"Whatever Darwinism's Ramifications For Morality, It Certainly Doesn't Do Much For Your Temper"

Great Expelled review by Martin Cothran.

Another piece highlights the strange lack of consistency on the part of reviewers who hate the film:

“Expelled” Movie Sparks Tantrum by New York Times
John West

The frustration level at The New York Times over Ben Stein’s new documentary Expelled can be gauged by the tone of its movie “review,” which might be described more accurately as a tantrum. It opens:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

One of the sleaziest documentaries in a very long time? This comes from the same paper that hailed Michael Moore as “a credit to the Republic” and praised his dishonest Fahrenheit 911 as “achieving an eloquence that its most determined critics will have a hard time dismissing.” And it comes from the same movie reviewer who just last month lavished praise on an “endearing” gay sex comedy for “its breezy shots of male genitalia and characters nicknamed Long John and Tripod.”

As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They parody themselves.

But perhaps I should feel sorry for those at the Times, as they obviously had a bad week. The same day the Times blasted Expelled, after all, it reported that its “main source of revenue—newspaper advertising in print and online—fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory.” Why am I not surprised?

Also, see the comments in this thread by a commenter named "interested" who is comparing what the reviewers had to say against Expelled for being tawdry propaganda vs what they had to say in fulsome praise for Michael Moore, even praising the tawdry propaganda techniques Moore used. Of course these reviewers know deep down that praising a socialist hack is a zero-risk proposition, but praising anything by "creationist retards" carries consequences. They're very brave for taking a bold stand against Stein!

And this:

Mainstream reviews of Ben Stein’s EXPELLED are going apoplectic over the movie’s connection between Darwin and Hitler. Take, for instance, the review in the Village Voice: it describes the connection between Darwinism and Naziism as “bizarre and hysterical.”

Yet this weekend saw the opening not only of EXPELLED but also of CONSTANTINE’S SWORD. Here’s what the Village Voice has to say about that film:

X marks the spot, literally, where Christianity and the Catholic Church fostered the centuries of religious hatred and anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust…. But if his film is more provocative personal inquiry than reportorial knockout punch, it still pokes needed holes in the concept of papal infallibility and provides historical context for the dangers of linking the church and military. If nothing else, it demonstrates why we should feel cold shivers whenever President George W. Bush bandies the term “crusade.”

So a film that shows how Christianity “culminated in the Holocaust” constitutes cutting-edge cultural commentary. But a film like EXPELLED, which shows explicitly how the Nazis appropriated Darwin’s ideas, is “bizarre and hysterical.”