Drop-Everything Movies

Haven’t blogged in a while, blah, blah, blah, simple first post in a while.

So The A.V. Club ran a Q&A about Drop-Everything Movies, the movies where “it doesn’t matter that you’ve seen it 13 times already, nor does it matter what point in the movie it’s at: You immediately stop flipping to watch ’til the end, even if it’s 4 a.m.”

I thought this was an awesome topic for a Q&A, and I noticed in reading professional critics reponses that these movies are not neccesarily what you’d list when you asked someone their favorite movie (although they might be). My personal drop-everything movies are RoboCop and Unforgiven. I asked my Twitter and Facebook friends what their’s were, and here are the compiled responses:

• Elise Carr: “Dirty Dancing. lol I know, I know.”
• Donna Hacking: “Waterboy/Moonstruck”
• Alex Rivera: “Last dragon. Karate kid for some reason. And the Breakfast club.”
• Beth Strobridge: “The Godfather Parts I & II and Drumline. Yeah, I said it.”
• Joe Monzo: “JFK”
• Chris Walter: “Saving Private Ryan, Field of Dreams, Halloween.”
• Andy Willson: “anything with john wayne.”
• Bill Greenwood: “Totally ‘The Fugitive.’ If I see even a second of that, I can kiss my next 2 hours goodbye.”
• Dave Costill: “forest gump.”
• Kyle Taylor: “Goodfellas. Even when it’s censored w/ commercials.”
• Mike Schmidt: “Better of dead and anything with Clint Eastwood or John wayne.”
• Ryan Phillippi: “Rocky 1-4 makes drop what im doing. Along with Halloween, Goodfellas (on dvd lol), ghostbusters, back to the future, n Shawshank.”
• John Kuhlen: “2001 or 2010.”
• Tanya Kuhlen: “Love Actually, Goonies, and The Breakfast Club.”
• Perry Davis: “Shawshank.”
• Joe Posten: “Tombstone, Top Gun, any Kevin Costner baseball movie, Searching For Bobby Fisher…”
• Matt Butler: “ghostbusters… There’s always time for ghostbusters.”

If you are reading this and you haven’t shared your drop-everything movie(s), leave ‘em in the comments section.

Expelled

If Expelled turns into some sort of national phenomenon, I’ll probably go nuts and kill someone. So far it was only 9th its opening weekend, but you never know about word of mouth.

No, I have not seen the movie, and by all rights and in the interest of avoiding hypocrisy I shouldn’t be commenting on it. But it is fairly clear that the film is a presentation of all of the arguments intelligent design (ID) proponents put forth in their arguments. All it takes are a couple minutes of Googling to find that the people who were “unjustly” fired “because of their belief in ID” are seriously misrepresenting the reality of their situation–unless, of course, all you read are the countless posts by ID supporters who like to paint themselves as being persecuted.

At the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Evolution may have holes in it, it may turn out to need serious revision at some point before it is truly understood, but that does not prove ID. Those who suggest that is the case are creating a false dichotomy. Their argument seems to be “Not fair, we have a right to our theory too!” But the problem here is that they are not actually performing science, which is the process by which they set out to do work to attempt to prove their theory. One does not prove one theory simply by pointing out problems with another theory. You need factual evidence that directly supports your theory.

Therein lies the ultimate problem. ID is quite simply not science. The ID people wish to assert that it is not religion, and I will for a moment graciously accept that. However, just because it stops being religion does not automatically make it science–it makes it philosophy. ID posits the metaphysical, which is simply not provable or disprovable in a factual manner. And if it can’t be proved or disproved, then it is not science. Period.

You’re gonna have to start being scared right now.

Grindhouse is the greatest thing in the history of ever.

That is all.