Shit. I just realized that the stock footage company I work for gave them that footage, which means we are probably listed in the credits at the end. :eek: 
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’d totally go see it just to see “Special Thanks: Eyebrows of Doom” in the credits.
I think opening weekend usually is a pretty good indicator of eventual box office success, actually. Expelled did even worse on its opening weekend than Dio’s cite predicted. It took in $2.9 something million. On a per-screen basis it was soundly beaten by the bomb 88 Minutes. This movie may be somewhat different from the normal film in that some church groups will force kids to see it giving it “legs” of a sort, but nevertheless it’s dud status is written on the wall.
You’re right, I think, in saying that the movie will turn a profit eventually, but that’s not really the salient point. This was supposed to be the conservative answer to liberal Hollywood. Where is all that pent-up Christian demand? It will score far less box office than Michael Moore’s films and you know that’s what they were aiming for. It seems there is no chance this film will break into the mainstream now.
So liberal talk radio failed because liberals don’t aren’t full of righteous fury, and Expelled failed because Christians aren’t interested in facts (or even reasonable facsimiles thereof)?
Sounds about right.
Personally, I think the whole thing is flopping because somebody was stupid enough to spent the entire advertising budget on Comedy Central spots. Do they not know who watches Comedy Central?
For those who don’t have cable or pay attention, the correct answer is: hippies, pinkos, stoners, college kids, homosexuals, lesbians, atheists, feminists, jaded systems analysts and anarcho-syndicalists.
Just like politics, religious agendas make strange bedfellows. Channel surfing today I saw Stein being interviewed and hawking this movie on the Crouch’s network, TBN. The host, their son, of course, loved it and praised Stein and said he should be “a rabbi or a preacher” (?) to which Stein responded “Praise from Caesar is praise indeed”.
Surreal moment for a super educated Jewish guy to link shields with anti-intellectual rabidly Fundamentalist Christians in a cause.
Hollywood’s all about the opening weekend, with films that turn a profit on overseas releases still being considered bombs if the opening weekend in the US was bad.
I love how they try to make that sound like some sort of accomplishment.
The numbers on that site don’t jibe with boxofficemojo or some of the other sites. I think that must have been based on Friday’s estimate before the numbers got revised down.
Also, those church and school groups were bribed to bus people in and help inflate the BO numbers.
Also, becoming the “26th documentary of all time” (if that’s even correct) is hardly much of an accomplishment considering the fact that almost no documentary ever gets the number of screens and the amount of promotion that Expelled got. I think they’re trying to make the old silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but Expelled had a very disappointing opening for its producers, no matter what they say. They wanted to engineer a populist, sleeper hit. They didn’t get it. Nobody outside the church groups showed up. The band was only playing to its girlfriends.
Who, in this case, don’t even put out.
Time Magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger is brutal:
Kluger also has some barbs for Dawkins and Hitchens and others who can be callously dismissive of religious faith, which is fair enough.
To date though the most damning, though probably only to me, is the line from Dawkins’ review that tells you all you need to know about the bathos and emotional dishonesty and ridiculousness of the movie:
For some reason that just reeks of false emotion and string-pulling and people who don’t even know how to make a propaganda film.
The pinacle of evolution.
The American Spectator was quite influential during the 1990s. I am eager to see a similar denunciation of Human Events by a conservative. And The National Review is considered respectable, though I believe they are a bunch of hacks that should not be taken seriously.
I couldn’t find anything by The Weekly Standard.
Sorry, but I maintain that modern American Conservatism has a boundless tolerance and appetite for wingnuttery. Yes, I believe that there exist serious minded conservatives, though by objective standards they might be characterized as fringe.[1] Nonetheless, I believe that they need to speak out about this crap.
…crickets…
[1] This is controversial: are conservatives who serve in Washington and are then drummed out of it -and who rarely receive subsequent airplay- fairly characterized as “fringe”? If not, then I retract.
What I tried to do is to see what the most respected [sic] conservative publications had to say about Expelled. As of this evening, The Weekly Standard continues its radio silence on the issue.
What about the Washington Times, the late Ronald Reagan’s favorite newspaper? Sure, it’s owned by a nutty cult, but so what? Modern conservatives love it.
Their culture writeup, extracts from NRO’s glowing review, referenced above. In the Family Times section, Kate Tsubata maintains that its great for home schoolers, and quotes extensively from the producer Mark Mathis. In fact, he’s the only person she quotes.
Oh and here’s Rush Limbaugh’s take:
The NY Sun loved it as well, though in a less effusive manner:
Ok, so the NY Sun believes that ID advocates are just as dogmatic as the Darwinians. I suppose that might be the case, for those who don’t believe in empiricism.
Ok, so mainstream conservative publications love Ben Stein’s Expelled. What about the Libertarians? Reason magazine hates it:
Google News also pointed me to something from the atheist/libertarian/market fundamentalist/fringy Ayn Rand Institute, which also panned the film.
Conservatives are supposed to be ruled by logic and reason and Liberals by emotion. This movie is pure propaganda without a single valid scientific point. The questions is do all the important conservatives really believe this nonsense, don’t care about science in any way, support it because it attacks their political rivals, just too stupid to know any better.
Modern American conservatism was born in the 1950s, when Bill Buckley founded the National Review. They had a setback with the Goldwater run in 1964. Then Reagan came to power in 1980 and the rest is history. His policies were more moderate than his rhetoric, but that’s another matter.
Go to Europe, and the center-right politicians will sound like liberal democrats.
Here’s another conservative site. I’ve shied away from the blogs and purely Christian sources, but this one purports to be aligned with the Republican Party, so I thought it might be relevant:
Let me be clear about this hackery. A halfway decent essay will at least address the obvious responses of the opposition – rather than simply making shit up. As far as I can tell none of these bozos bothered to address the points made by the National Center for Science Education at this website: http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth
The writers and editors at these conservative organs had no interest in educating their readers. What they offered instead was stroke.
I have no problem with tough-minded, empirical conservatism. Unfortunately, individuals who espouse such values are typically marginalized in favor of those willing to pamper the modern conservative audience’s highly sensitive disposition.
Non-fundie conservatives will think it’s a load of crap, is my guess. However, it is politically expedient for some (conservatives and liberals alike) to pay lip service to fundie airheads in order to pick their votes, so they will say nothing publically.
Surely by now you realize that this itself was never anything but a propaganda point that relates only to the narrow context of sticky problems like racism, social equality, welfare, etc. Stray outside of that and they’re koolaid drinkers just like everybody else.
Yes, I agree. This is however a major theme pushed by conservative voices, they are the rational “daddy” party liberals the emotional “mommy” party. George Will has written of the wonders discovered by the Hubble space telescope so I know he believes in the true age of the universe what his stand on ID is I don’t know.
Nature can’t by fooled, I don’t know where this will bite us as a nation but no good can come of it in the long run.
From the April 28, 2008 issue of Newsweek, Letters column, p 19:
“For The Record,
In your April 14 PERISCOPE INTERVIEW with Ben Stein (“You Say You Want An Evolution”), one of Stein’s responses contained a serious error: He said, “There are a number of scientists and academics who’ve been fired, denied tenure, lost tenure or lost grants because they even suggested the possibility of intelligent design. The most egregious is Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian, the editor of a magazine that published a peer-reviewed paper about ID. He lost his job.” Sternberg has never been employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Since January 2004, he has been an unpaid research associate in the departments of invertebrate and vertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sternberg continues to enjoy full access to research facilities at the museum. Moreover, Stein’s assertion that Sternberg was removed from a Smithsonian publication is not true. The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian.”