[rating: 0] Expelled is Ben Stein’s little piece of propaganda, a screed posing as a documentary. If it is a documentary, it’s in serious trouble; it’s more misguided than An Inconvenient Truth and, if you can imagine, packed with more outright lies than even the works of Michael Moore. I won’t spend much time here refuting the movie’s foolish Intelligent Design position or going through a point by point explanation of why each of its claims about people who have been professionally and personally ruined by a shadowy, anti-Intelligent Design cabal within academia are completely bogus. That information is easy enough to come by from jillions of different sources. Instead, I’ll look at it as a movie. Since it bills itself as a documentary, the question is therefore if it is a good documentary, and the answer is a big, bold no. As implied by the name, a documentary should document things. That’s as opposed to, you know, just making shit up, which is precisely what’s been done here. Each of the people the movie sets up as some kind of martyr for the cause of Intelligent Design tells a story that’s made up almost from whole cloth. The details of the true stories ...

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[rating: 2.5] As it loudly proclaims in all of its previews, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a Judd Apatow production – so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that it’s more of a romantic comedy than anything else. It’s worth mentioning, however, that this story is significantly more kind to its male lead than most chick flicks, especially other Apatow creations -- namely, Knocked Up. This is most likely thanks to the fact that the film was written by its male star, Jason Segel. Producer Apatow has a history of simply asking the main characters of his films to write a script based on their own lives – and hey, there are worse ways to make a movie. Either way, we have the story of Peter Bretter (Segel), a not-so-famous everyman, who happens to be dating a very famous starlet by the name of – you guessed it, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). But she dumps him in exchange for an even more famous British rock star, and in a wacky coincidence they all end up in Hawaii trying to forget each other. This is also where Bretter falls in love with the hotel’s laid-back desk girl, played by Mila Kunis. Surely, you can figure ...

So, actor Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years in jail for tax evasion. Sometimes when you're busy making movies, things get a little hectic; I can see how you could forget to pay millions of dollars in income taxes over a period of several years. But seriously, tax evasion is such a lame crime for Wesley Snipes to be jailed for. Here are some better ideas. Aggravated Bad-Assery Possesion of Coolness with Intent to Be Hip Jaywalking While Daywalking

[rating: 4] My preference in movies watched for entertainment runs to things like Die Hard, Army of Darkness, Airplane!, and Star Wars. I appreciate great dramas, but most of them require that I get in the proper mindset—that I prepare myself—and that just doesn't happen very often. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, on the other hand, is a movie I could watch every single day. The movie takes place on the day Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton) brings home John Prentiss (Sidney Poitier), the man she intends to marry. The meat of the film centers around the reaction of her parents (Tracy and Hepburn, who appeared together in every movie released over a stretch of some twenty years) to this situation. John is handsome, impeccably mannered and polite, and a doctor famous in his field—not to put too fine a point on it, he's a helluva catch for Joey. But since he's black and it's 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Drayton are still shocked, no matter how forward-thinking and liberal minded they've professed to be in the past. The script is a masterfully realistic exploration of personal feelings on race—not just the feelings of Joey's parents, but John's family too—as well as whether a ...

PZ Meyers, a Biologist from the University of Minnesota, Morris, recently tried to attend a screening of the Creationist film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but was himself expelled. A policeman came to tell him that he must leave the premises, that the producers had singled him out, as someone who might apparently disrupt (read: disagree) with the hackneyed, propagandist drivel presented by the film. Yes, this middle-aged, balding professor probably would've set the theater on fire. If you ask me, though, I think the policeman was mistaken. I think the producer pointed to the man next to Meyers -- the man who was allowed to see the film, clearly by accident. Which man, you ask? Why none other than the enormously famous atheist biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, that's who. You simply must read Meyers' personal blog on the subject, written giddily from a Mac Store while his family, and Richard Dawkins, saw the horrible movie without incident.

The Hills Have Eyes Part II is a terrible 1985 film where nothing happens and everybody has flashbacks all the time, including a dog. The Hills Have Eyes 2 is an equally terrible sequel to the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes (but, it's important to note, is not itself a remake of The Hills Have Eyes Part II). The point is, both movies are awful. So what I'm saying is: Wes, maybe it's high time you stopped writing sequels to movies called The Hills Have Eyes.

[rating: 2.5] When I saw the trailer for The Ruins, I didn’t really know what to make of it. I could tell there were going to be some people, and some peril, and probably some ruins. But just what the danger was, or how it manifested itself, or really what the movie was about...all that remained a mystery. Then I actually saw the movie and discovered, to my dismay, that it is about some kids who go to some Central American ruins and are menaced by a sentient freaking plant. It’s Indiana Jones and the Little Shop of Horrors. I’m serious, I promise. There are five characters trapped in the domain of the spooky plant. Well, that’s not strictly true; there are five people, but I would hardly call them characters. They’re more like slightly-animated cardboard cutouts, and if you’ve seen any movie ever you’ve seen them before. First are two couples, Clean-Cut b/w Blonde and Bushy-Hair b/w Brunette. Joining them is their new friend Foreigner. Together they wander around in the jungle and wind up at the titular ruins, the home of the deadly talking plant. Oh, yeah, did I not mention that it’s a talking plant? It is. Anyway, once these people find ...

[rating: 3.5] I’ll be the first to admit I was skeptical about Horton Hears a Who. Theatrical adaptations of Dr. Seuss don’t exactly have the best track record, after all; How the Grinch Stole Christmas was lousy and The Cat in the Hat was an outright abomination before the Lord. Fortunately for moviegoers everywhere, I’m pleased to report that Horton is better than these by leaps and bounds. The biggest reason Horton Hears a Who is a charming and enjoyable picture while the other Dr. Seuss movies suck out loud is that this one stays closest to the source material. Sure, Dr. Seuss worked in the genre of rhyming picture books for kiddies, but he was a genius nonetheless. The Grinch gave us pointless glimpses into the Grinch’s tortured past, The Cat in the Hat gave us disturbing images and Mike Meyers being totally horrifying in every way he could. But in this movie they don’t mess around making up all kinds of nonsense and bullcrappery. Thus, the story is lengthened without being padded, if you can dig that. It fills up the 90 minute running time without seeming stretched thin, but it also isn’t a stupid bunch of garbage. In fact, this ...