Defamer: expelled

This just in! Swaggering $3 million man and ...

STV — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:30:00 PDT

This just in! Swaggering $3 million man and new Yoko Ono lawsuit target Ben Stein responds to his latest nemesis via press release: "So Yoko Ono is suing over the brief Constitutionally protected use of a song that wants us to 'Imagine no possessions'? Maybe instead of wasting everyone's time trying to silence a documentary she should give the song to the world for free? After all, 'imagine all the people sharing all the world...You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the World can live as one.'" No doubt a fitting rejoinder from a man who once provided legal counsel to Richard Nixon. Good luck, Ben! [Movie City Indie]

Yoko Ono to Compete in Special Courtroom Episode of 'Win Ben Stein's Money'

STV — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:25:00 PDT

As one might have expected following the opening-weekend success of his anti-Darwinism documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Required, everybody in town wants a piece of Ben Stein. Among them: Yoko Ono, a huuuuuge Stein fan from back in his Nixon speechwriting days who nevertheless bristled at the part of the film that featured "Imagine" without the John Lennon estate's permission:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Ono accuses the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed of suggesting to viewers that those who guard John Lennon's legacy somehow authorized or sponsored the film.

The producers of the film ... said they used only "a very small portion of the song." "Based on the fair use doctrine, news commentators and film documentarians regularly use material in the same way we do," Premise Media said in a statement. "Unbiased viewers of the film will see that the 'Imagine' clip was used as part of a social commentary in the exercise of free speech and freedom of inquiry."

Worse yet, the complaint alleges that "Internet 'bloggers' immediately began accusing Mrs. Lennon of 'selling out' by licensing the song to defendants." Having also been on the receiving end of such "bloggers"' wrath in the past, we deeply sympathize with Ono and hope her .029% share of Expelled's staggering $3 million opening gross covers the indignity of anyone thinking she would exploit her husband's legacy. To that end, we hear Stein's defense will consist of him playing the Original Broadway Cast Album of Ono's bomb Lennon in its entirety at full blast.

Yoko Ono sues in NY [AP]

Unlikely $3 Million Man Ben Stein Arrives As New Great White Hope For Conservatives

STV — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:45:00 PDT

On a Monday when Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Jason Segel's penis duked it out for biggest story at the weekend box office, another argument was taking place among indie followers who witnessed a different star performance altogether: Ben Stein, whose anti-Darwinist screed Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed finished in the week's ninth-place spot with $3.1 million. Its $2,997 per-screen average — no great shakes for most mainstream openers — is nevertheless more than double the $1,401 average of Morgan Spurlock's Where In the World is Osama Bin Laden? To hear at least one documentary observer tell it after the jump, love Stein or hate him, this is pretty big:

Previously, only March of the Penguins, the Jackass films and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko appeared on more than 1,000 screens at once. An Inconvenient Truth never played on more than 600 screens. ...
Distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures employed Motive Marketing, the same firm that targeted Christian audiences for The Passion of the Christ and the Narnia films, for outreach to the faith community. This likely blunted the force of the overwhelmingly negative critical reviews of the film, which may be the worst reviewed documentary of all time, a stat that some may write off to liberal bias, save that even the NY Post's Kyle Smith (who famously pans nearly every left-leaning doc) gives the film a mixed review[.]

Really, though, in the end we couldn't care less about critics, ideology and marketing, because it is to our perverse, rollicking pleasure that Ben Fucking Stein outdrew George Clooney over the weekend. This should usher in a new era of stardom for the conservative figure, whose next outing into the cultural wild, Expelled 2: Wetbacks Be Gone, will feature a border-trolling Stein quizzing illegal immigrants on all nature of trivia before sending losers back to the South in his patented new Mexipult™. Then watch Stein and company kill on 2,000 screens; everyone knows this kind of insanity sells itself.

'Expelled' Trounces 'Osama' [All These Wonderful Things via IFC]