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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...)
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.
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
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.
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.
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