Be Thankful You Aren’t a Penguin
If you were a penguin you’d spend half your time hoofing it across the Antarctic sea-ice with an empty stomach, just for the sake of making babies.
I saw March of the Penguins. I found it to be a pretty other-worldly: Antarctica barely qualifies as planet earth, near as I can tell. The movie is beautifully shot and narrated, and generally an engrossing experience, but I had a few quibbles: mainly that I didn’t really learn all that much about penguins.
March of the Penguins is more narrative than documentary. The audience is often told that “many penguins do not survive X”, where X is all sorts of things that stand between penguins and life, from predators to storms to starvation. However, we’re never told how many fail to survive X. I’ve got no idea what the odds of surviving a year of penguin-hood are. I think it would have added to the experience if they had said some things along those lines.
Also, I didn’t find the movie all that funny. Apparently I was in the minority on this. Sure, penguins are pretty comical creatures, and there are lots of scenes of them tripping over their own feet, but I only chuckled once or twice at some particularly extreme penguin tomfoolery. By contrast, most of the audience found the whole film quite funny. I guess I was just too much in mind of the amount of penguin death being depicted to find the rest of it that amusing.
you should check out this story… i hear of it in the economist a while ago, but it turns out that the american religious right, the creationist croud, the gay-bashing croud, the abstinence-only croud, flocked to the movie.
for some reason, they thought it talked about I.D., monogamy, and left out global warming, so naturally, they loved it.
here is at least one article on the phenomenon. more can certainly be found through google.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1837607,00.html
Yeah, I had heard that it was the movie that brought a lot of people to the theatres for the first time since Passion of Christ. I was going to comment on that but didn’t really have a lot to say.
I will mention that the movie contains references to things on the scale of geological time (Antarctica used to be tropical, then the continent drifted south, most inhabitants died or left, the penguins “decided to stay” – which is a thinly veiled reference to Evolution). Whether the penguin’s remarkably bizarre mating habits are Intelligently Designed or not I’m not going to comment.
The film *does* feature a fair bit of fairly heavy penguin-on-penguin action. And penguins, I might add, are less manogomous than other birds: they get a new partner every year. Some birds mate for life.
in unrelated new, i now sort of have a blog.
in related news, here is something about penguins. very cute something about penguins.
http://www.sushiesque.com/adorablog/2005/11/how_to_knit_a_s.html