said …
Science purposely excludes alternative theories to the Sex establishment.
Sex theory has so many holes in it that it’s time for scientists to wake up to Avian Transportation Theory.
Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThQQuHtzHM
on 22 Apr 2008 at 9:33 pm 13.foobar said …
Ben Stein is the new Michael Moore. Richard Dawkins comes off like an absolute idiot in this movie.
on 22 Apr 2008 at 10:14 pm 14.Austringer said …
Given thirty minutes of interview footage, I can guar-ran-tee that any but the very most Vulcan-like of humans can be made to look like an absolute idiot.
You’ll notice that Ben Stein only slipped up once by letting someone else control a pre-release interview, the one with “Scientific American”. Guess who sounded like an absolute idiot then? And they didn’t even have to do a cut-up edit job for it, like “Expelled” did for Dawkins.
I don’t think Michael Moore is sweating the competition. “Expelled” pulled in an impressive $227 per theater on Monday… for certain values of “impressive”. I’m impressed that out of approximately 135 million people in the USA who are likely the sort who answer the Gallup poll question with “God created man in his current form within the past 10,000 years”, fewer than half a million of them bothered to go to the theater to watch “Expelled”. Even the supposedly captive audience you’d expect to march right out at their pastor’s bidding don’t seem to be buying it. That’s less than half of one percent of the market base. You can generally do better than that cold-calling people, which is why telemarketers telemarket. Even the dreaded “mandatory school field trip” suggestion from the promoters failed to materialize in any appreciable alteration in ticket sales from what would be expected.
Got any, you know, evidence that this stunning achievement to which you refer exists anywhere outside IDC cheerleading craniums around the country?
on 19 Jul 2008 at 11:40 pm 15.paul said …
What a disgrace of a movie. People were tricked into being in it, and yet the movemakers claim to follow morals. Shame on them for lying to interviewees and in the movie. ID is anti-education because it teaches people to ignore evidence, so it should be removed from education.