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Box Office Mojo’s weekend numbers are registering Ben Stein’s creationist documentary Expelled above George Clooney’s screwball comedy Leatherheads (3.1 million vs. 3.0 million), despite Expelled showing on 37 percent as many screens. Granted, it’s Expelled’s opening week versus Leatherhead’s third, but it still seems like an eye-popper. It looks Stein is headed for territory previously inhabited only by Mr. Michael Moore, though there’s some skepticism about how big of a success it should be measured. (hat tip: Chris Mooney)

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UPDATE: The peanut gallery over at Mooney’s blog posed the question about whether the geographic distribution of Expelled showings might offer something of interest.

I didn’t have the time to do anything too sophisticated (no geocoding to lat/long or ZIP code level analysis), but I did have time to pull the latest listings from Expelled’s theater locator and run the following charts over at Many Eyes. (FWIW, I only found 1050 theaters in the Expelled search, but Box Office Mojo says it showed on 1052).

This first one is a map that totals up the number of showings by state.

And then a scatterplot that rates the number of showings in each state against its population. They’re 2006 resident population numbers I pulled from Census.

You can see where the line would probably show up if you ran the numbers on the scatter. What I immediately look for are any states well above or below the pack. It looks like New York has a pretty low number of showings per capita, as do a number of other “blue” states, but so does Pennsylvania, home to the recent Dover controversy over Intelligent Design. On the other end, it looks like North Carolina and Georgia were pretty highly saturated, relatively.

See anything?

Last weekend I finally got around to seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a really good 70s movie starring Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro. I had a light bulb go on in the first couple scenes when I realized that one of my favorite one-hit wonders from the 2000s took their name from DeNiro’s character, the self-destructive Johnny Boy. I’m sure everybody else had this figured out by now, but it seems like a good enough excuse to put two great YouTubes together.

from Mean Streets, “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes.

“You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve” by Johnny Boy.

Knowing this now, it’s clear JB aren’t shy about any inspiration from the Ronettes.

One of the more enduring lines from John Ford’s Westerns is a maxim offered by Carleton Young in the “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Young plays Maxwell Scott, an aging newspaper editor confronted with facts that contradict one his community’s most cherished beliefs. Rather than print the ugly truth, he elects to destroy the evidence. His justification:

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I thought of Young’s line today while trolling the web for old video and news about Tony Wilson, the infamously impish founder of Factory Records who died this past week.

Over on YouTube, I found a snippet from a television retrospective of his career. It focuses on his success promoting pathbreaking pop groups like The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFndQ379ICw[/youtube]

While there are some fun moments with the man himself, I was struck by how heavily the producers relied upon clips from “24 Hour Party People,” the excellent biopic about Wilson starring Steve Coogan.

Nevermind that the movie was a work of fiction. Or that Coogan’s version of Wilson is an unreliable narrator with a nearly pathological commitment to self-mythologizing. When a moment calls for video to illustrate qualities of Wilson’s personality or events from his life, the producers jump for the legend more frequently than the fact.

And, as much as this tweaks my inner journalism professor, I think I can understand where the TV producers were coming from. I’ll try to offer it here as a 2007 update to Ford’s maxim.

This is TV, stupid. When the tape is hot, run the tape.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tca2JkjsZHU[/youtube]

Good news. E Street Cinema has decided to hold over their run of the restoration of Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s beautiful 1977 film about the Los Angeles slum Watts.

Part French New Wave, part verite documentary, it’s a long way from your normal movie. It’s a bleak and slow-paced. The budget was next to nothing. There isn’t much of a plot. The main subject is poverty. Many of the actors were amateurs.

But at several moments its dream-like passages capture feelings of longing, tragedy and frustration with a power I’ve rarely seen in an American film.

They don’t come in the emotional showdowns or tissy-fit histrionics required to draw attention in Hollywood today. Instead, this is a movie that sneaks up on you, its moments of clarity and beauty leaping up out of the gravel to catch your eye.

In its own silent way, the scene where our protagonists, a husband (Henry Sanders) and his lonely wife (Kaycee Sanders), ebb to and fro with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth” is a quiet, romantic tour de force with more movement and punch than eight hours of opera.

And you’ll probably never have a chance to see it on the big screen again.

Am I nuts, or are there some deep shades of Woody Allen in Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 3?

I’m serious. Let me lay it out.

The new Spiderman movie features:

• The sunrise over Manhattan.
• Our anxious, self-conscious hero struggling to sort out his life and love from a shabby New York apartment.
• Romantic bonding during a playful, exuberant adventure in the kitchen (think: Annie Hall).
• A date set in an urban jazz club brightened by 1930s-style crooning.
• A lovers’ rendezvous on location in Central Park;
• Quick, cutting quips targeting religion (I’m not kidding. A vengeful Peter Parker actually says “Want forgiveness? Get religion.”)

Okay, of course, it isn’t a Woody Allen movie.

For one, bullet points aside, a large portion of the movie is made up of fast-paced, computer-generated violence.

But, perhaps more significantly, the moral of this movie isn’t something you can spot in Woody’s pictures. By the end of Spiderman 3, both hero and villain alike have learned a lesson: Happiness and satisfaction come from mutual bonds of sacrifice and concern between lovers and friends.

When the characters become too wrapped up in themselves, they range from self-absorbed to homicidal. When each learns to listen and forgive, they find inner peace (and outer peace, too, since they’ve stopped trying to kill each other.)

That’s hardly like any Woody Allen movie I can remember. You might disagree, but to me it seems almost the opposite. For Allen’s protagonists, resolution is found by rejecting the traditions of your fellow man and attuning yourself to an inner compass. Worry about you, then the rest will follow.

While it may work for Woody, it’s hard to imagine a superhero movie where saving the girl didn’t come first.

It’s an unsettling thing that success can so easily be made to look like corruption. You’ll find a good and pretty darn funny example in The TV Set, a smart ring-up of the vulgarities of network television I caught tonight at E Street Cinema down by Ford’s Theatre.

While hardly a new theme — artist meets suit, integrity meets compromise — I enjoyed how the conflict was brought to life by dramatizing the way coercion and criticism can be cloaked in the rhetoric of persuasion and euphemism.

When the imperious network executive (Sigourney Weaver) wants to dumb down the pet project of an earnest writer (David Duchovny), she doesn’t directly confront him with her demands. His will is slowly bent through a series of passive-aggressive maneuvers that erode his resistance and are undertaken with a smile sandwiched between empty compliments. Looming at every turn, of course, is the unspoken knowledge that one side of the table is holding all of the cards.

Unlike other recent workplace satires like The Office or Dilbert, where bureaucratic gamesmanship and corporate happy talk are depicted as the shield and song of the incompetent, The TV Set aims to show how it can also be the sword of the ambitious and the powerful. Plus it’s really funny.

Last Sunday I visited The American Film Institutes’s Silver Theatre for a screening of the 70mm restoration of Lawrence of Arabia. Believe the hype. This is one big, beautiful movie. So quit screwing around and see it while you can.

Most praise pours forth for the film’s grand, sweeping shots of the Arabian Peninsula’s vast desert, but I found myself fascinated by the less voluminous things: Omar Sharif’s impeccable posture, the ragged red streaks cracking at the edges of Peter O’Toole’s eyes, the calm swagger of the stoic camels.

It’s bizarre to say this about a movie that, with an intermission, runs about four hours in length, but, somehow, there is not enough there. It lacks exposition. The audience is only granted a brief introduction in the Cairo barracks before being cast out with their hero. Who is this man who would shake off his own heritage so readily, so recklessly? The ambivalence and moodiness that bedevils O’Toole’s Lawrence certainly enriches the film. (Many of the themes will ring bells for anyone following the modern adventure in Iraq.) But, lacking a better understanding of our traveling companion, his vacillations can be as difficult to comprehend as the desert’s shifting winds.

A visit to AFI will require you summon your courage for the harrowing passage through that vulgar caricature of civilization known as “downtown” Silver Spring, but it’s worth it to see a great old movie on a great big screen. They’ll be showing this one Sunday nights all summer.

Less history than rehabilitation, Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, a glitzy new documentary about America’s first, unsuccessful stab at a professional soccer league, is more about introducing a source of pride to America’s fledging soccer community than documenting the league’s short, unprofitable existence. By recasting the millions squandered on aging talents by media tycoon Steve Ross as the work of a committed visionary (photos of his face appear with a frequency usually reserved for dictators and religious icons) and puffing up petty indulgences and short-sighted decisions by players and managers alike as the type of European capriciousness proper to professional football, the movie aims to establish a new mythology; one that anoints the Cosmos as the lodestar of America’s gradually increasing interest in the world’s game. It’s a tenuous thesis, but the vintage footage and soul soundtrack do make for some enjoyable viewing—although a mindful viewer will wonder why Matt Dillon, our kindly narrator, needs to keep reminding the audience of what a good time it’s having.

In his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” the director Richard Linklater has made a considerable achievement simply by conjuring images otherworldly enough to suit Dick’s arrhythmic work. By recasting reality in an eerie, hallucinogenic haze, Linklater has set the stage perfectly to play out Dick’s dark vision of a not-too-distant future where drug addiction and the technology of the police state have overtaken American society.

It was all done using a technique called rotoscoping. After a scene is shot with a conventional camera, the stock is loaded onto a computer where graphic artists create animations by tracing over the footage. In the days before computers, a projection machine — named, of course, the rotoscope — projected live footage onto a screen for the animator to trace by hand. Back then its primary use came as a reference tool, an aid for animators to help simulate complex movements like Prince Charming’s dance steps in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Linklater caught a lot of attention five years ago when he put the new digital version of the technique (the software is called Rotoshop) to use in his film Waking Life. His animators did more than just another trace job, instead splashing Linklater’s shots onto their digital canvas and morphing the mundane everyday into a fluid dreamscape where our narrator’s fantasies and longings could seamlessly float alongside his very lifelike movements.

Sadly, the frontier Waking Life opened has gone largely unexplored. Maybe the stoner philosophy at its center obscured the film’s achievements, or maybe other people don’t see the form’s potential as I do, but, for whatever reason, Linklater’s use of animation’s dazzling new vocabulary failed to inspire other directors to try and say something serious; the only significant followers coming from the world of advertising, where a brokerage house and an automotive company picked up on the technique to give their products a fresh, eye-catching look.

But, for all its sheen, Linklater’s animation turns out to be just as dependent on his characters as his best conventional work (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), which, for all its visual verisimilitude, has always hinged success on the ability of his actors to connect with the audience’s empathy and compassion. As engaged and entranced as we might be by the hynopotic visual lure of Linklater’s images, they remain, tragically, centered on the image of one Keanu Reeves, a man with all the emotive range and timbre of a slightly overcooked brisket. While he certainly succeeds in emitting the abundance of one-liners Linklater’s script provides with his signature quzzical grunt, sometimes even a well-delivered “Whoa!” just isn’t enough, as the Matrix sequels and whole string of vapid romantic comedies have certainly proved.

Instead the film belongs to the supporting cast, especially Robert Downey Jr., whose heady performance as the paranoid drugdealer Barris thrills with its tempering of Hunter S. Thompson’s addled-yet-poised diction with Downey’s own cool California arrogance. It’s a shame that he and his fellow costars do not play a more central role. This is particularly the case with Rory Cochrane, who turns in a wild-eyed performance as an out-of-control addict. His early scenes, especially those in interaction with Downey, spark with a energy utterly lacking in Reeves, whose performance can be summed up by the many unimaginative and tedious reverse shots of his inert visage. The same lament should be made for Winona Ryder, who surprises by managing to express more of the confusion, despair and ambivalence meant to suffuse the screen’s every pixel in one scene than her leading man can in 100 minutes. Whoa, indeed.

I walked down near Ford’s Theater this afternoon to catch The War Tapes at E Street Cinema. The concept is simple. Along with the rifle, assault pack, body armor and other gear issued to the typical American soldier, five members of a National Guard unit from New Hampshire set for deployment to Iraq were equipped with a less conventional tool: the hand-held video camera.

The embedded journalist is one of the American military’s notable, if not altogether significant, innovations of the Iraq War. The unkempt scribe in khakis and shades, mail-order helmet askance, packing his bags and enlisting to travel with an individual unit, ceding independence in return for access. If softening coverage was, as many allege, the Pentagon’s intent, then this film should theoretically be an even greater realization of its mission. The bothersome vulture is disposed with entirely. Where the embedment program would cast the journalist as soldier, The War Tapes casts the soldier as journalist.

But the result isn’t the upbeat infomercial we’ve come to expect from the White House and the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. It’s a ground-level chronicle of the frustrations, dashed hopes and anxieties that have, unfortunately, come to characterize the occupation. Arriving for their tour well after the fall of Baghdad, our guides aren’t witness to much in the way of valor, or even combat. Instead it would seem that they spend most of their days sheparding contractors and support staff through a minefield of improvised explosives amid the palpable unease of the natives. Measuring success proves as elusive as understanding the enemy, whose appearances are limited to a few gruesome bodies strewn by the side of the road after a frenetic spasm of automatic gunfire.

Cynicism pervades the barracks, eventually afflicting even the once idealistic Michael Moriarty, a husband and father who rushed to New York after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and who, like many Americans, earnestly viewed the invasion as an unavoidable challenge imposed by the destruction of that day. He was so inspired by what he saw at Ground Zero, he says, that he was moved to leave his family behind and follow the president’s call to action. By the end of their tour, the common sentiment among the soldiers treats the war not as a benevolent, if flawed, liberation, but instead a brutish power grab in the war of all against all. Power and money is what war has always been about, Stephen Pink says after he’s returned home to Cape Cod, and his hope is that at least some regular Americans get to taste the profits from this one.

The majority of the venom we hear from the soldier’s lips isn’t directed at insurgents or Iraqis, but instead the American contractors Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton that has been outsourced billions of dollars worth of logistics work. The most frequent target is vice president and former Halliburton executive, Dick Cheney, who the soldiers routinely lampoon as a war profiteer.

And after the relief and joy of their safe homecoming fades away, the story turns grim again, as the soldiers struggle to overcome physical and psychological infirmities and grapple with the challenge of reconnecting with family and friends who are largely unable to relate to their distant experiences.

The recipient of nearly universal critical praise, having scored points for “not being preachy” and offering an “unvarnished” view of the war, it’s worth remembering that, as the Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson emphasizes in the lone dissent I could find among major critics, there’s one very important point of view that’s been left out of this and most other visual depictions of the war, the Iraqi perspective. Indeed, as Atkinson observes, although I will add the exception of a Lebanese soldier who speaks Arabic and strives to connect with the natives, the voices in the film almost exclusively “disdainfully observe the indigenous populace from a distance as if they were hyenas on the veld.”

While the American psyche may yearn to withdraw and nurse its wounds after the shock of the Iraq experience, can this country truly understand the global challenge issued on Sept. 11 or the responsibilities it accepted when it invaded Iraq simply by looking in the mirror?