MAGIC         PORK

Faithful readers surely have noticed my extended absence. I haven’t posted in nearly 2 months. Well I’m finally back from my African safari and let me tell you, it was fantastic! There were lions and uh… giraffes. Lots of water buffalo… let’s see.. zebra, saw one of those. What else?

Oh okay, you got me. I’ve been here in Rochester the whole time. I’ve been pretty busy but that’s not much of an excuse. I just haven’t felt like writing. But I know my huge fanbase (ahem) must be absolutely going nuts without their magicpork fix so I’d better post something.

Then again, I stop blogging and what happens? The Democrats take Congress, Rumsfeld gets the boot, and Britney files for divorce. Maybe I shouldn’t start up again. (If you’re ever in Rochester, Britney, look me up. I even have the same name as your soon-to-be ex-husband, so you could scream his name out in bed and I’d never know.)

I saw two great documentaries recently, both of them absolutely infuriating. Both of them I went into the movie thinking I probably wasn’t going to hear anything I hadn’t heard before, but I was wrong.

Deliver Us From Evil is about Father Oliver O’Grady, who molested children for years, and when his church superiors found out, they’d simply move him to different parishes and allow him to continue. There’s no question that this happened. He openly admits to what he did and talks at length to the camera. He says he’s sorry for what he did, but he doesn’t seem to show any real remorse or understanding of just how much he devastated these families. His level of remorse is about the same as if he had swore at someone and then felt bad about it. But even more maddening is seeing the lengths to which the Catholic church went to protect him and keep it covered up. I think the movie was just a tad too long and overreached a little towards the end, but that’s a pretty minor quibble.

The other movie was American Blackout. It was about U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections. I didn’t know much about McKinney going into this movie except that there was some news story about her assaulting a guard a while back. (The movie didn’t address that but in the Q&A afterwards, the producer explained that the incident got blown way out of proportion.) I had heard about the problems with black voters getting turned away or having to wait in disproportionately long lines, but I have to admit, I didn’t think there was such strong evidence for it. It was pretty eye-opening and I would encourage everyone to see it.

OK, that’s it for now. Hopefully I won’t wait so long to post again.

This coming Wednesday, June 28th, at 8 PM, the George Eastman House will be showing the movie Exotica in the Dryden Theatre. That is a great movie that not a lot of people seem to know about. If you look at the DVD cover, you’ll probably get the wrong idea about the movie. It’s not some soft-core flick.

The movie centers around a strip club. The two main characters are a stripper who dresses like a Catholic schoolgirl and a man who frequents the club and always gets dances from her. I know how that sounds, but trust me, this isn’t some late night Cinemax movie. There’s about as much nudity in it as when Tony goes to visit the Bada Bing on The Sopranos. I don’t even consider it an erotic movie. The tone is completely one of loneliness. All of the characters are lonely and feeling pain about something.

The other main characters include the pregnant owner of the club, the DJ, and a gay pet store owner who’s completely unrelated to the club but ends up getting involved by the end of the movie. I wish I could say more than that, but the whole beauty of the film is in how you gradually learn who these characters are and why they do the things they do.

The film is written and directed by Atom Egoyan. I don’t know what it is about his style, but somehow he can create scenes that just stick with me. I first rented Exotica about ten years ago. Over the years I would forget much of the details, but I’d still have a clear image in my head of what the pet store owner looked and acted like, how the DJ would sound when he was talking into the microphone, the final scene of the movie (which was a flashback), little things like that. I bought a used copy of the DVD not too long ago and I have watched it pretty recently, but if I’m in town (there’s a possibility I won’t be) I plan on seeing it at the Dryden anyway. With my membership, it’s only $4.

I’ve seen two other Egoyan films: Felicia’s Journey and The Sweet Hereafter. The Sweet Hereafter is just amazing. It’s his most well-known work, but I had no idea when I rented it what it was about. I just knew that it was the same writer and director as Exotica and that it had been nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars. I hadn’t seen trailers for it. I didn’t know who starred in it. Nothing. There’s a reason I haven’t given you links to IMDB for these movies - because I think they give away too much of the movie.

So because that’s the way I experienced it, I’m not even going to tell you what it’s about. I couldn’t really describe why I like it so much anyway. But like with Exotica, it just stuck with me afterwards. The next day, I watched it all over again with the commentary track. The track featured Egoyan and Russell Banks, the author of the novel that it was based on. That is way cool to have the original author commenting along with the screenwriter & director. The DVD also had some interviews with both of them, and showed Banks reading a couple of passages from the novel.

OK, I’ll mention just a tiny tiny tidbit to illustrate something, but no spoiler here. There’s a bad event that happens in this small Canadian town. You learn about it early in the film. Everyone talks about it, we see how it affected people, we see through flashbacks some things that happened before it, but for a good portion of the movie, we don’t see the event itself. There are times they do a flashback and you think you might see it, but you don’t. Then at one point they flashback and because of how it’s set up, you know that this is it, we’re going to see it this time. I can’t really explain why, but that moment when I realized that, it sent chills up my spine. I got chills just thinking about it as I was typing this. While that scene progressed, my heart was pounding. I almost wanted to say “Please don’t show me this”. I’m sure some of you will see the movie and think “What’s he talking about? What was the big deal about that?”. I don’t know, I’m just saying that’s how it affected me.

I also want to note that The Sweet Hereafter has nothing to do with strip clubs or anything like that, so if you’re turned off by that aspect of Exotica, you don’t have to worry about that with this movie.

But I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t seen Exotica to check it out this Wednesday, or rent it on DVD if you can’t make it to the theater.  If you don’t like it, feel free to let me hear it, but I won’t be refunding your money.

Why do I get the feeling everyone’s going to ignore what I’m saying and not go see Exotica? OK fine. Ladies, sorry, I don’t got anything else for ya. Men, forget all that crap I said earlier. Mia Kirshner is hot. There, will that get you to go? Whatever works, just see it already!

I’ll state up front that I haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary about global warming featuring Al Gore. Perhaps I should, but maybe I’ll wait until it’s in the dollar theater. I’ve seen the trailer and I’ve read reviews about it so I have a good idea of what it’s asserting.

First off, while we’re on the subject of that trailer. It actually has the gall to state “If you love your planet… If you love your children… You have to see this film.” So there you have it folks. If you have kids and you don’t see it, you must not love them. Shame on you.

Now I’m not saying that global warming is all a crock. If a lot of scientists in the world support that theory then I’m not going to sit here and just say “well it sounds fishy to me”. Well I take that back. I am going to say it sounds fishy to me, but I’m willing to concede that just because something sounds fishy to me doesn’t mean it’s not true. I haven’t studied all the evidence that they have.

But what gets me angry is how global warming has become common knowledge. If you doubt global warming then you must be a moron or some right-winger in bed with the oil companies. After all, every scientist in the world believes in global warming, right? That’s what the film would have you believe.

Let’s talk about what we mean first. When we say “global warming” do we mean…

• The Earth’s temperature is increasing.
• The Earth’s temperature is increasing because of man-made actions.
• The Earth’s temperature is increasing because of man-made actions and IT’s GOING TO KILL US ALL IF WE DON’T ACT RIGHT NOW!!!

Few scientists contest that the Earth’s temperature is increasing. So in that sense, maybe you could say there’s a consensus that global warming is occurring. But environmentalists take that consensus and project it to mean one of the other two definitions above, for which there may be a great deal of support, but not a consensus.

Wikipedia has a list of scientists opposing global warming consensus. For example, there’s Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at some little liberal arts college called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s also an article in Wikipedia all about the global warming controversy that better explains it than I could here.

So back to An Inconvenient Truth. The trailer shows computer projections of what will happen if the ice caps melt. We’ve all been told about cities flooding and such. My generation basically grew up being told that. We’ll all be living on rafts drinking our own filtrated urine. (Yes, I just made a Waterworld reference.) But they don’t just say cities will be flooded and leave it at that. No, their computer projections can tell us exactly what parts of the coastal cities will be underwater. Yeah right. Makes for scary visuals but I don’t buy for a second that your programs can accurately predict what exactly New York City will look like after an increase in temperature melts the ice caps. I bet even the programmers who wrote that software are rolling their eyes at that.

But you know the part of the trailer that absolutely pissed me off? When they talk about Hurricane Katrina and how recently we’ve had all these bad hurricanes, and it’s because of global warming. That’s when I lost any hope that the movie would be a rational look at the issue of global warming. Recent hurricanes, tsunamis, etc have NOTHING to do with global warming. That’s 100% BS.

You can’t look at one or two years of data and make a claim as to a trend. Take a look at these historic statistics and tell me if you can see a trend. I can’t. Even if 2005 had some astronomical number of hurricanes (which it didn’t, according to the data I could find online. 15 hurricanes vs. 12 in 1969, 7 “major” hurricanes vs. 8 in 1950.) that still wouldn’t indicate jack. It wouldn’t mean it’s because of global warming.

Roger Ebert bought An Inconvenient Truth hook, line, and sinker. Luckily Richard Roeper was a little more level-headed. He also gave it thumbs up also but he had this to say (after Ebert got done reviewing the movie):

I agree with you. I don’t think there’s any dispute or debate. Global warming is real. I think there can be some debate about the causes and about Gore’s dire predictions and if this was a true documentary, it would have been nice to see a little balance here. I mean this is, this is a very well done, slickly packaged campaign commercial about global warming starring Al Gore. As such it’s very effective and very successful. I think it can create a debate and discussion and we can go from there.

The expression on Ebert’s face looked honestly stunned to be hearing Roeper at all questioning the film’s assertions about global warming. He was probably especially stunned because Roeper is well known to be a liberal. After some back-and-forth with Ebert where Ebert basically said no respected scientists debate global warming, Roeper said:

It’s whether or not it’s human behavior that’s causing all of this, it’s whether or not Gore’s predictions for the next 10 to 50 years.. there is some debate about that and the film doesn’t address that.

You can listen to their full conversation here.

So I guess I’m just saying see the movie if you want to, but realize that things aren’t as incontrovertible as they say and there still is some debate on the subject.

I wanted to come up with some funny derogatory nickname for Blockbuster that would reflect what I’m about to say, but “Blockbusted” was the best I could do. I know, it’s not that funny. But I tried.

I’m a little mad at Blockbuster because on three occasions recently I’ve rented a DVD (the old-fashioned way, from the store not online) and it stopped playing part way through because of scratches. It’s possible my DVD player is more sensitive than most, but it’s only 4-5 years old and it’s a decent machine. Plus I look at the DVD and there are pretty noticeable scratches. So I have to drive to the store and swap it out with another copy. I bet they just put it back on the shelf after I leave too.

Has anyone else had problems with this or am I just unlucky? I probably shouldn’t be too frustrated with Blockbuster because I’m not sure what they can do to fix that, besides analyzing every DVD that gets returned. But it’s still very frustrating.

What’s also frustrating is how filthy the DVDs always are. I’ll often rinse and wipe off a DVD before playing it, because I’ve also had problems in the past with DVDs not playing correctly from having so many smudges and fingerprints on them. And besides, I just don’t want to put something that gross inside my DVD player.

I know ultimately the customers are to blame for this. I really don’t understand what’s going on here. How long have CDs and DVDs been around? Are there really people that don’t understand that you’re not supposed to touch that shiny side without the label?

You can hold it by its edges:

You can hold it by its edges and the hole in the middle:

You can even hold it with just one finger:

I understand that people typically treat property that’s not theirs worse than they would their own property (i.e. rental cars, hotel rooms) but it’s not like it’s easier to hold a DVD when you put your fingers all over it. Do people just get their kicks out of being able to hold it differently than they would their own DVDs? “Oh goody! A rental DVD. I’ll be able to grab it like a frisbee instead of gripping it by its edges! I’m so sick of doing it that way.” Or do people actually handle their own DVDs that way? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Given the pervasiveness of this, there’s probably someone reading this that handles these DVDs incorrectly. Why? I’m beginning to fear I’m in the minority here.

Perhaps your hands aren’t large enough to hold it like in example #1, but if you have small hands then you can probably fit your finger into the hole. But fine, if you have small hands but really thick fingers then you’re excused. Just do me a favor and wash off that Orville Redenbacher butter from your hands before handling it, will you?

There’s another group of people that can be excused: young children. But parents shouldn’t be letting their little kids put their grimy hands all over a DVD that doesn’t belong to them. They should be teaching them about respecting someone else’s property and if they’re not old enough to be able to handle it properly, then they shouldn’t be handling it at all. “But it’s so amazing how little Timmy learned how to put in the DVD and press play all by himself!” Wow, someone call Harvard and start the early enrollment process.

OK, I’m sure some parents will think I’m being a little harsh but you know what, it’s doesn’t matter because if your kid is watching The Girl Next Door, X-Men 2, and The Sopranos Season 4 Volume 3, then you’ve got a couple more important lessons to teach before you get to the “respect other people’s property” chapter. (By the way, I refuse to call the X-Men sequel X2. I know that’s the official title. It’s stupid.)

This all makes me wonder: If I started using Netflix or Blockbuster online, would I have these same issues, except that instead of driving to the nearest Blockbuster I’d have to put it in the mail and wait for the new one to get shipped back?

A while back, I saw the movie Caché. It’s about this couple that find a videotape left on their doorstep. The tape is of their house, just filming them coming and going and such. But who made it, and why? More tapes get left throughout the film, secrets get revealed, and so on. Some major questions go unanswered at the end of the movie so you leave the theater scratching your head, wondering what the hell that was all about. Yeah, one of those movies. Oh and it’s in French with subtitles. You already know whether it’s a movie you’ll be interested in.

After thinking it over, I came up with a theory that I thought made it all work. In fact, it made so much sense that I thought there must be lots of people online that came to the same conclusions. After poring through discussions on IMDB and other sites that I found, I didn’t see anyone reach the same conclusion as me. I thought either I’m crazy or I’m brilliant! Those two aren’t mutually exclusive, but I decided that I was brilliant and left it at that.

Then I read a Roger Ebert “Answer Man” column where someone wrote in about some theory they had. I always read the Answer Man column. It runs every 2 weeks. Ebert just lives & breathes movies. I have a lot of respect for him. I don’t always agree with him of course, but very often I do, and he’s a great writer. In Answer Man, he’ll respond to reader’s questions. Sometimes they’re just questions about his opinion on something and other times it’s a specific question about a movie. It’s not uncommon to see a question about a movie and he’ll reply “I wasn’t sure so I asked the movie’s director, Martin Scorcese…” or “well back in 1992 I was having dinner with Robert Altman and he said…”. It’s like whoa, I guess that’s one way to find out!

Anyway, so someone wrote in with a theory about Caché and neither him nor Ebert had it right! Now I just had to write to Ebert and enlighten him as to what the movie was really all about. I imagined him reading it, thinking “This man’s a genius! Why didn’t I see that?” Maybe he’d be so impressed, he’d invite me to dinner if I’m ever in Chicago. I’d tell him to bring Richard Roeper along. I’d have to study a few films really hard and steer conversation to them so I can sound like I know what I’m talking about. Maybe I’d start by commenting on how I like his “Great Movies” articles about 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Birth of a Nation. Then I’d probably be the millionth person to tell him how wrong he was about Napoleon Dynamite and Fight Club. Then I’d turn to Richard and say how I read every column he writes, even the ones about athletes that I’ve never heard of (I don’t follow sports… at all) and tell him how awesome it was when he devoted two columns to ripping apart the “facts” of Ann Coulter’s book. But I’d say he was very wrong when he said on Ebert & Roeper that Camilla Belle is a thousand times more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan. Please. Lindsay Lohan is precisely 1.286 times more beautiful than Camilla Belle. End of subject.

Well that was over a month ago that I wrote to him and I figured he had hit the delete key but I was at least hoping that he had read it. Then I’m reading his latest Answer Man column today and there I am! My e-mail was greatly edited down and I think it makes me sound like a bit of a kook because of that, even though it does a pretty accurate job of capturing the gist of my argument. But he apparently didn’t see the genius in my theory on the movie.

First off, publishing it six weeks later makes it sound like I’m bringing up an old subject when I wrote to him the day after he answered a question about the movie. But more importantly, he doesn’t really address my theory, which makes me think he must be dismissing it as just another wacky theory he’s heard. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to play the part of the misunderstood genius. At least he found my e-mail worthy of addressing, and maybe some other people out there will flood him with e-mails telling him how I cleared it all up for them.

I’m not sure who is going to want to read the rest of this post, because I can’t imagine many of you have seen Caché, and therefore none of it will make sense to you. But here it is.

** Spoiler warning ** if you think you’re actually going to watch the movie.

First, here’s the previous question someone else asked, and his response. (Copied from here.)

Q. (Spoiler warning) My wife and I attended a screening of “Cache.” Everyone in the theater was puzzled by the last scene. Does the last scene at the school reveal the identity of who had been doing the tapings? Someone in the audience said they thought they saw the two sons talking to each other as though this provided a possible answer.

Al and Pat Ralston, Fullerton, Calif.

A. “Cache” has struck a nerve, and is doing surprisingly good business in the United States and Europe. I’m asked about it constantly, as if there is an answer. The last scene does indeed show the two sons talking, and there should be no way they know each other. But what does that explain? Does it account for the videos? Consider that the film’s last shot is exactly in the style of the videos that were received. Is someone else behind the camera? The film offers no possible closure.

Note how he says there is no possible closure. Not true, as I try to point out. Again I’d like to state that this is edited down from my amazing, astounding thesis. I wish I had kept a copy of the complete e-mail I sent to him but I had to fill it into one of those online forms instead of going through my e-mail client so it’s gone for good. It really went into a lot more detail, but I don’t feel like writing all that up again and I doubt any of you really care. (Copied from this week’s column.)

Q. No one in Michael Haneke’s “Cache” made those videotapes. The culprit is us, the viewing audience. There’s even a scene early in the film where Georges tries to figure out where the camera could have been, and can’t figure out how he could have walked right past it without seeing it. That’s because from his perspective, the camera wasn’t “there” at all. I took the film as a commentary on how voyeuristic our society has become. Whenever the movie switches to the videotape point of view, we stare, waiting for what’s going to happen. We become the voyeurs. I usually don’t go off on crazy theories like this, but you can’t take the movie literally. You mention that it doesn’t make sense that the two boys would be talking in the last shot; why couldn’t they know each other from school? They could even be unaware of who each others’ father is.

Kevin McMillen, Rochester, N.Y.

A. “Cache” is the movie people will not stop devising theories about, and although I’ve discussed it several times in the Answer Man, the subject is apparently not closed. I’m at the Cannes Film Festival, where I got into a discussion of “Cache” with the director William Friedkin. He told me: “I was talking to Barbet Schroeder, one of the producers on the film, and he said that after Haneke screened it, everybody told him he was crazy, because 99 percent of the audience would never see those two obscure kids in the upper left hand corner of the final shot. So he re-edited it, put in a closer shot so you could see it was them, and put in the dialogue of what they were saying to each other. Then his psychiatrist in Vienna told him, ‘No, no! Do it the way you wanted!’ So he took all that stuff out again.”

What were the kids saying? I asked.

“That,” Friedkin said, “I don’t know.”

*** SPOILERS from last night’s Lost ***

I liked last night’s episode of Lost, although the flashback story with that woman was a little reminiscent of David Mamet’s House of Games. Except that in House of Games, the woman was a psychiatrist so it makes a little more sense why she would be fascinated by the art of the con. Mamet must like stories about con artists because he also wrote The Spanish Prisoner and Heist, and possibly others that I haven’t seen. I haven’t seen Wag the Dog, but I know it’s about some people that try to fake a war so I guess that can be considered a con too.

If Mamet had written this episode of Lost, he would have had at least two more levels of deception going on, like the woman would have really been a con artist too but Sawyer knew she was a con artist and planned on her double-crossing him, and so on. Plus every other word would have been bleeped out and Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon would have been in it.

If you really dissect these movies, they aren’t very realistic. The whole plot might depend on some character anticipating the behavior of some other character that would have been impossible to predict - but it’s fun to watch nonetheless.

Mamet also made State and Main which stars Oscar-nominated Philip Seymour Hoffman!!! Sorry, he grew up here, so it’s been all over the news. It is kind of cool, but come on, it’s just making us look lame that we’re going ga-ga over this. It’s not like he still lives here. It seems to me like all this excitement over Hoffman just draws attention to the fact that to make something of himself, he moved out of Rochester.

It’s not like he’s some new star either. It’s his first Oscar nomination, but he’s been doing great work for years. For a while there, it seemed like he was in every other movie I saw. Anyway… State and Main’s a good movie.

OK, back to Lost. Part of me feels like Charlie’s acting a little out of character, but I’m willing to go along with the writers because:

1. He seems to be going a bit insane what with the wacky dreams & sleepwalking.
2. You’d probably go a little nuts too if you were deserted on an island perhaps for the rest of your life and you had a chance at sealing the deal with some really cute blonde chick.. she’s even got a funny accent like you.. hey you think, maybe this deserted island thing won’t be that bad.. and suddenly the weirdest guy on the island is taking your place. Guess it’ll be listening to old records with Hurley the rest of your life instead. Ouch.
3. Monaghan makes some awesome creepy facial expressions. If he gets to do that more often, all the better.
4. I trust that the writers are setting up something really good with this new dark turn in his character.

Some people are getting antsy because they want more answers to the show, but I say keep it going nice & slow. I love it. I wouldn’t feel that way if it seemed like the writers didn’t know where it all was going (like on X-Files where it started to get frustrating), but I think they know exactly where it’s all going and I say let them tell it and have fun watching how all the pieces fit together.

For all of you who fell asleep from my Inherit the Wind post, I’m following it up with some more lively movie news. Hopefully that title got your attention.

Terrence Howard was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for Hustle & Flow (warning: site plays music so if you’re at work, put on those headphones!). He did a great job in that movie. He was in pretty much every scene so he really had to carry it.

Also, the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” was nominated for Best Original Song. That was a really catchy song. I saw old white women bopping their heads to that in the theater. If that song wins, it will be the second rap song in recent years to win - the other being of course Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” in 2003.

When I went to see it, there were people guarding the door, taking cell phone cameras and patting you down. Besides being silly, I thought “how racist!!”. They weren’t doing that for any other movie. This was at the Little Theater, an independent film theater that has a predominantly white audience. This film was about a black pimp trying to make it as a rapper. But then I realized it was because it was a sneak preview of the movie so must be, nationwide where it was being shown, they were taking precautions like that. Because, you know, I could have sneaked out some high quality images from my dinky < 1 Megapixel cell phone. So I was relieved to find out that the Little hadn’t suddenly, inexplicably, become racist. Turns out the majority of the audience was white, and I was surprised at how many older people were there. I didn’t think it would appeal to that demographic.

Roger Ebert has a series of articles called Great Movies. Every other week, he’ll add a movie that he considers “great”. These writeups are different than his typical review. It’s more of a discussion of what makes the film so good, which sometimes means discussing the impact it had, its influences, things that can be determined better now that some time has passed. I usually don’t read them unless I’ve seen the movie because (as I discussed previously) I hate spoilers and he’ll sometimes discuss key events in the movies that I wouldn’t want revealed. He doesn’t do that for his recent reviews, but for some movies, you can’t really do an analysis of why they’re great without talking about them in detail.

His most recent “great movie” is Inherit the Wind and his writeup about it is quite good. The movie is about the Scopes monkey trial. I didn’t see the original until years later, but I happened to see some made-for-TV version of it when I was 13-14 years old and it had a pretty big impact on me. It made me think about things in ways I hadn’t thought of before at that age.

Then one day I was bored in study hall and saw a copy of the play on the bookshelf next to me (my English teacher’s room) and I read through it over the course of multiple study halls. Kind of like how I read the entirety of Al Franken’s first second book (thanks FoodMike) at Barnes & Noble over multiple visits without purchasing it. I still feel a little guilty about that, but it got to a point where “why purchase it now when I’ve already read most of it?”. I’m an extra big jerk now because I didn’t even bother to link you to Barnes & Noble’s website for a description of the book, I linked to Amazon.

But back to my story. At some point later on, I watched the original version. Both movies followed the play very closely, at least with the courtroom scenes.

Anyway, I’m boring you. The point is, Ebert doesn’t just discuss the movie, he contrasts the Scopes trial with the recent events in Dover, PA when evolution basically went on trial again. Ebert wonders if it would be harder to make a movie like this in 2005 than it was in 1960:

Brady and Drummond essentially engage in a debate between fundamentalism and the possibility that if God did create the world, he did so in more than six 24-hour days. What is astonishing in this 1960 film is the gutsy way it engages in ideas, pulls no punches in its language, and allows the characters long and impassioned speeches. There are a lot of words here, well-written and spoken, and not condescending to the audience. Both Tracy and March vent an anger and passion through their characters that ventures beyond acting into holy zeal.

I wonder if a film made today would have the nerve to question fundamentalism as bluntly as the Tracy character does.

Ebert is spot-on when discussing why creationism shouldn’t be taught in science classes:

Central to the case for “alternative” theories is a misunderstanding of what a scientific theory is, and isn’t. One thing it cannot do is depend on supernatural elements. That is the role of religious belief. By asking that creationism be given a place beside the theory of evolution, its supporters are asking that their beliefs be given equal standing with the scientific method. That violates the separation of church and state, as Judge Jones ruled; in claiming their science was not faith-based, he said, they lied.

Once again, if you still feel like reading it, here’s the link.