Category Archives: environment

Happy Feet

Posted on November 24, 2006

The latest marvel in computer animation, this movie has a couple of serious surprises: first, it delivers a powerful ecological message suitable to the kids who’re the primary audience; second, hot blonde Brittany Murphy shows off some powerful vocal talent on Boogie Wonderland and especially Queen’s Somebody to Love; and, third, director George Miller continues to march as far from his Mad Max roots as possible–his last picture was toddler-friendly Babe: Pig in the City. Happy Feet is a fine fictional compliment to both March of the Penguins and An Inconvenient Truth.

The story is fairly straightahead: Mumbles (Elijah Wood) is slightly damaged during incubation, so his singing voice is terrible, off-key and screetchy. In his village this is a big problem because everyone else is a fine singer and each penguin uses his or her own heartsong to attract the right mate. Mumbles’ parents, Memphis (Hugh Jackman, using a Presley-ish vocal with Heartbreak Hotel) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman, doing a nice version of Prince’s Kiss), try everything to fix his singing but to no avail.

Even his true love Gloria (Murphy) can’t get past it. Mumbles does have serious dancing skills, courtesy of Savion Glover and impressive motion capture software, but village elder Noah (Hugo Weaving, previously Agent Smith and Elrond) claims this is heresy likely to make their religious icon angry and only worsen the paucity of fish for eating. Our hero sadly leaves, aiming to find an answer to the food problems.

He meets up with Ramon (Robin Williams), a short Latino penguin, whose village believes that impressive pebble collections are the way to attract a wife. Ramon has more self-confidence than 10 Mumbles but is immediately a fan of the latter’s dancing and decides to help the poor guy out by taking him to mysterious guru Lovelace (also Williams, but using a sedate version of his Mork voice). The three, along with Ramon’s four bird crew, take off to a place where Lovelace had met strange aliens (humans) and gotten his guru-ji.

Adventure ensues, Mumbles returns to his own village, wins Gloria’s love and convinces even hardhearted Noah that dancing is a fine accompaniment to song. Happy Feet, with the script credited to Miller, his Babe co-writer Judy Morris, John Collee (the Russell Crow nautical mess Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) and Warren Coleman, does a really nice job integrating the songs and dancing, and leaves plenty of room for Williams’ humor while still presenting a serious message about how people are destroying the sea ecology that supports lovable penguins in a way that younger children as well as their parents can understand.

recommended

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March of the Penguins

Posted on September 3, 2006

My small present to Sweetie for her birthday last month was the allegedly totally cute and entertaining frozen nature flick March of the Penguins and tonight we finally got around to watching it. No one can look at the penguin chicks after they show up about halfway through–not counting the brief egg glimpses–and not come away juiced and amazed.

Mating begins in Fall and females drop the eggs as Winter is hitting, carrying the babes to be atop their claws before passing the chore to the menfolk. The ladies lose over 30% of their body weight after giving birth and need to head straight back to the ocean for food. So the men stay inland, eggs on their claws and no food themselves for over four months in the end. Even so, the dads have to be extremely careful since the briefest of exposures to open Winter air temperatures and winds will kill the chick before it can hatch.

Morgan Freeman, clearly succeeding James Earl Jones as trustworthy, believable voice of the nation, recorded the English narration (IMDB credits show that with the film’s unexpected commercial success localized versions were made for many markets) but the filmmakers did a good job of realizing that less is more and that visuals and emotional music suffice to tell the tale of the Emperor penguins and their endless annual cycle of migration and mating. Director/writer Luc Jacquet also was smart to keep all evidence of his production team out of the shot, and then bring in a taste under the closing credits and a making of featurette.

This should easily become a perennial children’s favorite, a movie they can watch a number of times as they grow up themselves and understand more of the world around them.

recommended

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An Inconvenient Truth

Posted on July 22, 2006

Frankly, I’ve put off writing up this movie because I wasn’t sure how to say what I feel. Regardless of party affiliation or attitude towards Al Gore, this is very watchable and a film you must see. Assuming you care in the least about the world we–or perhaps more importantly, your children and their children will–live in. I’m not saying its perfect or that the science cannot be challenged.

I am saying that we essentially face a real world variation of Pascal’s Wager. If the science is wrong, in whole or in degree, or if other developments make the problem irrelevant, then there’s little lost in acting as if we are in a climate crisis; if the argument made in Truth is correct, then we either start making real changes or sentence generations yet to come to a horrific future.

Frankly, if the science in An Inconvenient Truth is correct, some environmental changes may come within a decade that will make our present horrific. Two high probability events, significant ice cap melts in Antarctica and Greenland, could kill millions of people living in coastal areas on all continents and make tens of millions more refugees; you can write off big chunks of San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami, Manhattan, Naples, Venice, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, coastal India, Japan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, most of the Caribbean, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. Plus oil export port facilities throughout the Middle East.

That’s just the most direct, near term effect from one pair of high probability events. Gore lays out much more dire consequences if we maintain the status quo and frankly the research he presents seems very solid to me. Look at the temperatures for the last month or so, 2006 is already shaping up as the hottest year since we began keeping records!

Solutions are available and, Gore asserts, will have positive near-term economic benefits. That is, despite the negative progaganda of the corporate interests fighting them, changing our products and consumption habits in ways that greatly decrease human environmental impact will increase employment and gross global economic activity. Just not for the huge oil and gas companies, which is where almost all the funding for opposition to the changes comes from!

Some related linkage:

absolutely recommended

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