Bats both

Every baseball manager knows the value of alternating lefties and righties in the batting order, and given that my batting order seems always to tilt heavily to the left--especially the documentaries--I thought it would be useful to give a look to Ben Stein's movie. I'd been curious about it since I first heard about it, 'cause my understanding was that, righty though he may be, Stein's not an idiot. So . . .

Oh, but wait: is anyone out there familiar with the word nabe, as in neighborhood theater (usually used in the plural, with the)? It was in Friday's Times crossword puzzle--as 1-Across--and since 1-Down was something like "certain rental arrangements" and was supposed to be "net leases," I didn't know but what maybe the initial was supposed to be s. Well, now I know--so today I made a trip to the multinabes:

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

and

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Crit

These films share the strategy of most documentaries since the rise of Michael Moore: the naïf (or buffoon, in the case of Moore and Morgan Spurlock in search of Truth, aided by lots of audiovisual aids that are only tenuously related to that quest. What's different is that Spurlock's a/v aids range from amusing to hilarious (an animated Osama dancing to M. C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This"), while Stein's range from tediously obvious to infinitely tediously obvious. There may be just as much straw in the men Spurlock constructs as in those Stein builds, but at least he makes us smile. Or me, anyway.

Which is a tough thing to unravel: did I hate Expelled because I hate everything it stands for, or did I hate it because it's uncinematic, dishonest, and relentlessly unamusing? And do those adjectives themselves reflect anything more than my political perspective?

Well, I don't know: it seems to me fair to say that Stein oversteps just a tad by blaming Darwin for Hitler, but maybe that's just me. And it seems as if he wants to have his intellectual freedom and eat it too when he excoriates Darwinists for being uniformly atheistic but claims that support for "Intelligent Design" is purely scientific, independent of religious belief. (Never mind that ID's claim not to concern itself with religious belief is absurd on the face of it: design requires a designer, and regardless of whether you call that designer God or the Prime Mover or Murray, positing its existence looks, walks, and quacks like a devout duck.)

Look, I agree with Stein on this point (though he fails ever to articulate it thus): we shouldn't be afraid of any idea, no matter how ill it fits with our own own intellectual frames. The marketplace of ideas is healthy enough to ensure that smart ideas will prevail and goofy ones will die out in a fair fight. So bring on the loonies, I say. But let's be honest about what we're talking about. We're talking about bringing God into the scientific academy; and he (or she!) should have to earn tenure just like everybody else. And frankly, while the existing record of publication includes some fine poetry, it doesn't impress me with its intellectual rigor.

One thing I'll say for the flick: it opens with a damn fine instrumental (like, chamber trio, maybe) version of "All Along the Watchtower" (the watchtower in question being on the metaphorically central Berlin Wall--see, the nasty old scientific community has erected a pernicious wall against unconventional ideas). I managed to miss the name of the group in the end credits, even though I was looking for it, but it's worth sneaking in for the opening if there's something else at the multiplex you actually want to see.

Like the Spurlock flick, e.g. Not a great movie, but great concept (making the world safe for his baby-to-be), and great personality. Spurlock is well on his way to being Michael Moore for people who have gotten to the point where they just can't stand Michael Moore anymore. Musical highlight of this one is one the end credits: to sum up Spurlock's unabashed naïveté, we get Elvis Costello's heartbreaking rendition of Nick Lowe's "What's So Funny ('Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding)?" And come to think of it, what is?