Category: Doc of the Day (Page 5 of 5)

The first time I heard about “Flock of Dodos,” I immediately thought of the ongoing battle on “Friends” between Ross and Phoebe about evolution.

Ross: You don’t believe in evolution?
Phoebe: I don’t know, it’s just…you know, monkeys, Darwin…you know, it’s a…it’s a nice story. I just think it’s a little too easy.
Ross: Too easy? Too….the process of every living thing on this planet evolving over millions of years from single-celled organisms is… is too easy?
Phoebe: Yeah, I just don’t buy it.
Ross: Uh, excuse me, evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact, like…like…like the air we breathe. Like gravity.
Phoebe: Oh, okay, don’t get me started on gravity…

Thankfully, the participants in the debates between the two predominant viewpoints within “Flock of Dodos” – Evolutionists vs. Intelligent Designers – tend to be a little bit more open-minded. (There is, however, one tale of a Creationist telling a woman that, because she’s an Episcopalian, she’s going to burn in Hell…but, then, as an Episcopalian myself, I expect she’s used to hearing that by now. We get that all the time.)

Randy Olson is a filmmaker. He’s also an evolutionary biologist, although he hasn’t actively worked in the field for a few years. When his mom began writing him from his home state of Kansas, keeping him informed about various school board battles involving evolution and intelligent design, it spurred Olson to make a film which posed a few questions, first and foremost being, “If we’re so unabashedly certain that evolution is a fact, then why is it still called a theory?” Next up: “What’s the deal on this whole ‘intelligent design’ thing, and is it really as viable as its proponents would have us believe?”

Olsen delivers an interesting, entertaining look at the battle between science and religion, interrupting the intelligent discourse on occasion with animation and caricatures to lighten the mood. Sometimes, however, valuable information can be delivered in a humorous manner, such as when the question is posed that if there’s truly an intelligent designer to the creatures on this planet, then why do rabbits have to eat something, poop it, and then eat it again for it to be properly digested? (True story…and they even show it!) It’s almost a running joke about how the intelligent design folk like to utilize Mt. Rushmore as an example of something that you’d look at and say, “Well, obviously, this thing was designed by someone,” only to follow by suggesting that the same could be said of any mountain, since you can’t disprove the concept. Fair enough…I guess.

As someone who lives in the same area as Pat Robertson, Regent University, and “The 700 Club,” you’d think I’d feel the hot breath of the creationists breathing down my neck even as I’m writing this very review, but, in fact, filmmaker / evolutionary biologist Randy Olson isn’t sporting devil horns during the course of his documentary…or, in other words, he’s not the Michael Moore of his subgenre. He’s a nice guy with a good sense of humor who doesn’t have an in-your-face attitude about his beliefs, and for the most part, the Intelligent Design folk that he’s chatting with come across a nice people, too. (The exception to that rule tends to come up whenever The Discovery Institute enters the picture.) He tries not to browbeat the people he’s talking with, and for their part, they generally try to hold polite conversations with him, even though they don’t agree with each other. In the end, Olsen politely suggests that the Intelligent Designers suffer from a tendency to examine their premise with their heart without factoring science into the equation…and while I’m of the mind that people are welcome to their own beliefs, I have to say that I’m in Olson’s camp.

But, then, as an Episcopalian, I’m apparently already going to Hell, anyway, so it’s not like I’m really going out on a limb.

P.S. There’s a lot more discussion on the topic amongst the special features of the DVD. Count on this becoming a staple of college biology classes in future years.

Surely you didn’t think you were rid of me just because the Scare of the Day feature had wrapped up. Wait ’til you get a load of November’s feature: Doc of the Day. It’s not like horror flicks are the only kind of DVDs that pile up around here, you know; we’ve also got a ton of documentaries sitting around, too, and since we managed to clear quite a lot of space last month, we might as well keep the ball rolling.

I figured I’d start with the easiest one in the pile, and what makes it the easiest is that it’s the only one I’ve actually seen before: “Heavy Petting,” which was originally released back in 1989. I remember seeing the trailer for it at the beginning of some VHS tape or other, and the concept immediately struck my fancy: get a bunch of hipster icons, sit them in front of a camera, have them reminisce about their introduction to the concept of sexuality, then get them to discuss their early experiences with dating, romance, and gettin’ it onnnnnnnnnnnnnn…

Okay, maybe it sounds a little creepy when I describe it that way, but the mood is lightened considerably by the interspersing of clips from ’50s instructional films about the aforementioned topics, which range from naively quaint to laughably ridiculous, and the whole thing is set to a soundtrack of ’50s rock n’ roll, including “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Rockin’ Robin,” and “Ready Teddy,” among others. It’s not strictly instructional films, though; also incorporated into the mix is footage from the films of Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and other icons of the ’50s. Plus, the roll call of contributors is decidedly impressive. David Byrne, Sandra Bernhard, Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray, Ann Magnuson, and Laurie Anderson all pop up, as do more unlikely contributors such as Josh Mostel and John Oates, but the most entertaining appearances come from the side-by-side duo of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who come off like the alt-lit version of Matthau and Lemmon.

It’s a bit unnerving to hear Byrne discuss how he used to think that masturbating too much could lead to an inability to get it up when with an actual girl, or to have Gray suggest a connection between the comforting touch of animal fur on one’s member and the huge sales figures for Davy Crockett coonskin caps in the 1950s, but the reality is this: at least one of the stories in “Heavy Petting” – probably more than one, truth be told – will make you blush not because you’re embarrassed at the frankness of it but, rather, because you went through the exact same thing yourself. It probably won’t happen during Hoffman’s reminiscences of the night he and some pals attempted to perform a circle jerk until they’d filled a milk bottle, but trust me, it’ll happen eventually.

If it happens during this clip, though, I don’t need to know about it:

The biggest complaint about the film is that the various talking heads are only identified at the very beginning of the film, in a “appearing, in order” list of credits, and at the very end, in an admittedly cute segment which offers up photos of each of them in their younger days. This means, though, that if you don’t recognize who’s talking, you’ll either have to wait ’til the end to figure out who they were, or you’ll have to count backwards through that list of credits from the beginning…and unless you’ve got a photographic memory, you’re gonna need a score card to pull that off successfully. (“Let’s see, the last person was Laurie Anderson, and this person here is Frances Farmer, and we’ve already seen Ann Magnuson, so…that means that the woman we saw three people ago must’ve been Zoe Tamerlis!”)

Disc 1 includes an interview with director Obie Benz and extended cuts of the sexual confessions of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gray, Hoffman, et al, but it’s the bonus second disc that’ll really impress the cool kids, as it offers up ten original sex ed, anti-pornography and VD scare films from the 1930s through the 1950s. This is classic stuff that’s laugh out loud hilarious, which makes it perfect to have running on the DVD player during your next party…particularly this one:

(And if you really must watch Pt. 2, it’s right here.)