Jenna Jameson outstrips Ben Stein

Posted by Josh Rosenau on April 18, 2008
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Here’s the New York Times on porn actress/producer Jenna Jameson’s new movie, Zombie Strippers:

Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff. ?

Though not nearly as clever as it aims to be, the film at least tries. In addition to drawing inspiration from Eugène Ionesco?s ever-relevant absurdist play ?Rhinoceros,? it?s full of jabs at the Bush administration and philosophy references ? for starters, Jenna Jameson, as the first stripper to succumb to zombification, reads and quotes Nietzsche.

But all intellectual touches remain secondary to the catfights and carnage of Ms. Jameson and her leggy colleagues, clearly the main attraction here.

Meanwhile, Stein’s schlock-fest Expelled gets this review:

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.

?the film relies extensively on the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy ? after this, therefore because of this?

Prominent evolutionary biologists, like the author and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins ? accurately identified on screen as an ?atheist? ? are provided solely to construct, in cleverly edited slices, an inevitable connection between Darwinism and godlessness. Blithely ignoring the vital distinction between social and scientific Darwinism, the film links evolution theory to fascism (as well as abortion, euthanasia and eugenics), shamelessly invoking the Holocaust with black-and-white film of Nazi gas chambers and mass graves.

Every few minutes familiar ? and ideologically unrelated ? images interrupt the talking heads: ? This is not argument, it?s circus, a distraction from the film?s contempt for precision and intellectual rigor. This goes further than a willful misunderstanding of the scientific method. ?

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn ?Expelled? is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

Now, both movies managed to get the words “intellectual” and “clever” into their reviews, an impressive feat on both counts. The thing is, having your editing described as “clever” is hardly a compliment. SImilarly, “contempt for ? intellectual rigor” is not in the same ballpark as the “intellectual touches” in Zombie Strippers.

Something tells me this would make a fun double feature, even if you didn’t go to see Expelled.

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Comments

  1. #1 bad Jim
    April 19, 2008

    Hey, the L.A. Times liked Zombie Stripper too!

    “Zombie Strippers” is a B-movie whose ideas and wit set it well above the great unwashed of the genre. Early on, Jameson’s still-human character is seen reading Nietzsche. Later, post-zombification, she reads the same book and laughs hysterically: “This makes so much more sense now!”

    Not so much Expelled:

    Someday, perhaps, it will be possible to look back on “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” as a relic and reminder of the rhetorical logic employed during the era of George W. Bush.

  2. #2 The Waco Kid
    April 20, 2008

    Well, seeing as how they are both extreme leftist publications, I feel I’ll go watch the movie, research the information, and make my own decision. I mean seriously, who would the left rather endorse? A woman who is basically the embodiment of the ideology of “free love” or someone who would ask the question “What are the loop holes in Darwinism and why can’t God have something to do with it? Can’t it be both?” Stein made some good points on a radio broadcast that I was listening to on the ride home from school two weeks ago. He said that he doesn’t want to cram his ideas down your throat like (I’ve noticed) some biology teachers try to do – he wants to open up the discussion and get people to think about Darwinism vs. Creationism instead of blindly saying “It was all evolution”.

    So, if you watch the movie without bias you might understand more of what the movie is trying to say and listen to his words literally instead of the twisted statements that the media is feeding you. Stein’s ideas of Nazis and Darwinism has been blown out of proportion. It is being reported that Stein said Darwinism was the cause for the Holocaust and Nazis. What he really said was that the extermination of the Jews was justified in the Nazis’ belief that they were performing a type of Darwinism – they were killing off the weak (the Jews) so that the human race could advance. He’s not saying that because of Darwinism, Nazis came about. He’s saying that Nazis justified their own actions with the ideas of Darwinism – and if they did it and history repeats itself, its doomed to happen again.

    So, now that I’m done ranting, I’m going to recommend, again, that you watch it with an open mind and try to actually gain something from the film.

  3. #3 Josh Rosenau
    April 22, 2008

    What makes you think I haven’t seen Ben Stein’s swill? What makes you think that judgments about the merits of a film are purely political? (Fox panned Expelled.) What makes you think porn is free?

    Ben Stein says nothing about Holocaust being justified by Hitler’s belief in Naziism, he says that Darwin leads to Naziism. Your statement is closer to a realistic perspective on history, which then leads to the obvious rebuttal that the Nazis misunderstood and misinterpreted a number of things, so why didn’t Stein address all of those misunderstandings, and why does he merely repeat Hitler’s mistaken understanding of evolution rather than correcting it.

    As Stein puts it in the movie, it’s just a trivialization of the Holocaust.

    I’m going to recommend that you read a real history of the Holocaust, or perhaps Ben Kiernan’s “Blood and Soil,” a recently published history of genocide.

  4. #4 Umlud
    April 22, 2008

    Thanks Josh. I didn’t know that there was a film about zombie strippers coming out… until I read your entry.