March of the Penguins

Sorry for the blogless day. Circumstances conspired to frustrate me all day long.

Here in the mountains primitive we have to make do with a dial-up connection which is fine most of the time, but today.....

First "She Who Shall Not Be Named" informed me that she would be on-line for a while to download security updates. I didn't mind. It gave me time to do some reading and writing, and then I watched a broadcast of Fellini's "Satyricon." Fascinating! I remember when it first hit theatres in 1969. It was considered shocking at the time -- mostly for its sexual [and particularly its homosexual] content -- but today its story elements are fairly mundane [what a long, strange journey it hs been since then]. The cinematography holds up, though -- some of the most beautiful and striking images you will see on screen. And, of course, there is Fellini's critique [with which I am far more sympathetic today than I was in the Sixties] of a society in which people seek solace from spiritual emptiness in an endless round of sensualism. [how's that for alliteration?]

The downloads took far longer than expected -- mostly because her security programs kept interfering -- and it wasn't until mid-afternoon that the line was finally free. Unfortunately, I had promised to take her to see "March of the Marauding Fleshrending Penguins" or whatever, and only had about fifteen minutes online before we had to go. Finally, after a movie and dinner, I went online only to find that Blogger was down for maintainence. Then "She" had to go online to do whatever it is she does there. All in all it was nearly midnight before I finally was able to start blogging again.

So here goes.

One thing I learned today -- don't go to see a "family" movie in the late afternoon. The theatre was packed with mothers and children, some of them very young, who kept up a constant chatter throughout the film. One boy was making so much of a fuss that his mother dragged him out of the theatre. The trouble was that he was screaming at the top of his lungs the whole way.

Other than that the film was not bad. Basically a National Geographic Special, stretched out to short movie length and without commercials. The photography was spectacular, the alien icescapes amazing, and the anthropomorphized penguins fascinating. All in all an hour and a half well spent.

One thought, however, recurred throughout and weakened the film's main thrust. Like all documentaries this one lies -- it twists reality to conform to narrative or dramatic conventions, or to make an ideological statement -- and the story line here is that penguins, no less than humans, have a rich and profound emotional life. But, as the film inadvertently shows, these deep emotions -- the pair-bonding, the parent-love for offspring, etc. -- are extremely transient. They are real -- but they last for only a season, after which the "tribe" disperses and the whole process has to begin all over again a few months later. So, whatever the surface similarities -- and they are strikingly presented in the film -- penguins are not people.

But then you already knew that..., didn't you.

RELATED:

Patt Morrison has a nice piece on the decline of the cineplexes in the LA Times. Among the reasons he cites:

People who've grown up watching movies on TV at home act like they're at home when they go to the movies. Theaters don't need ushers — they need bouncers. (The movies' patron saint ought to be David Gordon, a San Gabriel man who, 50 years ago, drew a gun on a couple of noisy popcorn-eaters interrupting his enjoyment of a Rosalind Russell-Glenn Ford double feature. The jury ended up hung.)

Amen!

Read it here.