News: Jane Campion may have lamented the lack of female directors at Cannes last year, but there’s a positive drought this year, with only Lucrecia Martel’s (The Holy Girl) La Mujer Sin Cabeza—uplifting title, that—screening in competition. One other film is co-directed by Daniela Thomas, working alongside a much better-known male director, Walter Salles. Making up for this dearth entirely are gorgeous starlets Alexandra Maria Lara and Natalie Portman on the jury. Naturally, The Third Wave, screening out of competition, is about the 2004 tsunami.

Opened Last Week:

My review of Expelled appears this week, rather than last, because the production company preferred to conduct advance screenings for church groups and Christian schools instead of asking for objective criticism. Generally, avoiding critics means the movie is reprehensibly bad, and I have to admit, even I was surprised by the film’s condescending, simplistic assertion (popular among creationists) that since Hitler used Darwin to justify evil acts, reading Darwin will incline you toward similar evils. You couldn’t get farther from the merits of the argument if you tried. Other critics have made that point with more vigor than I could (I just think it’s sad), so my review hones in on the interesting gap between what intelligent design proponents say in public forums or in courts of law and what they tell friendly audiences.

The most bizarre thing about the new intelligent-design propaganda film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed isn’t that former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can’t be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film compares science with Nazism and Stalinism (though it does, repeatedly and remorselessly). What’s truly weird is that the filmmakers don’t seem to understand the tenets of intelligent design.

Proponents of intelligent design—which is essentially a legal strategy, developed in the wake of a Supreme Court decision rejecting the teaching of creationism in public schools—try to discern traces of an intelligent designer in the universe and in living things. Crucially, however, the “theory” remains agnostic as to the identity of that designer. This was an important component of the legal underpinning of the movement: If intelligent-design proponents ever hinted that the designer was God, the teaching of intelligent design in schools would, like the teaching of creationism, constitute an infringement on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. At the same time, though, not naming the designer meant that intelligent-design proponents like Michael Behe had to allow the possibility that their designer is one of many gods, or even an intellectually superior alien. (This problem was memorably satirized by followers of the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

So when Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist who is a prominent critic of intelligent design, concedes to Stein in Expelled that he is open to the idea that aliens may have seeded our planet with life, intelligent design has actually scored a point (even if Dawkins never argues that an alien visitation could be somehow inferred from the evidence, and even though the theory of natural selection isn’t particularly preoccupied with how life first began). But this modest victory means nothing to the movie’s target audience of evangelical Christians, so Stein takes the intellectually bankrupt way out and makes vicious fun of Dawkins for believing in aliens.

I linked to a document by a Discovery Institute shill up there, and he attempts to bolster his assertion that intelligent design doesn’t point to a creator God by citing Of Pandas and People, of all things. Thanks to a little trial in Dover, we all know that Of Pandas and People is a hastily rejiggered creationist textbook. See Chapter Ten of the NOVA episode Intelligent Design on Trial for hilarious proof.

Opening this week:

Andrew Wright reviews Jenna Jameson’s, uh, film debut? No. Theatrical film debut? No. Commercial theatrical film debut? Why is this so hard? Anyway, Zombie Strippers. Andrew: “Of the many damning sins it commits against acceptably skeezy exploitation filmmaking, perhaps the cardinal one is this: The two most attractive women in the cast never even take their tops off. That faint thumping noise you hear is Russ Meyer doing donuts in his grave.”

In (the print version of) On Screen this week, you’ll find reviews of The First Saturday in May (Jen Graves: “When brothers Brad and John Hennegan set out to follow six trainers and six horses on their journey toward the ultimate horse race in 2006, they had no idea that one of their animal stars would prove to be more of a draw than any of their human subjects. Now, the movie’s publicity materials boast about ‘never-before-seen footage of a young Barbaro,’ and he, truly, is the highlight of the film”), The Life Before Her Eyes (me: “The Life Before Her Eyes has its bright spots—Evan Rachel Wood is irritatingly great at the half-seductive, half-self-destructive thing—but every retouched color [the tomatoes in this movie are from another planet] and dramatic visual effect [blotches of blood keep morphing into other things] serves to pollute the movie’s already sloppy metaphysics with an unpleasant strain of hysteria”), and Deception (Bradley Steinbacher: “The idea of the driven and privileged turning to anonymous encounters for sexual fulfillment is interesting, but outside of some overwrought sex scenes, Deception clearly has other, far more standard, issues in mind—namely blackmail, kidnapping, and corporate theft. And it’s here, unfortunately, that the film slowly starts to fray”).

In web-only content this week:

Lindy West reviews Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (“The smart jokes are too stupid and the gross jokes are too gross and the diarrhea is too loud and the forced blowjobs at Gitmo are just lazy”). And Megan Seling gives a qualified thumbs up to Baby Mama.

Hidden away in Film Shorts this week are reviews of Planet B-Boy at the Varsity, Breathless and Divorce—Italian Style at Northwest Film Forum, and yet more screenings of Senator Obama Goes to Africa at Capitol Hill Arts Center. Also of note: the Seattle Polish Film Festival (including two programs of work [shorts tonight, The Story of the Fox tomorrow] by the early 20th-century animator Władysław Starewicz) at SIFF Cinema, Greg Araki’s The Living End at SIFF Cinema, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane and The Nanny at Grand Illusion, and much more. See our Movie Times page for all your movie-going needs.

And for dessert, Lindy West on local horror.