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March of the Penguins Tops Box Offices
Zinside writes "Yahoo News is running a story stating that March of the Penguins may become the No. 2 documentary of all time at U.S. box offices." From the article: "The film, which follows a pack of Emperor Penguins during an arduous mating season, had grossed $18.4 million by Wednesday and was poised to surpass the $21.6 million for Michael Moore's anti-gun documentary Bowling For Columbine. For 13 months, Jacquet and his crew braved Antarctic temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero - and winds up to 150 mph - to capture astonishing images of thousands of emperor penguins engaging in a mating and child-rearing ritual that is nothing short of astonishing. The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love."
The interesting thing (or "news for nerds") is that a scientific documentary has become the second-highest grossing non-IMAX documentary in history... as opposed to another one where Michael Moore makes fun of people he disagrees with.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Now you know why the Penguin is Linux's mascot. It is reliable, unshakable, self-sacrificing (think of all those selfless developers working night and day around the world), extreme heroism (ok, that might be taking it a little too far...)
Why on earth is this filed under "Linux"?
Get your torrents...
And damn few sciences ever make it to the movies, let alone get this successful.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As a piece of trivia, March of the Penguins grossed more per screen shown on than the Fantastic Four did, in the Fantastic Four's first week. (Although MotP didn't make a whole lot of cash, it was only shown on 64 screens, whereas FF was shown on a something like 3,500. Those of you who also visit K5 may remember my diary entry on it at the time.)
Ultimately, it is the selling value of the narrator that probably made the big difference. HOWEVER, Hollywood pays attention to box office figures, and the fact that a wildlife documentary could hit the number 6 spot may cause them to seriously think about how they make movies for kids. (They're going to assume that kids are the main audience, whether that is true or not.)
If wildlife sells, then expect it to be merchandised to death. Having said that, it would be one hell of an improvement if kids get SOME natural history in their diet, as opposed to the turgid carp they get at the moment.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The footage in this movie is incredible, no doubt. However, I think one valid concern that has been raised about it is its tendency for anthropomorphization of the penguins. The narration often ascribes various human emotions and motivations to the footage that is shown, and realistically, this probably isn't accurate and probably leaves a lot of audiences with the wrong impression. It's certainly understandable why this was done (if nothing else, penguins especially are prone to anthropomorphization anyway), but when this does come out on DVD, I think it might be nice to be able to just watch the footage and turn off the narration.
Uh, wrong, lard-ass.
1. The penguins also get EXERCISE.
2. They don't eat absolutely unheathy crap like you do.
hmmm...
i wonder what the survival value of a sense of humor is?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love.
They're also capable of extreme homosexuality.
[1] It is G rated. I guess some people are sick of car chases, boobies and scary monsters - go figure! The "naughtiest" part is penguins doing "it" to make more penguins. I actually saw a parent take their child out of the theatre for this one. Felt sorry for the poor kid...
[2] Penguins are somewhat similar to humans in the way they walk and behave. They walk upright but wobble and thus they look like "cute", "fat", "fuzzy" people. You couldn't pull this one off with snakes or, tigers. They are social creatures. In the movie ( I hope I don't spoil it for anyone ;) a mother penguin who lost her egg, tries to steal the chick from another penguin. The other females in the group would not "approve" of such behavior and came to protect the chick and the mother from the "thief".
Also penguins are monogamous (emperor penguins are monogamous at least for duration of one year) - which often is not the case with many humans nowadays - not that there is anything wrong with it... So that also anthropomorphosizes them even more.
[3] The bravery and determination of the people who shot the movie is impressive. Very cold weather, very dangerous, all just to film the cute little birds. And, of course, as some post mentioned, some like Morgan Freeman.
[4] It spread mostly by word of mouth. This is similar to the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". A small movie that made big $ because everyone told their friends to go see and how great it was. I heard about the movie from my parents then after I saw it, I recommended it to all my friends and they saw it. If everyone who see it does it - it is quite a few people..
A good fantasy or sci-fi, or any story about alien places and creatures is successful (=appeals to the audience) only if they emobody human ideals in them like justice, honesty, self-sacrifice, love, beauty, overcoming adversity and other such things. In other words if you had a movie about worms that live at the bottom of the ocean, or even some alien bacteria (or just mattrasses that sit around ) from Mars or say Titan, you couldn't entice the audience as much.
Classifying BFC as a documentary bastardizes the work of authentic documentaries that attempt to provide an objective presentation of a subject's facts.
Documentaries exist for uncovering the preexisting conditions of a particular subject in a way that the creator's own perspective is not present. BFC's producer deliberatly and intentionally created on-camera environments that would result in an expected outcome.
We have a responsability to preserve the legitamacy of what a documenatry is all about. If all of our documentaries were produced with such careless regard for the preservation of fact and lack of subjectiveness, we end up distorting our generation's record of history.
If BFC was actually a documentary, its premise would be absent of intentional subjectivity.
The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love.
Or at least, that was the end goal of the camerawork and the filtering of the hundreds or thousands of hours of penguin footage in the editing room.
Call me cynical, but with enough footage you could probably make a pile of beercans express anthropomorphic emotions.
I think that is why it was appealing and contraversial, it asked (loaded) questions, people on both sides of the gun debate drew thier own conclusions. I think I can understand why you didn't comprehend it properly, the questions didn't sink in because guns are part of your culture. Having grown up in a country where only lunatics wander around with handguns I have a similar problem. I simply don't comprehend the US obsession with gun ownership.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's not the subject matter of his movies that are bad, or even that the point he's trying to make is wrong. It's the process he employes; the editing to twist people's words around, the ambush interviews under false pretenses, and the conclusions he reaches under falatious logic.
He pisses off conservitives because he uses lies and deception to support a point they don't agree with.
He pisses me off (and I'm pretty liberal) because he uses lies and deception to support a point I do agree with.
If Moore tried to employ a little journalistic integrity or even simple objectivity (which even he admits he doesn't do), he could be a powerful voice. Instead he's a con artist who preys off those who have yet to learn how to read between his lines.
The Internet is generally stupid
The survival value of a sense of humor is 'not much', but the good news is that such unfunny people are unlikely to ever mate. If it is true that women want someone who will make them laugh, then Natural Selection should make our species more funny over the coming generations. Eventually even PHBs and marketing-types will grasp Dilbert (and boy will they be pissed when they do!)
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Having grown up in a country where only lunatics wander around with handguns I have a similar problem. I simply don't comprehend the US obsession with gun ownership.
Why anyone would want to live in a country full of
lunatics with handguns is beyond me. Why do you
let them do that? Why do you prohibit sane people
from protecting themselves from these lunatics?
That way lies madness. Please tell me which country that is,
so that I may stay far away.
You obviously have never studied any film theory, for if you had, you would have realized that documentaries are not objective. Not one bit. Sure, some might have strive for balance, but at the end of the day, documentaries are arguments using both moving images and narration to back up their "truths". Some, like Moore's documentaries, are very obvious about it. Others, like this Penguin one, are subtle. But at the end of the day, both are making arguments.
As a viewer, you are being shown a very small piece of "reality". You don't know what happened before or after the event. You don't what a subject said before or after the presented clip. Think about it - the mere acting of editing a conversation shows that the documentary filmmaker is being subjective. What makes him use the first part of the clip, instead of the middle part. Or even the last part? He's using it to back his argument.
By saying you wish to preserve the "legitimacy" of the documentary is saying you want to put critical thinking aside. There is no legitimacy. Whether it appears to be subjective or not, liberal or conservative, about animals on the Savannah or men on the moon, documentaries are all arguments proporting a certain world view.
It you watch it, weather you agree with it or not, it's final premis is that the culture of fear and violence perpetrated by our foreign policy and the mass-media that supports it, that seems to cause the staggering amount of gun deaths in the US...not guns. In fact there are arguments made that it's not the guns (I remember the comparison to canada). Michael Moore himself is a member of the NRA.
Well in a way the parent was correct because Moore does a terrible job making a coherent point in the movie. The whole scene where he went to Kmart headquarters to make them stop selling bullets certainly seemed anti-gun...but he doesn't really prove "guns are bad" because he states that Canada has more guns then the US per capita, yet less murders.
Where's the "cute" in slogging across Antartica, starving yourself for countless weeks, and then having to leave your offspring to die because your mate got eaten by a seal?
And the very definition of "safe", by the way, is sitting through a political spiel that you already agree with.
Mind the Gap
What you say is very true -- Moore is certainly not a journalist in that he abandons even a veneer of objectivity. However, I think his message is powerful for precisely that reason -- he is a subversive*, not another cog in the machine of mass-market media.
In a time when the rich and powerful have insulated themselves from criticism or comment, he has had some success in forcing powerful individuals and corporations to pay attention to the smaller people, and embarrassed them in front of a large audience. I think this sentiment appeals to Americans who feel that their lives are increasingly beholden to large corporate interests.
I think his victories are, for the most part, fleeting -- he might persuade a large corporation to do something because their PR department sees disaister looming, but in the long run the company will likely revert to status quo. You could argue, though, that the bigger victory is reminding his audience that they do still have power.
*especially in the sense that Neil Stephenson used in "The Diamond Age"--someone who shakes up the status quo and forces us to view a situation in a new light.
No, it's used to refute the arguement that homosexual behavior is unnatural.
Geez, talk about circular reasoning:
Homophobe: Homosexuality is unnatural!
Rational person: No it's not. There are many non-human animals that engage in homosexuality.
Homophobe: Are you suggesting we model our behavior on that of animals? Disgusting!
Gee, wouldn't a good place to start that spiritual development be more tolerance and less fear and hatred?
And sex can be a powerful tool for spiritual development.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It was in reply to a post which said "Vacationing Bush Poised to Set a Record With Long Sojourn at Ranch, President on His Way to Surpassing Reagan's Total". Given the tone of the rest of that post, it was clearly a snide comment about Bush not taking his job seriously.
I agree with you when you said I am certain most democratic presidents in recent history have done the exact same types of things. My point to the original poster was that by not being careful when taking potshots at the president, Democrats are diluting their message. By making incorrect fusses over tiny incidents they are generating so much noise that people tune them out.
A much better strategy would be to pick two or three large issues, where the president is clearly at fault, and then hammer on those. Something like lying under oath which is what the GOP used against Clinton. One issue that is clear and easily understood by most Americans.
Put another way "the Sky is falling!" is not an effective strategy.
Yes, it was moving and wonderful an all, but I was pretty disappointed about the lack of useful factual information. I thought that the movie excessively anthropomorphized the penguins and that it didn't present the information in scientific terms.
For example, in the movie they show the consequences of the penguins dropping their eggs and losing track of chicks, but nowhere in the film do they state what the survival rate of the chicks is. They show an albatross catching and killing a penguin chick while adult penguins stand around and do nothing, and fail to explain the lack of a response. They also say nothing about the ongoing environmental changes in the antarctic and how these may affect the penguins.
I went in to the documentary hoping to see some science, but it turned out to be mostly pretty pictures and emotionally loaded nonsense.
nuke the moon
Even this is debatable. It's entirely possible that a modest rate of homosexuality actually helps a (highly socialized) species survive, in that it decreases the the possibility of overpopulation, decreases the amount of (potentially disruptive) competition for females, and frees up some extra individuals from the burdens of child rearing so that they can devote their efforts to other things that are useful to the species as a whole (e.g. defending the group from invaders/predators).
My feeling is that evolution doesn't make too many "mistakes", and so if homosexuality is something that appears in many species, then it's likely there is a good (albeit non-obvious) reason for it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If Moore tried to employ a little journalistic integrity or even simple objectivity (which even he admits he doesn't do), he could be a powerful voice.
No, he would be just another documentary film-maker that no one has ever heard of and no one will ever see any of his films. Just like thousands of other documentarians with more "journalistic integrity."
There is a reason F9/11 was the largest grossing documentary of all time -- he made it entertaining, he worked the system to get as much play as he could. In doing so he sacrificed some of the moral high ground, but he did get his message out.
Remember, it doesn't matter how right you are, if you keep it a secret. Moore's approach seems to be that it is better to get your core message heard even if it costs him some credibility because in the american public consciousness, perception is reality.
Given that no other documentary, on any topic, has had even one tenth the public recognition - not just box-office receipts, but news coverage, public discussion, etc - I think his tactics are at least one reasonable option.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You have a point in that every attempt at human communicatons can be viewed as an argument... an assertion of truthhood. Critical theories aside, most people use the label "objective" to characterize the manner in which the particular argument under consideration was built and presented.
I could go on, but it would be more meaningful for this "film theory" to develop standards for assessing and promoting objectivity instead of finding coy ways to argue that it does not exist.
By saying you wish to preserve the "legitimacy" of the documentary is saying you want to put critical thinking aside. There is no legitimacy.
Honesty (on behalf of the filmmaker) yields legitimacy, but I guess you are correct in saying that we (as an audience) are too quick to grant "legitimate" status to anything labeled "documentary" in lieu of critically examining it. It is troubling, though, that films like Bowling for Columbine show such disregard for even attempting honesty. There's a dearth of honesty in the U.S.A. on both sides of the polticial spectrum, and it's only dividing us further...
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
People who have these sorts of arguments never seem to have very nice pets. ;) Regardless of what a crusty old book written by some long-dead people has to say about our relationship to the animal kingdom, simple observation of non-humans would reveal the following obvious truths:
;)
;) )
;) /former-altar-boy-now-lapsed-catholic
1) Animals seem to love
2) Animals seem to miss
3) Animals play, animals cry, animals laugh
4) Animals have saved humans on countless occasions without being "ordered" to
5) Animals pair-bond, or what we refer to as "marry". 90% of all bird species are monogamous, which is quite astonishing considering they supposedly descended from the dinosaurs!
6) And last but certainly not least, animals engage in all sorts of sexual behaviors, not all of which produce offspring. If you enjoy oral sex, as probably 95% of your human brethren do, you're enjoying without procreating. And most of the time it's done in the context of a loving relationship. I suppose hell is a small price to pay.
I don't think that spiritual development (which I also believe in) is somehow mutually exclusive or incongruous with "everything our evolving beings have learned along the way so far while they were still animal-like and not spiritually-aware". To me this is like saying that since we've built up the skyscraper to the great view on the 300th floor, we might as well remove floors 1-100 since we've gone "beyond" those and don't need them anymore. Everything has ALWAYS built on what came before, but has never totally eclipsed it. Cars did not completely replace horse-drawn carriages, calculators did not replace understanding math. Corporations did not replace mom-and-pop stores, and money did not completely replace bartering. Computers did not replace, well, everything (as some of us geeks would have preferred
So basically, go fly a kite, open your eyes and stop listening to dogma for a minute and THINK FOR YOURSELF, as we're not as different from the animals as some ancient power-grabbing pontificators who had no extensive experience with animals (or science for that matter) would indicate.
On a somewhat unrelated note, Jesus never dictated any sort of religious hierarchy. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was all about tearing those down. Otherwise "The System" wouldn't have been so interested in getting rid of him. And here we are again, with a religious hierarchy trying to dictate its views to us within the sheeps' clothing of the Republican party. Where's Jesus when you need him to f*** some sh** up?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
First of all, most people who disapprove of homosexuality (the non-bigots, I mean. I can't speak for the bigots) claim no right to stop people from practicing it; only to stop teaching it in school. The real reason this should be implemented, when you get down to it, is the purposes of Sex Ed. in schools in the first place.
Unless I am mistaken, they are:
1) To teach how the reproductive systems work (go figure, the systems within an individual work the same regardless of sexual orientation!)
2) To teach about how children are conceived, grow before birth, and are born (all people go through this process in an identical way as well, regardless of sexual orientation)
3) To prevent teen pregnancy and STDs (again, the principles governing this are the same regardless of sexual orientation)
So, when you get down to it, why should endorsing any kind of sexual orientation be involved in this at all? Well, quite simply, it shouldn't. Teachers shouldn't have to deal with teaching sexual orientation at all. They should simply teach that babies only result from vaginal sex between a man and a woman, and not from anal or oral sex, and leave it at that, without bringing morals into it. Until high schools start teaching Intro to Sex Techniques, there's no reason to bring sexual orientation into it at all, since the process of reproduction and protective measures to guard against STDs are the same for everyone.
To sum up, Sex Ed. is about the process of reproduction, not the pleasure experienced in sex, and that's the way it should be.