Summer Movies

Right now they are playing a lot of this past summer’s movies on the crew channel, and fortuitously they are the ones we did not see at Merritt Mall (with the exception of “War of the Worlds”). I have seen bits and pieces of “Herbie Reloaded” (neither Lohan nor Keaton’s finest hour) and most of “The Longest Yard” (absolutely delightful. Probably one too many slow motion montages of football accompanied by classic rock for my taste but I laughed out loud a lot during it, mostly at the Prison Guard whose steroids get switched with estrogen and Cloris Leachman, who I now think is a genius). But I would like to devote this entry to the snuff film that is “March of the Penguins.” This movie is great if you spend your Saturdays pouring hairspray into the eyeballs of rabbits. Otherwise, it’s pretty upsetting. I had almost seen the movie this summer and my sister had asked me to see if it would be appropriate for my four year-old niece. I think it’s a fine movie for little children, if you’re interested in having them immediately reclaimed by the DCFS. I spent the entire time mentally checking the points in the movie where my five year old self would have had to have been escorted out of the theater and into a hospice for short term trauma care. They were:

• When one of the mother penguins gets dragged back into the icy waters by a seal;
• The extended close-ups of said seal’s snapping, penguin breaking jaws;
• When the young penguin couple hurry through the egg transfer and break the egg, and then have to watch “the ice reclaim the egg” (Morgan Freeman’s words, not mine);
• The extended montage of the horrifying razor-billed duck trying to snatch up one of the penguin chicks as the adult penguins stand by and DO NOTHING;
• The lingering close-up of the frozen penguin chicks;
• The numerous penguin deaths due to starvation, exhaustion, or exposure, and then Morgan Freeman smugly saying how this would mean the chick would die too since they would not get the food the parent was procuring for them.

While I am not a Licensed Zoologist by any means, the documentarian’s work seems pretty biologically shoddy to me. There’s tons of anthropomorphizing, with the narration constantly projecting human emotions (joy, lust, grief, manic depression etc.) onto the penguins. And there are obvious parts where they have edited parts together or are trying to imply something has happened when it hasn’t (e.g., seal attack). While I have no problem being manipulated with images of adorable fuzzy penguin chicks and fat waddling penguin parents, I don’t want to see those same penguins then being subjected to the limits of penguin endurance for eighty minutes. I will be limiting my penguin entertainment to Chillie Willie cartoons and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” from now on.