The Screengrab : ben stein

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of April 18-20, 2008

Paul Clark — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Richard Jenkins- still the indie box office king! For the second consecutive week, The Visitor (Overture Films), directed by Tom McCarthy and starring Jenkins, reigns supreme for per-screen grosses, bringing in an average of $9,249 on eighteen screens. Along with the ever-dependable Mr. Jenkins, credit overwhelmingly positive press and some really good word of mouth among arthouse-goers in the major markets, as well as the relatively meager selection of new indie releases this past weekend. Overture currently plans to expand the film over the next few weeks in an attempt to continue its successful run before the summer blockbusters sweep aside all competition. Will it succeed? Watch this space.

The weekend's other big indie success story was the strong showing of second-ranking film The Singing Revolution (Abramorama Entertainment), which returned to the top 10 for only the second time in the twenty weeks since its initial release. The documentary deals with popular song festivals in Estonia during Soviet rule, and the distributor has wisely tailored its release to Estonian populations in the cities where it's playing. This would indicate that interest for the film might be limited outside these areas, but as any independent filmmaker would tell you, any audience is better than no audience.

Coming in at #3 and #4 are the weekend's top debuts, both documentaries: Scott Hicks' Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts (Koch Lorber), and Constantine's Sword (First Run). Filling out the top five was the crowd-pleaser Young@Heart (Fox Searchlight), followed closely by the winner from two weeks ago, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon.

Finally, falling just outside the top 10 was the top-averaging indie that played on more than 1,000 screens, the "intelligent design" documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Rocky Mountain Pictures). The documentary, featuring Nixon-speechwriter-turned-cranky-TV-personality Ben Stein, brought in a $2,824 average on 1,052 screens, and frankly beat the tar out of the weekend's other high-profile piece of info-tainment, Morgan Spurlock's Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (Weinstein Co.). Audiences must have seen the documentary hoping Stein might inquire about the whereabouts of a certain Mr. Bueller, or perhaps give them some of his money. Because honestly, I can't believe that intelligent design is really still an issue.

Top 10: Weekend of April 18-20:
1. The Visitor [Overture Films] ($9,249 per screen)
2. The Singing Revolution [Abramorama Entertainment] ($7,079)
3. Glass: A Portrait Of Philip In 12 Parts [Koch Lorber Films] ($5,546)
4. Constantine's Sword [First Run] ($5,066)
5. Young@Heart [Fox Searchlight] ($4,606)
6. The Flight of the Red Balloon [IFC Films] ($3,818)
7. Water Lilies [Koch Lorber Films] ($3,350)
8. La Traviata [Emerging Pictures] ($3,238)
9. Anamorph [IFC Films] ($3,120)
10. Bab'Aziz [Typecast Releasing] ($2,842)

Source: IndieWire.

The Tree Of Libertas Is Watered By The Blood Of Idiots

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As longtime readers will know, I am a dirty stinking liberal. I complain about the depiction of Arab terrorists in movies about Arab terrorists. I make fun of right-wing cultural pest/William F. Buckley son-in-law Brent Bozell on a regular basis for his alleged resemblance to Ghostbusters bureaucrat/asshole Walter Peck. I infiltrate conservative polticial conferences in order to take pills and mock bogus documentaries featuring Ben Stein. I think one of the most irritating things about the modern-day Democratic Party is that they pretend to care about stuff like violence in video games and smut in movies. I would rather watch Ben-Hur ten times in a row than spend five minutes hearing Charlton Heston gas on about gun control, and I'm a gun owner who hates Ben-Hur.

But let it never be said that I don't play fair. I believe in a level playing field, and I've decided that it's about time, given all the posts I've made here linking to bastions of communism like the Guardian and the New York Times, that I give some props to my favorite right-wing movie blog: LIBERTAS!

Founded as the internet component of Jason Apuzzo's Libertas Film Festival, a tiny annual symposium of conservative cinema, the Libertas blog has grown from a mere forum for right-wingers to complain that their values aren't honored by those crooked pornographers in Hollywood to a wonderful full-service site featuring movie news, reviews and writing from the perspective of angry cranks! (As an aside, Libertas and their ideological counterparts love to point to the poor commercial performance of anti-war documentaries as evidence that America isn't interested in such subversive flapdoodle. So where does that leave their claim that no one ever makes movies from a right-wing perspective?)

If you visit Libertas this very day, you'll see an exciting array of crazy cooterness: a review of Definitely, Maybe that condemns its "distasteful display of Hollywood values"; a review of Diary of the Dead that laments George Romero's "increasingly strident politics"; an article which condemns the mainstream media for failing to report Bob Geldof's recent praise of President Bush (although a quick Google News search reveals that it was covered by such non-radical papers as the International Herald-Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Investor's Business Daily); a review which calls the new Harold and Kumar sequel "unfunny and mean-spirited" even though the reviewer has not seen the film; and a pre-emptive condemnation of Iron Man for possibly containing anti-war sentiments. Now that's good film blogging! Enjoy, folks!

Screengrab Exclusive Preview: EXPELLED - NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:15:00 GMT

Last week, I attended — well, really, infiltrated is the proper word — CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. A gathering of true believers, donors, hucksters, pundits and politicians of the extreme right-wing conservative momement, CPAC has, for a number of decades, been the premier venue for those seeking to court the votes of the nation's most reactionary thinkers. Both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney spoke at this year's CPAC, and I was there; Mitt Romney announced the suspension of his campaign at this year's CPAC (to the great disappointment of the right-wing faithful, who had inexplicably anointed him the new successor to St. Reagan), and I was there. More importantly to Screengrab readers, though, there were exclusive screenings of a number of new films made by and targeted at the extreme right, and once again, I was there.

The first of the three films I saw during CPAC was Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Like most of the rest of the 'documentaries' shown at the conference, Expelled — directed by Nathan Frankowski, who also worked on the ideologically motivated TV movie The Path to 9/11 — is little more than pure propaganda. Of course, the same argument can be made (and is, endlessly, by the constantly complaining voices of power at CPAC) about any number of left-leaning documentaries, a number of which are up for Academy Awards this year. The main difference is that those movies tend to be made by professional filmmakers with ideological leanings, and thus maintain a certain level of basic professionalism, while the propaganda films of the right tend to be made by professional ideologues with a smattering of training in filmmaking and are almost totally unwatchable from an aesthetic standpoint. The makers of Expelled, at the very least, grace us with a professional actor as its primary spokesman and delivery vector for the sub-Michael Moore schtick that comprises most of the film: it's Ben Stein, a right-wing opinion columnist, former Nixon speechwriter and one-time game show host best known for his appearance as the "Bueller...? Bueller...?" teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Expelled's central thesis is that an arrogant cabal of Marxist academics, politically correct leftists, and scientific ideologues are conspiring to keep the teaching of "Intelligent Design" — a non-theory that is essentially creation science dressed up and given a new set of buzzwords — off of college campuses. In aid of this theses, Stein wanders around with a camera crew, engaging in Moorean antics that involve him drawing calculated outrage and obnoxious bluster from a number of scientists, academics, and other detractors of ID. If all you want to do is upset authority figures, of course, it's not hard to do; people like Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers are easy to rile up, especially when confronted with an irritating talk-show host berating them about their unwillingness to discuss total nonsense. If you want to see a bunch of straw men soaked with seltzer, Expelled attains a certain level of success; the right people are made to look foolish or self-important, if for all the wrong reasons.

However, if you want to see what the movie actually promises — a genuinely successful argument over why Intelligent Design should or should not be taught in schools — you'd best look elsewhere. The movie spends very little time in discussing the actual hypotheses of ID, no doubt because they're largely open-ended and unfalsifiable, and thus poor science. It's not so much a theory as it is a loosely slapped-together, multi-pronged critique of other theories, and is no more science than the man in the moon or the tooth fairy. (Curiously, for all the film's bluster about "academic freedom" and First Amendment rights — which, of course, have nothing to do with what should be taught in science classes — Stein is never seen arguing that Babylonian creation myths or the theories of Scientology should be given equal time. Apparently, only his favored form of nonsense suffers from exclusion.) Since any legitimate confrontation between Intelligent Design and actual science would end badly for ID, the movie focuses on making ID's opponents look like censors (as if the teaching of science was a democratic practice, where all possible ideas are presented and then people vote on which one they like the best) or anti-Christian bigots or wordy, incomprehensible windbags.

It's a pure hatchet job, plain and simple, without any scientific merit and very little artistic merit. Worse still, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a fundamentally dishonest film: it's funded by right-wing think tanks, its marketing materials urge the formation of politically-motivated 'street teams' to push for screenings of the movie before they've even seen it (a tactic likely motivated by the fact that no one would book the thing based on its qualities as a film), and hosted by a political hack for either mercenary or ideological reasons. Stein does deliver a few amusing moments with his deadpan delivery, but it's nothing you couldn't get in equal amounts from one of his Clear Eyes commercials in less than thirty seconds and without the added burden of vast, pseudoscientific nonsense. Sadly, Expelled, worthless as it is, was the best of the three movies I saw at CPAC; stay tuned for further reports.

(For pure delusional self-pity, it's hard to beat the Expelled movie blog; their latest entry claims that, since those meddlesome Washington bureaucrats combined Lincoln and Washington's birthdays into President's Day, "Darwin Day has now supplanted Lincoln's birthday in the public imagination"! Yes, who can forget those long Darwin Day weekends, when the family gathers around a copy of Origin of Species and makes a little wooden model of the Galapagos Islands before setting out for a big trip to the mall for one of the many Darwin Day sales?)