Expelled Exposes Itself

Ah, yes, my darlings. Today's the day we've all been waiting for: Waterloo. Expelled hits theaters today like a tsunami of bullshit.

Evolutionists are supposed to hide under the bed. Evolutionary biology will end. Etc.

Uh-huh. We're all shaking and stuff.

There was a calm before the storm: aside from a flurry of negative reviews, the only news of note comes via ERV. Much to no one's surprise, Expelled lied to the Killers, too:

Here is what the head administrator over at the official Killers message board just posted:

"I just spoke to the band's manager, and adding to the confusion was the fact that they did authorize a project months ago with this request:

Quote:'The film is a satirical documentary with an estimated running time of 1 hour and 50 minutes, exploring academic freedom in public schools and government institutions with actor, comedian, economist, Ben Stein as the spokesperson.

'What they authorized was a documentary about 'academic freedom in schools', not the film that the producers produced.

They contacted the producers of the film to ask that the song be removed but it is too late. Unfortunately it was misrepresented to them when the request came through to use it. Add this band to a long line of people who were misled by the producers of this film."

She later added:

"The band asked the producers to remove their song from the film when they became aware of the true nature of it. They were told it is too late. That's all there is."

As Doc Halliday might have said, their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

I'm sure as fuck not wasting my time or money on this poorly-made propaganda piece propped up by plagarism. I'd have my choice of theaters, mind: it's on several local screens, but definitely not on reviewers' radar. The Seattle P.I. doesn't even have a review. The Seattle Times does, and tain't pretty:

A hard-core, fundamentalist bit of right-wing propaganda, "Expelled" slyly appropriates its style from liberal and left-wing sources, sending Ben Stein out to do deadpan interviews with a grab-bag of people, while intercutting old movies, new animation and newsreel footage.

Succinct. Manages to capture both the truth of what the movie actually is - i.e., fundamentalist right-wing propaganda - and gets across the fact that the fuckers have to sneak, deceive and steal from others because they don't have the intellectual power to come up with original work. Nice.

The Stranger is even more cruel:

Yes! I love that the Discovery Institute’s precious little pseudoscience has to be peddled directly to pastors, rather than being debated in the open air, as ID proponents constantly insist they’d prefer. When you market a supposedly secular, scientific movie to religious people—purposefully excluding anyone from the independent press—it’s pretty clear that you’re trying to dupe the poor rubes. It’s also sweet that the reviews that the Discovery Institute has been trumpeting so far on their blogs are from places like Christianity Today (you came into the film "very, very skeptical,” did you , Mr. McCracken? I’ll show you skeptical).

After that, no one should be suprised that The Nanny made their list of recommended films, while Expelled did not.

Seattle Weekly didn't pull any punches, either:

[Stein's] thesis: Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today—bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the recession combined. A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center, whose infamous leaked 1993 “wedge memo” stated as one of its primary goals the propagation of the idea “that nature and human beings are created by God.” ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis (Stein visits Dachau for an insulting “It happened here” moment). Using the powers of low-grade montage to compare the divide between
evolutionary scientists and ID’s proponents to the Berlin Wall, Stein becomes, with his doc’s insistence that we tear down that wall, Ronald Reagan. Bizarre and hysterical. (Vadim Rizov)

Somehow, I get the sense he didn't mean "hysterical" as in "intentionally humorous."

I want you to take note of something: there's no positive review anywhere in Seattle's main newspapers. Not sure about the minor ones, or the religious ones, but the papers with the broad audiences are sure as shit pretty fucking far from impressed.

I don't know what it is, but I'm just not anticipating a wave of conversions. I feel no need to prepare for a rash of "I believed in evolution, but Expelled showed me how wrong I was!" I am, however, ready with the consoling pat, because I'm sure I'm going to hear plenty of "I want my ten dollars and ninety minutes back!"

We tried to warn them.