2008 documentaryRating: 10/20
Plot: Did you know that academic types who even think the words "intelligent design" are being persecuted by the rest of the scientific community? They're losing their jobs, finding themselves blacklisted, and being made fun of at parties. Ben Stein found out and doesn't like it one bit. The result? He gets all bitchy and makes a documentary about it.
Whiny propaganda spotted with fairly obvious pop culture allusions and some distracting historical footage, this fails to either entertain or enlighten. So entirely one sided, Stein spends almost the entire movie pulling half-evolved rabbits out of his ass, stacking the deck with Fascists and Nazi cards before fanning them out and saying, "Pick a card, any card," in that nasally voice of his. I watched this in four installments, partly because it's not all that interesting but mostly because of it's pretty gross and insulting, regardless of your views on Darwinism, intelligent design, or Ferris Bueller. The Holocaust? C'mon, Stein! Who died and made Ben Stein Michael Moore anyway? I think I'd rather spend a couple hours watching a creationist and a monkey tickle-fight each other.
4 comments:
sorry i have to pull the intelligent design is bullshit card. i can't stand ben stein and the people who argue for intelligent design are so agenda oriented that they can't be honest with themselves. ben stein on cbs sunday morning last week argued that "leftist" mass media wasn't covering a story(only the bastions of honest reporting fox news was covering) that sunday morning just an hour previous had covered. he has his inflated head so far up his own ass that he can't even watch his own show. he apparently just does his opinion segment and doesn't even bother watching the rest of the show.
Well, I'm sure he prerecorded his segment and had no way of watching the rest of the show in advance...
A lot of the persecuted scientists interviewed in this documentary didn't seem to be driven by any agenda. On the contrary, they were in trouble with their peers for simply mentioning that intelligent design is an idea that deserves investigation.
I actually came up with the idea of intelligent design when I was four years old and a malodorous hobo sat me on his lap and introduced me to evolution. I didn't tell anybody about it though, so I don't get credit for it.
in all fairness you now need to watch the episode of bullshit which is slanted unfairly in the opposite direction. my thoughts are religion is about faith which is the opposite of science and you don't need physical prove if you have faith, therefore you shouldn't be pushing these ideas off as science. by you i mean ben stein. and i by i i mean penn and teller. and by are i mean free health care now.
At least the 'Bullshit' show was (not is, right? They aren't still making those, are they?) tongue-in-cheek. Ben Stein was so straight in this. The dvd box called him "comedian Ben Stein" which surprised me because I didn't know he was supposed to be funny.
There's a lot of "faith" in science, too. Stein's argument in this had less to do with intelligent design and more to do with how exploration of the idea of intelligent design was being repressed. All science starts as theories, and with theories, you're starting with a leap of faith.
What the heck happened to you at the end there?
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