It seems the producers of the fraudulent documentary about a manufactured controversy starring wannabe smart guy Ben Stein are going out of their way to insure that the film will be a flop. They are actually withholding screenings of Expelled from critics. This seems like a reasonable thing to do if your film is full of spurious facts and misrepresentations. After all, critics have this nasty habit of, you know, criticizing and who wants that? Especially when you’re banking on people not knowing what your flick is about lest they decide to hang onto their hard won money.
And it’s a tactic that works when your audience doesn’t read movie reviews anyway instead relying on commercials and trailers. As Sean Means, film critic for the Salt Lake Tribune puts it:
“This makes sense, from the studio’s perspective, since the people who go to see horror flicks and dumb comedies – teenagers and morons, respectively – don’t read reviews, and will be lured by those shiny objects called TV commercials. The same logic applied to the “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus” concert movie, which was pre-sold to its pre-teen audience, who would have attended no matter what wooly-headed critics likeme had to say about it.”
However, documentaries are different. Documentaries aren’t usually marketable via trailers or commercials and people are reluctant to spend their money to be “educated”, especially by an unknown film. So documentaries are almost always dependent on critics for initial praise and to help build a word-of-mouth following.
Not the producers of Expelled though. But why? Probably because they know the film is terrible. Not just bad, but mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, claw-your-eyes-out-with-your-fingers awful. They don’t want critics to see it because they don’t want people to know, before they plunk their silver down, how abysmal the flick really is.
So I think we have to ask, why all the fuss? The film is getting next to no publicity outside of creationist circles, the widely reported disingenuous tactics and the general ineptitude of the producers of Expelled have already garnered the film so much negative publicity that perhaps the only reason anybody would pay to see the movie is to laugh at it, much in the way that people laugh at Ed Wood films. I think, inside of a month, Expelled will have come and gone and no one but creationists will care.
Well, to be fair, there are some reasons for rationalists to care. After all, viewing flicks like Expelled gives good exercise in deconstructing propaganda and studying denialist tactics (and believe me, denialists all use the same tactics). It’s also useful for pointing out to others the deceitful hypocrisy of creationist and ID proponents. Beyond that though, I truly think Expelled is a complete non-starter.
