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December 25, 2005
March of the Penguins
I saw the film for the first time on DVD, which allowed me to watch the extras right after the film. I'm not sure that was such a good idea. First, it bothers me that extras don't have time indicators - I had no idea the making of doc was practically as long as the movie, nor that National Geographic makes such tasteless drivel (with a bunch of interesting facts pushing you through the drivel and fast, flashy camera work).
What I find most interesting about the reviews for the film is that reviewers thought they were watching the life cycle of the entire Emperor Penguin species. When the movie ended I thought, hey I wanna know more about these creatures - how many of these mating places are there and how are they affected by global warming and how were these shots gotten. Turns out, the documentarians had to wait in camp during the coldest month b/c one got frost-bitten and the other mucked up his leg during a particularly grueling six hour mile walk back to base camp during a seriously bad storm. And there's not exact truth in the film, in a way I think ppl would find disturbing if it was a documentary about people - they didn't follow the mothers all the way back to the ocean, yet played footage of penguins as if they did.
I kept getting infuriated that Morgan Freeman never said the words dies, dead, or death. Instead, penguins mellifluously faded away. During the making of doc, Of Men and Penguins, the truth was revealed - a quarter of the babies die either in the egg or during their first year. And many more fathers die standing around for three months, not eating or drinking, but only protecting their kids from the weather.
Another really interesting thing brought up in the National Geographic doc is that there are plenty of other pods of Emperor Penguins - and some of them only live a few miles offshore. I think those pods have more success with their reproduction...unless a huge iceberg comes along (the largest in the world, the size of Ceylon, broken off of Antarctica due to global warming), and crashes into your bit of the continent, destroying the beautiful sheets of ice and leaving you with a hilly terrain that your simple claws and waddling body cannot navigate. That happened to another pod, and most simply disappeared into the depths of death, but a few were caught on tape (dead or dying in troughs of ice they'd fallen into).
I guess I'm far more fascinated with the big picture of Antarctica and its penguins than I am in the "love story" Morgan Freeman spinned. Maybe, like the BBC reviewer, I'm simply too hard-hearted. I know I would've felt differently about the movie if I'd seen it 8 months ago. Oh well. It's pretty and it made me appreciate the relative warmth of a Chicago winter.
BBC review by Paul Arendt
Rotten Tomatoes entry
Ebert's review
LA Weekly review
IMDB entry
Posted by cj at December 25, 2005 07:35 PM