Fourth Row Center

Ben Stein (speech writer for both Nixon and Ford, comedian, game show host, and actor) continues to intrigue me. Like many of you, my first introduction to him was as the droning economics teacher from Ferris Beuller's Day Off ("anyone? anyone?") . Years later, he hosts a game show called Win Ben Stein's Money , a series of Visine commercials and an internet letter. And that leads us to his documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. If it was not for this appearing on Netflix's Watch Now section, I most likely would not have watched the film, but why not? I added the title to my Watch Now queue and went upstairs to have it streamed to my TV via the ROKU Box. One other thing you have to know is that Stein rejects Darwinism and embraces Intelligent Design. The premise of the movie is that Academia has created a wall that is dividing science and rejecting new ideas. In this case, Academia is rejecting Intelligent Design as a new attempt by Christian's to h...

This year I have seen two post-apocalyptic movies about Earthlings returning to terra firma after some cataclysm, Disney’s WALL-E and the yet-unreleased Terra . City of Ember is the third, and this time humans are tucked away in an underground city for two hundred years, with instructions on how to leave the city passed down generation to generation through the office of the mayor. Except something goes wrong, and the instructions are misplaced for nearly half a century. When the power source for the city begins to wind down, two clever teens must figure out the secret of getting out of Ember and back to the surface before their world is plunged into darkness. City of Ember is not without its faults. The performances are merely adequate, and Bill Murray, as the mayor, never seems to inhabit the character. It’s Murray up there reading lines, and it’s a distraction. I could go on about the gloomy set design or the holes in the script, but I won’t. City of Ember is an intriguing famil...