Another movie tie-in to current events

As the black humor of Adam's Apples reflected the unruly weirdness of the Biblical basis of support for the marriage amendment, so did the plot line of the 2011 movie Margin Call reflect (or at least bring strongly to mind) the plot of the recently reported failure of JPMorgan Chase.

Margin Call (2011: J.C. Chandor) [Follows the key people at an investment bank, over a 24-hour period, during the early stages of the financial crisis] [E] 5-2?-2012

    New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott wrote on October 20, 2011 ("Number Crunching at the Apocalypse") that

There have been reports of hurt feelings among the bankers and brokers who have been the focus of public ire and Occupy Wall Street protests. And it is true that those poor, hard-working souls have been demonized and caricatured. Surely the much-reviled 1 percent does not consist of plutocrats in top hats or predators in blue suits, but of human beings just like the other 99 percent of us, albeit with more money and perhaps more to answer for.
    That, in a way, is the message of J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call, which does a great deal to humanize the authors—and beneficiaries—of the 2008 financial crisis. But the film, relentless in its honesty and shrewd in its insights and techniques, is unlikely to soothe the wounded pride of the actual or aspiring ruling class. It is a tale of greed, vanity, myopia, and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize.

    To what extent greed, vanity, myopia, and expediency played roles in the recent failure, I'm not able to say, not being much of an observer of such matters. I'm just saying.
    And recommending Margin Call as an excellent film deserving of your serious attention and cinematic enjoyment. It's blackly comic, too, in a way.

Charles Darwin film "too controversial for religious America"?

I read the news today, oh boy, about a British film that failed to make the grade. It's about Charles Darwin and hasn't found a distributor in the United States supposedly because his theory of evolution is "too controversial for American audiences." So says its producer, Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of "Creation," according to Telegraph.co.uk:

US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.
    Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder." His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering," the site stated.
    The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as "a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying."

This news is rather sad. Mr. Thomas is further quoted as saying:

The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
    It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we [sic] in the UK to imagine religion in America [and quite difficult for some of us who live here]. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
    Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn't saying "kill all religion," he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.

A day in the life of America? One hopes that Mr. Thomas is merely exploiting America's embarrassing tendency to blow its mind out in a Sunday School bus to try to gin up some publicity for the film when it does get released in the United States.

"Creation" stars Paul Bettany, the fine actor we all enjoyed as the imaginary Princeton roommate of John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) in Ron Howard's 2001 four-Oscar-winning film, "A Beautiful Mind." "Creation" was directed by Jon Amiel and also stars Bettany's wife, Jennifer Connelly. They met in "A Beautiful Mind," for which Ms. Connelly portrayed John Nash's wife (and won an Oscar for it).