Hilary Swank and Jimmy Kimmel discussing "Miracle Debunkers"

[Juustin]

I happened to catch Hilary Swank on Jimmy Kimmel last night. She was talking about her new movie, The Reaping, in which she plays a "myth debunker" who debunks ideas of the supernatural.

Kimmel asked "These people really exist?" and she went on about how they do, and they have a magazine called Skeptical Inquierer, etc. They basically made it sound like a bunch of cranky old men who have nothing better to do that travel around the world trying to disprove miracles.

Anyone else catch it?

[Walk The Line]

I didn't catch it last night, but I did see the preview for this movie in theaters. This prompted me to wonder how God applies the death of the firstborn to adopted children.

Does the adopted child get killed because he/she is the first child of the adopted family? Does the adopted child get killed because they are the first child of the biological parent?

Is the adopted child exempt because they are the second child of the adopted family and firstborn of the biological parent? Or is the adopted child exempt because they are the second child of the biological parent?

Just how does it work?

[Skeptic Guy]

I didn't see it and it doesn't seem to have hit You Tube, yet. I'm sure that her debunking in the movie is shown to be without merit. Somehow, I doubt they would create a movie called "The Reaping" and make it anything but supernatural. It's a shame that they made skeptics out as cranks.

[Juustin]

Yeah. I thought I had heard Kimmel was an Atheist before, but that might've been misinformation (I'm pretty sure Adam Carolla is, maybe someone confused them in the Man Show era).

His main question became "Who funds this stuff?" (meaning the debunking), and one of them eventually came up with the answer of "whoever is releasing their book".

[RSLancastr]

The commercial for the movie has the "debunker" (Swank) at one point saying tearfully "I'm sorry - I was so wrong!!" (or words to that effect).

:rolleyes:

[ObscureReferenceMan]

When I first heard about this movie, I thought the person writing about it said that it was based on Joe Nickell. I wish I could find the reference...

[Cleon]

When I first heard about this movie, I thought the person writing about it said that it was based on Joe Nickell. I wish I could find the reference...

Then they really screwed the pooch.

Joe's a great guy, very intelligent, and really fun to talk to.

But he looks nothing like Hilary Swank.

[Skeptic Guy]

You can say that again!

[Upchurch]

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reaping)

Since her family was tragically killed, Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) has battled against religious faith, including her own. The former Christian missionary has become a university professor and a world-renowned expert at refuting religious phenomena. When Doug (David Morrissey) approaches her to investigate events at a small Louisiana town that appears to have been struck by the ten Biblical plagues, she accepts the challenge. With everyone in the town pointing to a little girl named Loren (AnnaSophia Robb) as the source of the dark forces that threaten the community, Katherine’s investigation turns even more bizarre. As she begins to have difficulty explaining the occurrences with scientific evidence, she realizes that she may have to look deeper within herself and reclaim her faith if she is ever to understand the omens that surround her.


Just another example of the secular media trying to keep the Christian man down. :rolleyes:

[Skeptic Guy]

This bit has me scratching my head.

As she begins to have difficulty explaining the occurrences with scientific evidence, she realizes that she may have to look deeper within herself and reclaim her faith if she is ever to understand the omens that surround her.


"...difficulty explaining the occurrences with scientific evidence..."? Perhaps they meant "with the scientific method"? And of course only by falling back to her faith is she able to gain understanding.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

I hope Roger Ebert gets back to work in time to review this movie because he'd have some choice words for it.

I'm still grateful for his midly amused, mocking review of The Omen and The DaVinci Code:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060605/REVIEWS/60524002/1023

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060518/REVIEWS/60419009/1023

[sk3ptical]

Not getting good reviews. Liked this quote:

"Just in time for Passover, Easter, and/or any other equinoctial festival on your liturgical calendar comes THE REAPING, an abomination of a film to put the fear of God in us all with its sheer awfulness"

[ObscureReferenceMan]

Here's a reference...
http://centerforinquiry.net/newsrooms/media-06.pdf

[seayakin]

I didn't catch it last night, but I did see the preview for this movie in theaters. This prompted me to wonder how God applies the death of the firstborn to adopted children.

Does the adopted child get killed because he/she is the first child of the adopted family? Does the adopted child get killed because they are the first child of the biological parent?

Is the adopted child exempt because they are the second child of the adopted family and firstborn of the biological parent? Or is the adopted child exempt because they are the second child of the biological parent?

Just how does it work?

This fascinated me since first taught about the plagues brought on Egypt. Do they think that there is a bureaucrat in heaven writing policies and procedures for this.(I see a Monty Python skit.) What about orphans? First born orphans of biological parents are killed. Would God see this as a mercy killing for being an orphan?

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

As the only person here to have completed Sunday school, I'll take it upon myself to answer this seeing as how I'm the resident expert :D . Well, God knows all you atheists have spent more time studying religion than most of those who practise it, so not resident expert but inside expert.

It's the first born biological child. Adoptions are irrelevant. This includes orphans as it's the sons of Egypt that were being punished for Egypt's sins.

[fuelair]

Sounds pathetic to me - and I thought Kimmel had some brains, while Swank truns out to be just another bubblehead. A real shame.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

I wish an acupuncturist on Hilary Swank and a palm reader on Jimmy Kimmel. Serves them right.

[headscratcher4]

Remember when ScoobyDo made debunking fakers cool...at least for the 8 year old set?

[Walk The Line]

Remember when ScoobyDo made debunking fakers cool...at least for the 8 year old set?

Or even Johnny Carson. He had Randi on a number of times to deflate scammers and tricksters.

Nowadays no one on the late night circuit is going to be that bold for fear of losing viewers.

[headscratcher4]

It has amazed me that CSI -- which generall promotes a scientific aproach (with the exception of a couple of diversions into the woo) is so popular...but that the idea of debunking what are essentially leaches on society (like Sylvia B. and John Edwards) is considered too boring or potentially an audience killer. I mean instead of Medium, why not a show about a Randi type who fights back criminals and crazies?

[Skeptic Guy]

Remember when ScoobyDo made debunking fakers cool...at least for the 8 year old set?

That was the old Scooby Do. The "spook" or "ghost" was always a faker. Now days the Scooby Do movies actually involve the supernatural.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

What about Court Tv?! As channel about law enforcement catching criminals showcases psychic detectives?! That's a slap in the face of all law enforcement agencies and personnel worldwide.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

The commercial for the movie has the "debunker" (Swank) at one point saying tearfully "I'm sorry - I was so wrong!!" (or words to that effect).

:rolleyes:

Will that be you when Sylvia turns out to be a real psychic? :)

[headscratcher4]

I know...it wrecked the whole thing.

[Dark Jaguar]

Remember when ScoobyDo made debunking fakers cool...at least for the 8 year old set?

Yeah, and a sign of the times is when they decided to make the monsters REAL.

[zombiebex]

The review (http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/117577266758500.xml&coll=2) for this film in today's paper amused me.

First the river turned to blood. Then frogs fell from the sky. Then came the flies, and the cattle disease and the boils.

Standing in the midst of a natural disaster of literally biblical proportions, even a devout atheist like Katherine Winter is finding it hard not to pray.

Sitting in the theater watching "The Reaping," you may find yourself praying, too -- for a plague of darkness to strike the projection booth.

Written by a trio of Hollywood hacks, the movie starts with the sort of premise that seems born of a slick team's pitch meeting: Two people, one a believer and the other a skeptic, investigate and try to debunk modern religious phenomena.
It sounds like it might make a halfway good television show. It already made a mediocre one, "Mysterious Ways," which lasted for two seasons at the start of the decade and was written by two of the credited screenwriters here. As a movie, though, it doesn't have a prayer.

It does have Hilary Swank as its heroine, playing a former minister who's now some sort of godless college professor specializing in spiritual fraud.

Swank is as earnest and decent as ever, and even though she has one long, terribly written speech explaining away the original 10 plagues (according to her, red algae had a lot to do with it), she does a solid job.

Less solid, though, is David Morrissey, a Liverpudlian trying hard - and in vain - to convince us he's a proud product of the Louisiana bayou. And wasted is AnnaSophia Robb, the young actress who was so good in "Bridge to Terabithia," but here simply keeps showing up silently, pointing a slender finger and then disappearing into a morass of editing tricks.

The plot has Swank and her more-religious partner, Idris Elba, called down South to investigate Morrissey's small town, where the river has turned crimson and insects keep showing up in the most inconvenient places. Could the plagues of Exodus have returned? Or is there a scientific explanation?

Unfortunately the movie has already painted itself into a corner, or, perhaps, a pentagram.

Because, as no Hollywood movie would ever end with an atheist being proved right, we know that this film is going to conclude with Swank rediscovering her faith. And because that rules out a scientific explanation, and the random cruelty of the curses seem to preclude a divine cause, clearly something else is at work here. Something evil.

Could it be - Satan?

Yes, Church Lady, it could, but it takes a lot of stage blood to get there, not to mention several awkwardly spliced-in scenes of Stephen Rea in a Roman collar and on the phone, hastily filling in Swank on the history of some mysterious cult. (I didn't catch his name but I think he's Father Exposition.) And then, finally, it's time to cue the computer-generated lightning and bring out the chanting and the sacrificial daggers.

[sackett]

Hey, give Hillary a break. She has a turkey to sell.

[Overman]

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Katherine Winter, played by Hilary Swank in her dutiful-yuppie-good-listener mode, is a former minister, and now a professor, who travels the world defusing the lustrous credibility of miracles. Swank must know the feeling: She has won two Academy Awards, and she's still doing movies like "The Reaping."

Katherine is summoned to the sleepy Bible Belt backwater of Haven, Louisiana, and the first thing she confronts is a river of blood -- a pretty cool image, to be sure, though Katherine is certain there's a rational explanation for it.

To her, science can explain everything, and she hews to that belief (which is really a lack of Belief, you see), at one point delineating how the 10 biblical plagues were all natural phenomena. This woman could witness the parting of the Red Sea and think, without hesitation, that it should be reported to the Weather Channel.

In "The Reaping," every one of those biblical plagues appears, but they can't be accounted for by science, only by studio executives who theorize that an apocalyptic "religious" horror movie is the perfect way to tap into the evangelical market. (It sure beats the PG-rated piffle released by FoxFaith films.)

Having seen the error of her ways (science = bad!), our heroine finds the reverence to battle frogs, dead cows, locusts, and -- just to hedge the movie's bets -- a spooky blond girl who could be Satan's messenger. But no belief on earth can rescue Swank from a film that's a chain of disaster chintz masquerading as a sermon.

EW Grade: D+

[RSLancastr]

Will that be you when Sylvia turns out to be a real psychic? :)Yeah, that's exactly when that will be me.

[Skeptic Guy]

I received an email from the CFI where Joe Nickell wrote about the movie and had a sympathetic take on Ms. Swank. I think she may be playing it different now to sell the movie.

ETA: Here's the link, if you are interested.

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/reaping.html

[Jon.]

And because that rules out a scientific explanation, and the random cruelty of the curses seem to preclude a divine cause, clearly something else is at work here. Something evil.

Could it be - Satan?

Well, I guess you could count that as a plot twist. After all, God was behind the original plagues.:rolleyes:

[ChristineR]

In real life, there isn't a scientific explanation. In real life, the plagues never actually happened.

Someday somebody will do one of these movies where the good looking female scientist gets to the town and says: "Your nutcase teenager is obviously messing with you. You can buy better tricks for $13.00 at the local magic store."

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

Y'all are making way to big of a deal out of this movie. The only question I have about a movie, as a diehard film fan, is "is it good or bad?".

This is a Hollywood entertainment from the same supernatural thriller genre as The Omen and The Exorcist and you should treat it as such. Hopefully, it'll be entertaining and done well enough to be as good as, say, The Exorcism of Emily Rose or The DaVinci Code and not a disposable clunker like Premonition or The Omen.

And this movie seems to use skepticism and the plagues as a movie premise and doesn't intend to be a real life reflection of them, any more than Casablanca was about WW2.

[Cello Man]

"The Next Karate Kid is no longer the embarrassing thing on Hilary Swank's (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005476/) resume."

Ouch. That's the first line from this review. The article even references Randi by name, and it's quite obvious which side of the fence this writer is on.

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/04/05/review-the-reaping-ryans-review/

[ChristineR]

Rotten Tomatoes has currently got The Reaping at 6%. To put this into perspective, they have tracked more or less all movies released since 1999, and this would be among the worst 50.

They do track older movies under some circumstances. For example, The Seven Samurai has reviews because they keep releasing new DVD boxes. :D

[Tamazon]

It has amazed me that CSI -- which generall promotes a scientific aproach (with the exception of a couple of diversions into the woo) is so popular...but that the idea of debunking what are essentially leaches on society (like Sylvia B. and John Edwards) is considered too boring or potentially an audience killer. I mean instead of Medium, why not a show about a Randi type who fights back criminals and crazies?

Actually, there was one good episode of CSI where Grissom is obviously skeptic of the psychic in the show and debunks her pretty good.

[SRW]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAgYGeuZO0

Its on youtube, part 2 is where she tells everyone what an idiot she is. Nice legs though.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

the NYTimes has a negative review:

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/movies/05reap.html?ref=movies

[strathmeyer]

The Post calls it a 'redneck apocolypse thriller'.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04052007/entertainment/movies/foul_plague_movies_kyle_smith.htm

[LostAngeles]

Anyone else getting annoyed at the way Swank's character is being described as, "Science-crazed," and the like?

[Sir Robin Goodfellow]

What's up with talented actors like Swank taking on movies like this that end up bombing? She's won awards for her work, and now she's in something that gets reviews like these? Does she need money? It reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson in that atrocity of a movie about super-intelligent sharks. These people need better advisors.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

I think it's the post-Oscar slump thing. Halle Berry wins an Oscar, she never makes a good movie again, starting with Catwoman. Reese Witherspoon gets an Oscar, she does nothing noteworthy for a year, except lose her husband, that is. Swank gets two Oscars, she makes this.

[LostAngeles]

It's the Standard Morgan Freeman Clause in contracts with the devil. For every "Shawshank Redemption" Morgan Freeman makes, he does crap like, "Hard Rain."

[qayak]

Well, I guess you could count that as a plot twist. After all, God was behind the original plagues.:rolleyes:

He is behind these ones too. He uses the plagues to protect the girl accused by the town's people of causing all the trouble. It turns out the town is really a cult.

My daughter went and saw it.

[Senex]

http://amysrobot.com/files/swankback.JPG

I saw Hilary on the Kimmel show. I don't remember her saying anything about debunkers (or anything else either :rolleyes: )

[pspaddict]

I saw Hilary on the Kimmel show. I don't remember her saying anything about debunkers (or anything else either :rolleyes: )

Maybe you missed this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRcmaUYuRkI&mode=related&search=

[The Painter]

You guys are too much. It’s a freaking movie. It’s not real. You know like Harry Potter or Star Trek. It doesn’t claim to be a documentary. It’s for entertainment purposes only. Get a life.

[Senex]

Maybe you missed this part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRcmaUYuRkI&mode=related&search=
I don't think I missed that part because it sure did look familiar :)

Hilary didn't say anything to discredit debunkers. Kimmel said they were the party poopers who explain the face of Jesus on the grilled cheese sandwich is just a burn mark. She agreed they might be described as party poopers but said they debunk using scientific facts and would never except "a miracle" as the answer. She explained what a skeptic is perfectly. When Kimmel said Jesus on the bread was a burn mark he seemed to assume the opinion of a skeptic. Being a grilled cheese Jesus image party pooper is not something anyone should feel offended being called.

She remains attractive in spirit as well as attractive in a short (or backless) dress in my book.

The Painter:
You guys are too much. It’s a freaking movie. It’s not real. You know like Harry Potter or Star Trek. It doesn’t claim to be a documentary. It’s for entertainment purposes only. Get a life.

You miss the point. The discussion is about Hilary Swank being respectful of people who have a skeptical nature -- nothing to do with the movie. For you to post this message on a skeptic site makes me wonder who needs to get a life the most.

[blutoski]

That was the old Scooby Do. The "spook" or "ghost" was always a faker. Now days the Scooby Do movies actually involve the supernatural.

Even the old Scooby Doo fell off the wagon quickly. The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo (1971) with Vincent Price was about catching thirteen actual ghosts.

[Rrose Selavy]

Now if only every spokesperson for skepticism could have those legs. :eye-poppi Er..what did she say.....

[Achán hiNidráne]

The AV Club section of The Onion brought up the skepticism angle in their review of "The Reaping:"
(http://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/the_reaping)

The Reaping casts Swank as a former woman of the cloth who lost her way after her family was killed in Africa. Swank subsequently devoted herself to disproving apparent miracles through the sinister use of science and reason. (Boo! Hiss!) When a sleepy small town begins experiencing plagues straight out of the Old Testament, Swank and platonic buddy/sidekick Elba investigate, only to learn that there are things science can't explain. Science and rationality endure an old-fashioned ass-whupping in The Reaping, a film that cynically exploits the large, receptive audience both for horror movies and for films with explicit Christian themes. But before Swank can learn the error of her God-disbelieving, book-learning, tree-hugging ways, she first has to unpack enough exposition for several mythology-heavy trilogies. It's hard to say which is funnier: the sheer volume of the film's exposition, or the jaw-droppingly artless way it's handled. The Reaping finally finishes teasing out its endless backstory just in time to lurch from one preposterous twist ending to another, in a loopy climax that echoes such recent howlers as The Omen and The Wicker Man. The Reaping is Bible camp, pure and simple. And for bad-movie lovers, it's manna from heaven.


They gave it a C+. I know I'm not going to spend good money watching it.

[Achán hiNidráne]

It reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson in that atrocity of a movie about super-intelligent sharks. These people need better advisors.

Or Snakes On A Plane.... or the Star Wars Prequels.

[I less than three logic]

You guys are too much. It’s a freaking movie. It’s not real. You know like Harry Potter or Star Trek. It doesn’t claim to be a documentary. It’s for entertainment purposes only. Get a life.
Perhaps it is not the notion that the movie is real that people are talking about. Maybe it is more about the sociology, or perhaps more accurately the socioeconomics, behind what is generally considered acceptable as "entertainment purposes only" work that draws discussion. Movies such as The Reaping in which the plot hinges on the supernatural, but where the skeptic is not shown to be completely wrong by the end are somewhat rare. This is real, even if the events of the movie are not, and some may even think that the topic of why this may be so is worth talking about... perhaps even some who do have a life.