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Six Degrees of Richard Keyser

shira

I’ve always prided myself in spotting familiar faces while watching movies and TV shows. In fact, it drives me crazy when I’m sure that I’ve seen an actor in another film, but I just can’t place him. Well the other…

Political by being art…

mbowman

I had the pleasure of attending the Images Festival in Toronto, Canada a couple of weeks ago. Now in its twentieth year, the festival was one of the first dedicated to supporting the work of independent filmmakers. Many Canadian “niche”…

angela

indieWIRE has a great article about film festivals.

Forced to make a name for themselves in a crowded festival season and pressured to offset rising costs (witness Tribeca’s 50% ticket-price hike, for example), festivals are doing whatever they can…

Planet Earth

mbowman

Ever since I was old enough to tell the various barnyard animals apart, I’ve liked nature documentaries. “Cow! Chicken! Sheep!�? quickly grew to include “Leafcutter ant! Bushbaby! Komodo Dragon!�? But the excitement of watching nature programs faded over the years and it became hard not to zone out when yet another wildebeest was devoured by yet another crocodile.

I also grew to dislike that draining feeling of hopelessness that came at the end of most films. “There are fewer than twenty left in the wild today,” the narrator says, after having spent the past hour explaining how wonderful the creatures are. “Because of habitat loss, their numbers are dwindling rapidly.” “They have only one thing to fear: Man.”

Cue dirge.

So despite Planet Earth‘s great reviews, I was only mildly interested in catching the series on Discovery Channel. Yesterday (Earth Day), I finally did.

It was glorious.

Planet Earth is an 11-part series produced by the BBC with Discovery and is intended to be “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet.” Scenes of the familiar (even the wildebeest and crocodile) are so well shot they feel new again, and scenes of the unfamiliar (the undulating sea of roaches that live off bat droppings) are spectacularly so.

Because of the scope of the subject — five years in the making and over 200 locations, say the promotional materials — the series does meander at times. Also, however fond I am of Sigourney Weaver (Alien!), I would have loved to hear David Attenborough’s original narration.

But these are quibbles. Planet Earth is amazing for all of the things it does right: from a snow leopard chasing a mountain goat down a sheer cliff to a vast cave system that grows crystal formations that look like snowflakes.

And at the end the narrator doesn’t even have to say, “It reminds us of how much we still have that’s worth saving.�?

Planet Earth is currently on Discovery Channel and available on Amazon.com.

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