Oh, crap.

You may have heard that there is a new movie about Darwin in the works, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. We have a synopsis now, and it isn’t good news.

The Darwin we meet in CREATION is a young, vibrant father, husband and friend whose mental and physical health gradually buckles under the weight of guilt and grief for a lost child. Ultimately it is the ghost of Annie, his adored 10 year-old daughter who leads him out of darkness and helps him reconnect with his wife and family. Only then is he able to create the book that changed the world.

They’ve got to be kidding. I’m assuming it is only a metaphorical ghost, not a real one, but given the dreadful melodramatic botch of a story there, I can’t even be sure of that.

Another movie I’m not going to see

I thought Expelled was an awful concept, but now there’s another movie that’s come out that is even worse: The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t plan to, since I was horrified by the trailers … and now Gary Farber has collected the key points of many reviews. There ought to be a law that no remakes can be released that are worse than the originals, just to discourage this kind of abomination.

The original movie was a wonderful SF classic. I’ve got it on DVD here, and I think just to spite the hacks who ripped it off, I’m going to watch Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal sometime this weekend. It has some great lines in it: “It isn’t faith that makes good science, Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity” and “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason”, and of course, “klaatu barada nikto”. And the theremin! I’d watch it right now if I didn’t have a lot of work to do tomorrow…

I’m pretty sure this is satire

I’m not a fan of Toby Keith at all, but I’ll make an exception for this one time.