Thoughts from Kansas

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.

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.

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