This year’s Disney Nature release for Earth Day is “Bears,” the story of an Alaskan bear named Sky and her twin cubs, Scout and Amber, their trek from the den where they’ve hibernated all winter to a place where they can find enough food to sustain themselves through the summer and the next year’s hibernation. John C. Reilly is the genial narrator in a highly relatable story that has adventure, humor, peril, discovery, and some very powerful maternal love. There’s a reason that we call our toughest human mothers mama bears.
As in the previous entries in this series, the footage is stunning, both the breathtaking grand vistas of snow and mountains in the five million acre national parkland on the Alaskan peninsula to the tiny faces of the brand-new cubs. And it is filled with “how did they get that” moments, with no indication until the final credit sequence of any human presence. The water sequences are especially thrilling.
The narration is less intrusively anthropomorphic than some of the previous entries in this series. While there are many dangers and some animal battles and predators, it is also less sad and scary than African Cats. Parents of younger children should know that it appears at one moment that one of the cubs has been killed, but it turns out that he is fine.
Sky and her tiny cubs wake up in the den she prepared for giving birth and dozing through the winter. She is depleted and the tiny cubs are not quite ready for the week-long trek through the snow to find a place where the salmon are running, and Sky can have access to the 90 pounds of protein a day she will need to survive the next hibernation. The trio face many threats. They reach a pack of other bears (the cubs’ are very excited to find others of their species), but Magnus, the over-1000 pound alpha male, is capable of eating the cubs if no other food is available. An outcast from the pack is also after them. The hunt for salmon takes them to the shore, where there are clams to eat, but it is also dangerous when the tide comes in.
The devotion and persistence of these animals is a powerful reminder that family connections link all species. With this peek into their world, we are more aware of our own.
Parents should know that this movie includes some peril and animal fighting. It appears at one point that one of the main characters has been killed but he turns out to be fine.
Family discussion: Why was Chinook an outcast? How does Sky teach the cubs what they need to know? Who is your role model and why is it important to have one? How would the story be different if it was from the point of view of one of the other animals or the salmon?
If you like this, try: “Chimpanzee” and “African Cats”
I spoke with the humans behind the gorgeous new IMAX nature film, “Island of Lemurs 3D: Madagascar,” Drew Feldman (writer/producer), David Douglas (director/cinematographer), and Dr. Patricia Wright, about the challenges of making the film and the more daunting challenges of saving these precious creatures.
Copyright Warners
How do you get so close to the lemurs? What are some of the challenges that you face?
DD:We spent a lot of time scouting and looking for lemurs that would allow us to get somewhere near them. We obviously picked the easiest ones we could find because our gear is big and heavy and it doesn’t take well to running after lemurs. So we found places where their movement was constricted by geological or geographical limits and that helped us to get closer to them and that often meant that we were working with the same lemurs scientists were studying. Those lemurs had some experience with human beings already.
Patricia tell me a little bit about lemur families and the role of the females.
PW: There’s over 100 species of lemurs. Each is a little bit different in their social structure except for one thing: they are all female dominant. The females are the leaders. They are the ones that call the shots. When you watch a group, you can see the females are the first one to say “We’re going to move.” Then she moves off and everybody just follows. And they follow her into a fruit tree and then she starts to eat the best fruits available at the tops of the trees and the males are required to just wait outside the fruit tree until the females have eaten the best fruits and then the males are allowed in. And if they don’t obey the rule, well then they are reprimanded. Sometimes it’s a slap across the face. Sometimes it’s just a vocal sort of “Don’t do that.” And sometimes they bite them.
What other kinds of animals are unique to Madagascar?
PW: We have carnivores that are all related to the mongoose family. And they are very special to Madagascar, found nowhere else. There’s or no cats or no dogs on Madagascar. So instead, these kind of weasel-like creatures that have evolved into these much bigger predators. And most of the birds are found nowhere else either.
What is the Malagasy community doing to support the lemurs?
PW: When I first got there which now is well over 20 years ago, the Malagasy sort of had no idea that lemurs were special. And we spent, not just me but the environmental movement, spent a lot of time developing a National Park Service. There wasn’t anything like that before. We also train tourist guides and work on getting the people themselves to really value the extraordinary wildlife that they have. We have a education team that goes out to talk to the local villagers. We have a health team that helps them get healthier than they are now and we basically visit and talk and have meetings with the village elders and they get some jobs. Because at the end of the day it’s economics isn’t it? So we have been training them as artisans. We have been training them as construction, teaching them computers. The local people have really enjoyed the fruits of having a national park in their backyard.
You have a background in anthropology as well as primatology so I guess that applies to your work with the humans as well as with the primates.
PW: My first job was actually as a social worker. And then later, I got my PhD in anthropology. And I’ve always been interested in humans as well as primates. We are all kind of have the same emotions, the same goals and lives really. But to me, when I first got to Madagascar I realized that the lemurs lives are very closely related to what the humans are doing; partially because they’ve got both looking for natural resources. And if we can make some way that both humans and lemurs can live together peaceably and happily, that would be my goal for Madagascar.
Drew, tell me a little bit about how you first came to be interested in lemurs.
DF: I’ve always been fascinated about Madagascar but to be honest I never really knew that much of lemurs growing up. Maybe they are just overshadowed by monkeys and apes and they’ve never really had their moment in the sun. And right after Dave and I finished Born to Be Wild I had a chance to meet Pat kind of by coincidence at some party. And after I heard her stories about lemurs, Dave cornered her and was like, “we’ve got to make a movie about Madagascar and lemurs.”
So, she invited us out and we went and she took us all around Madagascar for a month and showed us how extraordinary, fascinating, and just adorable lemurs were.
I was so struck by the eyes of these lemurs. How do you capture that on screen?
DD: And it’s every color. The project that didn’t get done on this movie was that I wanted to do was a poster that was just pairs of eyes of those lemurs because there’s red, gold eyes and green eyes and blue eyes and every shade of in between. Crazy! Jewels! And yeah, just marvelous! So expressive also and of course because of the way they get around, they really need highly evolved stereo vision because they need very good depth perception to go blasting through the trees the way they do. They leap for long distances and actually get where they thought they were going to go. So they have a very, very well developed sight sense for sure as well as being pretty exotic and beautiful to look at in the eye department.
You had a big transition in technology between the last film and this one. How did that affect the filming?
DD: This is a big thing. There’s three minutes in an IMAX film magazine but we’ve now transitioned to digital. It makes an enormous difference; especially in 3-D because a 3-D film camera is almost a 300 pound instrument. Two cameras built into one, enormous cost and weight and everything and in ways everything and noise. But now we’ve come up with a camera which is about 50, 55 pounds. So that’s like our old 2-D film camera and it’s a new kind of 3-D actually. We could put it on our backs and carry it down into the jungle as a single unit and put it onto a tripod and use it in a way that seems familiar. The other thing that it has is the capacity to not run out of film. When you’re working with wildlife, that’s a really good thing. The likelihood is if they do it and are pointed that direction, you’re going to get it. And that lets you plan for things and it also lets the crew relax. One of the things that I notice is that when the crew is all working, the crew is tensed up hoping an animal is going to do something in the near future that you want. Everybody gets a bit tense because once you can that big camera on, you’re basically spending a thousand bucks a minute as that camera is running and hoping that before three minutes, before $3000 goes by, that they did something that you like and they somehow ignored that floundering machine that you are standing with. And not while you are changing magazines, which is the normal time for them to do things.
Drew, how do you go about imposing a narrative on this story?
DF: David and I spent a lot of time talking about that. Our first trip to Madagascar, I remember at the very end, we had some pretty interesting conversations about the just trying to piece together what this story is like about at its core; because obviously it’s about lemurs and the lemurs are amazing and all that but we are trying to make films that aren’t necessarily straight wildlife films that are more cinematic that have a sort of real cinema story to it. The thing we kept coming back to, really the defining characteristic of the lemur story is that they are really these accidental creatures in a sense. They came to Madagascar by accident. They found this Garden of Eden with no snakes and no apples and they flourished there for 40 million years before predators showed up. It’s kind of this alternate reality of what happens, primate development in Africa. And the danger has finally reached them. All the troubles in the world after millions and millions and millions and millions of years have finally reaches their shores. And how are they dealing with that? And how are we going to deal with that?
What have we learned about humans from studying lemurs?
PW: We have learned a lot of things. First of all, being primates, they live very long, maybe 30, 35 years in the wild. So we begin to look at old age, what is old age in the wild? Does it slow them down? Are the older ones out-of-favor? Are they good grandmothers? It was very charming to see they have great respect for their elders. They don’t cast them aside. So that’s good and we’ve learned a lot about different kinds of social systems because some of that lemurs are monogamous pairs and others are kind of groups of males and females in one group. And we’ve learned about parent-offspring conflict and growing up.
Lemurs are good parents but they do it in different ways. I originally studied father care. I was very interested in that and we saw that a lot of these animals that lived in pairs and the father wasn’t doing anything at all for the first month. But then suddenly, when the baby got to be a certain weight then the dads chipped in and started carrying the babies which was very nice. And then if there was twins or triplets then they helped, so that’s definitely true. The black and white lemur, the one that relaxes on that branch, they actually have day care, like kindergartens; where all the mothers come together and they put all the babies into this one nest and they let dad watch it while they go out and have food and have a good time and then they come back in a few hours. We’ve never seen that in other primates. This is the first time it’s been described so that’s major news.
Anybody who sees this movie is going to be utterly enchanted by the dancing.
PW: Lemurs are extraordinarily leapers. I mean they are just really going from tree to tree and then if there is not a tree, they just come down to the ground very gracefully. But it is the music that makes them seem to be dancing. They are basically getting from one place to another and that’s just natural for them. They are just natural acrobatic dancers, just the way they move. It’s beautiful!
DF: Music choices are totally fun and we certainly threw a lot of choices up against that to see what stuck. I mean we went through James Brown and all sorts of things. I remember asking one of the researchers in Madagascar who works with (19:45 inaudible), “what type of music do you think they would dance to?” She was like, “Jazz, they would dance to jazz.”
The people behind the marvelous 3D IMAx Born to be Wild have made another awwww-inspiring story of some of the world’s least-known and most adorable and intriguing creatures, the more than a hundred species of lemurs, found only on the island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. Around the time of the dinosaurs, lemurs arrived on Madagascar as castaways. For millions of years it was a paradise for them with no predators. Fascinatingly, due to the isolation, evolution and natural selection resulted in unique species found nowhere else on earth.
This fascinating 40-minute film takes us inside the world of these glorious creatures, their brilliant eyes and leaping dances, and the efforts led by American professor Patricia Wright to create spaces that will keep them safe. Lemurs die in captivity. They can only be kept alive in their own environment. We see scientists search to find mates for the last two known of one species of lemur living in a preserve, playing matchmaker by hunting down two more from the wild and introducing them to each other. The Lemurs and Wright are exceptionally engaging protagonists, and by the time we get to the schoolchildren dressing up as indigenous animals at the end, you will understand how they feel.
Parents should know that there are references to the risk of extinction and environmental despoliation.
Family discussion: Which lemur was your favorite? How are lemurs like other primates: chimps, apes, and humans? How are they different? What can you do to help lemurs?
Errol Morris turns his famous “interrotron” camera on two-time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for something between a bookend and a counterpoint to his Oscar-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. But this SecDef (as they say in the Pentagon) is not here to confess or apologize even in part, as McNamara did.
He says, in the movie’s final exchange, that he is not sure why he agreed to submit to more than 30 hours of what must have felt more like the cross-examination in “A Few Good Men” or even a detainee interrogation than the back-and-forth press briefings Rumsfeld conducted during the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We see many clips from those celebrated exchanges, at the time referred to as the best show in Washington, and still undeniably entertaining. Rumsfeld’s good humor and confidence were bracing and reassuring at a time when everything seemed to be what he would call an unknown unknown. Like Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” he does not think we can handle the truth. He may be right.
He’s not here to explain. What he is here to do is to repeat the same version of the story, despite the fact that the audience has had the benefit of making some of those unknowns more known.
Rumsfeld’s constant memos, perhaps 20,000 by his count over his final term at Defense, were called “snowflakes” by the staff, based on their color and frequency. It must have seemed like an avalanche. Morris shows us long shelves of folders filled with snowflakes. He has Rumsfeld read some portions aloud, beginning with his famous taxonomy of information. There were known knowns, things we know and know to be true. There were known unknowns, things we do not know and wish we did. There were unknown knowns, things we do not realize that we know. And unknown unknowns, things we don’t know and don’t know that we need to know. Yes.
But what we do with those categories is the tough part, especially when assigning facts. The boxes and labels are nice and neat. The things we do and do not know are not. Rumsfeld often seems Wittgensteinian when he calls for dictionary definitions or makes a distinction between a Pentagon term and standard English. But definitions are not answers.
“Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination,” Rumsfeld says. So, we gather, was 9/11. Vietnam was “the inevitable ugly ending of an unsuccessful effort.” How do we not make that mistake again? How do we destroy terrorists without a Hydra effect, creating two more for every one we cut down? We might think those answers are known unknowns. But Rumsfeld does not have the luxury of waiting to be sure.
He tells us he found out the US was going to invade Iraq when he was called into a meeting with then-Vice President Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld’s former assistant in the Nixon White House), along with Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. And that he never read the Justice Department legal memos about “enhanced interrogation.” He insists that he never said and the American people never thought there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. Cut to tape of the press conference where he called Saddam a liar for denying there was a connection.
Rumsfeld is aware of the inherent conflicts. He cheerfully acknowledges the inconsistency between two principles: Belief in the inevitability of conflict can be one of its causes. And if you wish for peace, prepare for war. Plus: all generalizations are false, including this one. He sounds like a zen master, but a jolly one. His good humor can be disconcerting, but not chilling. At the time, it was reassuring to us and undeniably disconcerting to our enemies. Rumsfeld often seems exceptionally forthright, as when he calmly discusses his two offers to resign following the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Would you rather have someone in that job who is grim?
His demeanor comes across today as oddly disengaged. He tears up once, telling about a visit to a gravely injured soldier who was not expected to live, but who did. There are no stories about those who did not.
Morris sometimes overdoes it, with a celestial choir and a snow globe of the Washington Monument as repeated commentary/symbols. Repeated sped-up shots of traffic in Washington, obviously far after the events being discussed, add little.
One can’t help thinking that part of what draws Morris to this story is his own belief in the capacity for absolute truth, in its way as limited as Rumsfeld’s belief that he can tie down the unknown unknowns tightly enough to support a military strategy. Or disinfect a morally compromised decision. But then, how many decisions in wartime or in time of terrorism are not morally compromised? There are unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, and there are also political and historical quagmires.
Parents should know that this film has disturbing subject matter and some graphic images of the victims of “enhanced interrogation” and abuse.
Family discussion: Once you have created the categories of “known knowns” and “known unknowns,” how do you know when you have enough information to decide? What qualities should one have to serve as Secretary of Defense? What surprised you about this version of the story and why?
It was a galvanizing moment. A divisive moment. An iconic moment.
President George H.W. Bush had just nominated Clarence Thomas to be the second black man and the first black Republican Supreme Court justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee was conducting a confirmation hearing. It was spirited and at times partisan, but nothing out of the ordinary.
And then a law professor from Oklahoma named Anita Hill appeared before the committee to testify that when she worked for Thomas he frequently made crude, offensive, and humiliating comments to her. While she had never filed a formal complaint and had indeed accepted a second job working for him, she said that she had to answer the committee’s investigators truthfully to allow them to make an informed decision about a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
This was in 1991. Most Americans were not familiar with the rules on sexual harassment. The all-white, all-male, all-old members of the committee clearly had no clue on how to evaluate Hill’s testimony, or even how to treat her. This documentary, more than twenty years later, looks at what happened and what has and has not changed.
It begins with a 2010 phone message from Thomas’ wife, Ginni, left on Hill’s voicemail, asking her to apologize, and ending with a chirpy “Okay?” Hill is not apologizing. As she appeared 23 years ago, she is still utterly dignified and unruffled, though understandably less formal and more relaxed.
Hill is the youngest of 13 siblings, born on a farm in Oklahoma. Her parents moved there to escape a lynching. Her older siblings attended segregated schools and six of her seven brothers went into the military. Her parents told her she would have to be twice as good to get half as much as her white classmates. She was willing to be twice as good. She was class valedictorian.
The film takes us through the hearing, with the Senators’outrageous questions (“Are you a scorned woman? Are you a martyr?” asked Howell Heflin) and insulting comments (Alan K. Simpson refers to “sexual harassment crap”). She took and passed a polygraph test. Witnesses recalled her telling them about Thomas’ behavior at the time, but no corroborating witnesses with similar stores were permitted. Issues of race and gender are forthrightly explored. Law professor Charles Ogletree, who represented Hill, talks about how no other black man stood up for her. “You don’t do that to a brother,” he quotes. Implied in his decision: “You don’t do that to a sister.” Hill says, “People had a tendency to think that he had a race and I had a gender.”
“There was no way we were going to win,” Ogletree says. “It was a charade.” And yet, with much still left to do, this movie shows how much has been accomplished. Hill did not want to be a public figure and hoped to go back to her work on commercial law. She promised herself to talk about it for just two years. But “If I am not public, there will be a sense of victory over me.” She understood that sexual harassment was not about flirting or seduction but about power and control and humiliation. And it was just one part of the larger issue of gender inequality. The film shows us her work, especially with young women, to teach them what is “okay and not okay.”
It will itself serve as a teaching document to carry the story forward, not just the story of a woman objecting to demeaning treatment from her employer, but the story of a woman who told the truth with “honesty, dignity, and courage.”
Parents should know that this film includes very explicit sexual terms and references including pornography.
Family discussion: What has changed most since 1991? What has changed least? What is the best way to educate young men and women about sexual harassment?
. But this SecDef (as they say in the Pentagon) is not here to confess or apologize even in part, as McNamara did.
, also by Morris, and 