Memorial Day weekend, and the academic year is almost over. Hurray! I have such a light load this term, but I have had to see the same small group of students four days a week for a twenty-week stretch since New Year, with only one week's break in the middle - and much as I like them, I think we're all due for a rest from each other. If their idiosyncrasies wear on me after this time, presumably mine wear on them just as much.
Memorial Day - what is that? I've tried asking this before (and all those bank holidays in the UK - do you know what they're for?), but I'm still not very clear. If you watched TV, you'd think it was for buying cut-price mattresses. Actually, it seems officially to be for honouring war dead. Two years ago I ran in the Bolder Boulder 10k race on Memorial Day, and many people had marked on their t-shirts the names of family members who had fought in a war; and at the stadium spectacle that followed, there was military display and parachuting in with big rippling American flags and a lot of clapping and cheering (woo hoo!). Oh, it's also a marker of summer - someone said to me that you can assume it safe to plant after Memorial Day. My plants are planted, though - I have a little herb garden going in the back yard.
Anyway, as to those polar bears....
Yesterday we went to see the film Earth, otherwise known as Disney's Earth (warning bells!), otherwise known (depending on where you are) as BBC's Earth. J. saw this in Germany last year, and had said how beautiful it was - but for a long time when we searched for it online all we could find was BBC's Planet Earth. Only after we saw it at the cinema yesterday did we manage to look further into its origins. It appears to be substantially a re-edit of footage from the Planet Earth series done for the big screen, with an attempt to shape it into a natural epic of struggle and survival, heart-warming stories of mother-and-child migration, with a good dose of polar bear tragedy and the odd comic bird.
I've never see the whole of the Planet Earth series, to my regret - just bits of it here and there. I know enough about it, though, to know that it focuses on different areas of the planet as the series progresses, presumably giving it an overall sense of depth and breadth that was lacking in this film version. Well, there was breadth, of sorts - but a strange lack of unity in the whole, as if they had their three main mother-and-child stories (polar bear, elephant, humpback whale), and then added in other things by way of weak thematic links to try and make it long enough (migration theme: cut to migrating demoiselle cranes struggling over Himalayas; seasonal change: cut to the Papua New Guinea rain forest without seasons, and laugh at some dancing birds of paradise).
Things were picked up and then dropped again - near the beginning was a sequence on the boreal forest of... wait... where? I didn't catch it, and it never came up again, but it's supposed to be the biggest forest on earth (do they mean the entire boreal zone?), supplying 30% of the world's oxygen... or some such figure. But not much animal life can eat those conifer needles, so now we speed off to somewhere else, by way only of a shot of a lynx and a comment about the spirit of the wilderness (Wait! What does he eat, if there's nothing here to leave footprints, as you say?).
Well, it's at least very beautiful. And distinctly emotional at times, including that polar bear tragedy: polar bear exhausted by swimming at sea, having wandered too far from land when the ice melts, arrives back on shore and tries in his desperation to grab a walrus cub; but is fought off, wanders shakily for a while, and then lies down and dies. It's upsetting to watch something die of starvation and exhaustion like that. But don't worry! The narration tells us that the brave spirit of the father polar bear will live on in the heart of his cubs. Never mind that they've never met, and that he'd presumably have eaten them if he'd caught them when a little smaller. And here, predictably, is the major flaw of Disney's Earth. The narration is just terrible. It might have been just as bad in German, but at least we wouldn't have understood it.
There's also an issue with trying to make this epic, which is the taking of sides - something supported by the exhausting orchestral score. Early in the film we have a view of migrating caribou - oh, how beatiful, how brave! - when a wolf appears on the scene, accompanied by ominous music. After a long chase he gets our beatiful little caribou baby, though luckily the film jumps away just as the caribou gives up and sits down with a bleat - game over, no need to worry about the gore to follow. And yet, when the polar bear is trying to grab the walrus baby, whose side are we on? And what about those poor shrimp bubble-netted by the whales?
Memorial Day - what is that? I've tried asking this before (and all those bank holidays in the UK - do you know what they're for?), but I'm still not very clear. If you watched TV, you'd think it was for buying cut-price mattresses. Actually, it seems officially to be for honouring war dead. Two years ago I ran in the Bolder Boulder 10k race on Memorial Day, and many people had marked on their t-shirts the names of family members who had fought in a war; and at the stadium spectacle that followed, there was military display and parachuting in with big rippling American flags and a lot of clapping and cheering (woo hoo!). Oh, it's also a marker of summer - someone said to me that you can assume it safe to plant after Memorial Day. My plants are planted, though - I have a little herb garden going in the back yard.
Anyway, as to those polar bears....
Yesterday we went to see the film Earth, otherwise known as Disney's Earth (warning bells!), otherwise known (depending on where you are) as BBC's Earth. J. saw this in Germany last year, and had said how beautiful it was - but for a long time when we searched for it online all we could find was BBC's Planet Earth. Only after we saw it at the cinema yesterday did we manage to look further into its origins. It appears to be substantially a re-edit of footage from the Planet Earth series done for the big screen, with an attempt to shape it into a natural epic of struggle and survival, heart-warming stories of mother-and-child migration, with a good dose of polar bear tragedy and the odd comic bird.
I've never see the whole of the Planet Earth series, to my regret - just bits of it here and there. I know enough about it, though, to know that it focuses on different areas of the planet as the series progresses, presumably giving it an overall sense of depth and breadth that was lacking in this film version. Well, there was breadth, of sorts - but a strange lack of unity in the whole, as if they had their three main mother-and-child stories (polar bear, elephant, humpback whale), and then added in other things by way of weak thematic links to try and make it long enough (migration theme: cut to migrating demoiselle cranes struggling over Himalayas; seasonal change: cut to the Papua New Guinea rain forest without seasons, and laugh at some dancing birds of paradise).
Things were picked up and then dropped again - near the beginning was a sequence on the boreal forest of... wait... where? I didn't catch it, and it never came up again, but it's supposed to be the biggest forest on earth (do they mean the entire boreal zone?), supplying 30% of the world's oxygen... or some such figure. But not much animal life can eat those conifer needles, so now we speed off to somewhere else, by way only of a shot of a lynx and a comment about the spirit of the wilderness (Wait! What does he eat, if there's nothing here to leave footprints, as you say?).
Well, it's at least very beautiful. And distinctly emotional at times, including that polar bear tragedy: polar bear exhausted by swimming at sea, having wandered too far from land when the ice melts, arrives back on shore and tries in his desperation to grab a walrus cub; but is fought off, wanders shakily for a while, and then lies down and dies. It's upsetting to watch something die of starvation and exhaustion like that. But don't worry! The narration tells us that the brave spirit of the father polar bear will live on in the heart of his cubs. Never mind that they've never met, and that he'd presumably have eaten them if he'd caught them when a little smaller. And here, predictably, is the major flaw of Disney's Earth. The narration is just terrible. It might have been just as bad in German, but at least we wouldn't have understood it.
There's also an issue with trying to make this epic, which is the taking of sides - something supported by the exhausting orchestral score. Early in the film we have a view of migrating caribou - oh, how beatiful, how brave! - when a wolf appears on the scene, accompanied by ominous music. After a long chase he gets our beatiful little caribou baby, though luckily the film jumps away just as the caribou gives up and sits down with a bleat - game over, no need to worry about the gore to follow. And yet, when the polar bear is trying to grab the walrus baby, whose side are we on? And what about those poor shrimp bubble-netted by the whales?
