Cynical Cinema

When I brought home Sex And The City on DVD, my girlfriend said “oh, cool”. When I brought home The Visitor, she said “will that make me cry?” and decided not to watch it. And when I brought home The Go-Getter, she said “why do you watch this crap?” (The Go-Getter, incidentally, was not crap - it was very good.) But when I brought home Meerkat Manor: Season Two, she said “oh my God, YAY!” I’m not even joking. And ten minutes later, we were watching the first episode of the second season. And seven hours after that, we were watching the final episode of the second season. Because Meerkat Manor is, really, that compelling. Alliance Films releases season two on October 7th, and it is well worth picking up.

Now, I may just be a morbid guy. Or perhaps I am cruel and mean-spirited. But when I watch nature documentaries, like Meerkat Manor, I want to see animals eat other animals. That’s just what I enjoy watching. And aside from the dominant meerkat, Flower, inexplicably attacking a bird, we see very little of it. There are hard-fought battles between meerkat tribes, battles that leave meerkats dead, and often the babies as well. One of the meerkat babies gets eaten by a goshawk. But we don’t get to see that. The program is all about the “real life and death” events in the Kalahari, but we don’t get to see the cool stuff. I guess it’s a way to keep the series PG-rated. There is even a scene where the group of meerkats surrounds a cobra, keeping it at bay before they finally abandon it to it’s fate as a snake-eating eagle circles overhead. So…what happened to the snake? Did it get eaten? We never find out. Come one Animal Planet. At least show a snake getting eaten.

Despite the fact that the truly violent parts of the show are edited out, this program is still ridiculously compelling. It contains all the cliffhangers and the emotional moments you would associate with soap operas. Only instead of terribly attractive awful actors, this one stars tiny little cute meerkats. My girlfriend is right. Yay!

Alliance Films is releasing Jane Goodall:  When Animals Talk today, September 2nd, on DVD.  This is another DVD that comes from the people at Animal Planet, one that features Jane Goodall, famous for her 40 years working with chimpanzees.  And she talks to animals.  Like chimpanzees.  It’s easy to roll one’s eyes when we see Goodall beginning a speech by making chimpanzee noises, and it’s also easy to tune out when we see people talking about their pets and how they seem to sense when daddy’s getting home.  Yeah yeah yeah.  They’re animals.  We get it.  Pets are not interesting to me.  Show me a komodo dragon that knows when your husband is getting home.  And waits in his bushes.  THAT would be interesting.

But then there are the creatures that are fascinating.  There are killer whales that actually beach themselves in order to eat sea lions, and in doing so they establish a dialogue with the man who has been studying them for years.  After they rip sea lions to shreds, he goes in the water and plays with them!  (I would rather have seen them eating more sea lions, myself…that was pretty cool.)  Then there is the parrot that not only speaks, but actually understands speech, has conversations with people, and may have a telepathic bond with his owner.  (You have to see this bird to believe it.)  And then there are the elephants, the rats, the whales and…more pets.

Which means that more than half of this DVD is interesting.  Whales and elephants and rats and their methods of communicating with each other and with us are fascinating.  Cats are not.  Dogs are not.  If only this documentary had stayed away from commen house pets, it would be great.  As it is, it’s just decent.  But that parrot alone makes this worth checking out!

The Jeff Corwin Experience is a show on Animal Planet starring a Crocodile Hunter type guy who visits exotic locations, seeking out exotic animals, then picks them up and shows them to the camera.  The first season comes out on DVD tomorrow, September 2nd, from Alliance Films, and starts out in Borneo.  Corwin finds elephants, sea turtles, orangutans, snakes, bats, creepy-looking proboscis monkeys, and tree frogs.  He then moves on to India for episode 2, where he finds cobras and all kinds of other exotic wildlife.  The animals are cool, the locations are cool, and the episodes feature as many animals as possible.  As Season One continues through Arizona, Alaska, Indonesia, Thailand, Madagascar and the Galapagos, we get to meet many animals we would ordinarily not get to see.

But the show isn’t great.  And the problem is the host.  Jeff Corwin is a likeable guy.  He kind of looks (and acts) like Ryan Reynolds, only without the really funny stuff.  Just the kind-of funny stuff.  But he talks too much.  He does a few set-pieces that are meant to be funny, but really we just want to see more animals.  Enough about you, already!  Let’s get to the proboscis monkeys!  That being said, this show is certainly good for kids.  They will be entertained, and at the same time they will learn about the natural world and perhaps something about conservation as well.

White Tuft: The Little Beaver is a Canadian film about White Tuft. Who is a little beaver. As The Little Beaver in English, and La Riviere Aux Castors in French, it’s a family-friendly film that comes to DVD August 19th from Alliance Films. White Tuft is a beaver with an odd white tuft of fur on top of his head. He lives in the Canadian woods, and has to deal with all kinds of wildlife around him. In the tradition of The Bear and Born Free, cameras follow this little beaver around as he makes his way through the world, and then voices are added afterward to make the story appear more like a traditional narrative. In this case the voice belongs to Colm Feore, the consummate Canadian actor.

And while The Little Beaver is certainly entertaining, and a pretty cool movie for nature lovers and families, it doesn’t quite live up to the quality of, say, The Bear. Near the beginning of the film, White Tuft’s dam is destroyed by bears, and he has to make his way through the world, a journey which includes several high-intensity encounters with a pack of wolves, and some charming moments as he befriends a young lynx. But the narrative is what lets this movie down. I like the idea of a narrator taking us through this interesting story. And I like the idea of telling it like it IS a story, and not just a nature documentary. But don’t start attributing emotions to the beaver. Don’t start telling me that the wolf attack is bringing back painful memories of his own father’s demise. This story has enough drama already, without human characteristics being overtly inserted into it. Why not just tell us how White Tuft has never been able to approach girl-beavers since Brown Belly ditched him at senior prom? Come on.

That being said, I really did enjoy The Little Beaver. It really is well-filmed and interesting and remarkably family-friendly. But you may as well watch with the sound off. It’s the only way to thoroughly enjoy it.

On Tuesday, August 19th, Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing three DVDs in the Growing Up Animals series. Growing Up Wildcats contains four hour-long episodes about baby…well, wildcats. Although “wild” cats might be the wrong word to use. You see, the four episodes centre around baby lions, baby tigers, baby cheetahs, and a baby black leopard. But none of them are wild. The lions have been rescued from abusive owners near San Antonio. The tigers have been bred in captivity at a wildlife refuge in Texas. The cheetahs are from a wildlife breeding ranch in South Africa. And Edie Falco (of the Sopranos) hosts the special episode about the rare black leopard, also bred in captivity.

Not that this is a problem - each of the cats in these programs relies on their human benefactors for survival. So it isn’t exactly like watching animals growing up in zoos. But after a while, I found myself really wanting to see these animals grow up in the wild. I wanted to see how cheetah parents raised cheetah cubs, not how humans raised cheetah cubs. In the end, this is basically like watching one of those shows about babies on Lifetime Network. Only, the babies grow to be 600 pounds and could conceivably eat people. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that tiger babies are far cuter than human babies.

Growing Up Safari is one of three DVDs released by Alliance Films on Tuesday August 19th. These DVDs are part of the Growing Up series from Animal Planet, a series that follows the development of young animals from infancy to the point where they are re-integrated with their adult populations. Growing Up Safari follows the story of young rhinos, hyenas, zebras and giraffes as they grow up. These four animals are certainly not as cute as those on the Growing Up Wildcats DVD. Rhinos are kind of cute, because as babies they’re just so strange looking. But hyenas have a bad rap simply because they’re pretty ugly creatures, baby zebras look exactly like adult zebras, only smaller, and baby giraffes are so gangly and awkward that it’s hard to consider them cute. It’s also hard to use the word “cute” to describe something that comes into the world seven feet tall.

Also ruining the “cuteness” factor for the giraffe - the fact that after it’s unceremonious introduction to the earth - a drop of ten feet to the ground - it is then covered, head to toe, in a life-giving but certainly disgusting waterfall that consists of like sixty gallons of giraffe afterbirth. There was something about seeing this that I found…disconcerting. As in all the other Growing Up DVDs, we see death, birth and disasters befall these tiny animals, and at times the series can really tug at the heart strings, as when we see the caregiver of a young hyena named Homer have to deal with the loss of his young charge. But again, I watch these episodes feeling like I’m not really learning much about the animals themselves, but more that I am learning about the people who raise them. Which is still interesting, but not as interesting as the animals are.

There are three Growing Up DVDs being released on Tuesday, August 19th, from Alliance Films. They are DVDs from an Animal Planet series that features young, cute animals as they are raised from infancy by humans. Often they are orphaned, and left alone, or perhaps they come from abusive owners and needed to be rescued. The three DVDs, Growing Up Safari, Growing Up Wildcats and Growing Up Arctic are pretty much interchangeable, except that the wildcats are cuter and the safari animals are more interesting. But the best of the three DVDs is Growing Up Arctic. Partly because there may be no creature on Earth cuter than a baby penguin - unless it’s a baby seal. And both those animals are featured on the disc. Also featured are the polar bear (also terribly cute) and the walrus (not so cute, but awfully darn cool).

These are some of the only episodes that take place at zoos - the penguins are hatched at the Oregon Zoo, the polar bear cub is given a chance at life at the Toronto Zoo, and the walrus baby grows up at the Indianapolis Zoo. The baby seal isn’t at a zoo, however, as it gets nursed back to health at the Alaska Sea Life Center. Growing Up Arctic is the best of the three DVDs in that it’s slightly more interesting than the others. But, like the others, it’s just cute, and that’s about it.

Meerkat Manor is really, really cool. It’s a lot of things - nature show, documentary, soap opera, and a reality show rolled into one. Cambridge University has been following a family of meerkats in South Africa for the past decade, filming their every move and examining their social behaviour. You might ask, as I did, what is the point of expending that many resources just to find out how meerkats live over the course of a decade? How do you justify this to your bosses who hand out the money? And I think the researchers may have come to this conclusion also. So they decided to justify the entire experiment and at the same time actually make some money by turning the meerkat society into a reality TV show, one that runs on the Animal Planet network. Season One of that show comes out on DVD tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and I highly recommend picking it up.

Meerkats, for those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t either until I first saw this show) are tiny little animals that live in the Kalahari desert in South Africa. They are related to the mongoose, make barking noises like dogs, and live in a very complex social environment. Their society is like many human things. It’s like the mafia - you go against the family, you better look out. It’s like a street gang - rival gangs come on our turf, it’s war. It’s like a cult - the leaders are the only ones allowed to have sex, and woe unto all others who do. And it’s like one of those weird communes, where all the women take care of all the babies and breast feed them. And all of this is captured on film for the series, and delivered to us in 13 episodes in the first season of Meerkat Manor.

These creatures are awfully cute, and they have babies all the time, and those are really cute too, so there’s that. But it’s more than just cute animals doing cute things. After a while, you begin to identify with individuals in the group, cheer for them to defeat their enemies, and mourn the loss of the ones who die. (And there are some who die - after all, it is nature.) It’s like a really good, really natural, reality soap opera without irritating people. Which is terrific! Now, I watched all five hours of this show, in one night, with my girlfriend. And it does get a little repetitive. Some of the same information is bound to be repeated if you watch the entire series at once. (She said, before the final episode - I hope this wraps up nicely! And I told her that it was nature, you couldn’t really make them follow a script. And then it wrapped up with a cliffhanger! We have to get season 2 now!)

It’s narrated by Sean Astin (that other hobbit from Lord of the Rings), and he does a good job of keeping the story going when the animals can’t talk for themselves. Again, it will seem repetitive if you watch them all at once. Like hasn’t he used the phrase “discretion is the better part of valour” at least three times now? But it’s very possible that you will want to watch it all at once, because this show is addictive. Pick it up on DVD tomorrow, it’s worth your while. Oh, and your family’s too. The kids might cry a little - you know, with the deaths and all - but they’ll love it.

Released the same day as Season One of Meerkat Manor, the great Animal Planet TV show, is the DVD Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins, which is a documentary that tells the story of the meerkats before the TV show. At a little over an hour long, it is much easier to get a full picture of meerkat society from this film than from the full five hours of the TV show. Both are really good, but The Story Begins is a little more brutal in terms of the deaths (and murders) of some meerkats. This one is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, who cracks a few lame jokes early on. Thank goodness they dispense with that fairly fast.

Flower is the star of Meerkat Manor, the dominant female who leads the family. The Story Begins is her own, personal Scarface, tracing her rise to power a the top of the meerkat world. (Not quite as swift and brutal a rise as that of Scarface, to be sure.) This documentary would be great for people who are mildly interested and don’t want to sit through the entire TV series, or possibly for people who are obsessive about the TV series and want to know every detail. All in all, the two are very complementary, and I can’t wait for Season Two!