Natures: Is this a great country or what? No screens for Darwin

Monday, September 14, 2009

Is this a great country or what? No screens for Darwin

Wow. The Telegraph (UK) reports that the film Creation has so far been unable to find a US distributor. Because it focuses on the life of Charles Darwin during the years in which he developed the theory of evolution, the movie has been attacked on Xtianist web sites.

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.
....

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

The movie stars Paul Bettany as Darwin; Jennifer Connelly as his wife Emma, who was deeply religious; and 10-year old newcomer Martha West as their daughter Annie, whose death in 1851 precipitated for Darwin a fundamental crisis of belief.

But don't look for it on a screen in the US anytime soon.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that this nation is supposed to be one of the world's "advanced" countries, isn't it?

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Paul Bettany plays Charles Darwin in Creation - Photo: ALLSTAR

Labels: Creation, Darwin, movies

Praise for NatureS

"Way back when, a literary gent by the name of E.L. Pound, from Hailey, Idaho, announced to the world: 'I divide poetry into what I can read and what I cannot read.' I am new to Jeff Davis's work but hit'll read!!! It reminds me that writers named Robert Creeley and Charles Olson once taught at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County NC - and made a difference."

~Jonathan Williams

"These poems are succinct in language and insights - no waste of words here - lovely and moving jewels of the Eleusinian luminous darkness, a magnificent shining in the dark. Poems (all of them) that are gifts, with a sassy bit of awareness to ground them all. At their best, they show an excellent eye and ear for the images and rhythms of nature - fresh, clear, as any sparkling mountain stream - and sing with that limpidity Olson was always trying to drum into my head at Black Mountain. Jeff Davis is a poet who knows what most males thirst to know - and die, not knowing. 'I am written,' Rimbaud said, and he is just that in these poems."

~Michael Rumaker

"Being human and part of nature, what we have in common with the natural world is something we gain then lose, gain then lose, over and over. The continual process of holding and letting go makes up the world we smell, we taste, we see, we feel, we hear, we share. As the custodian of this experience we have none better than Jeff Davis. He has been tireless in his practice of recording these dark and luminous encounters: the flicker of love, or the shadow of leaves in the wind."

~Thomas Meyer