There are two interesting stories today related to the new Disney movie Earth, and since I’ve seen the little kid-friendly doc and disagree with both sides of the backlash, I’m going to address the stories in today’s bloggery despite the fact that only a few film blogs have commented on this topic. First off, there’s the complaint from Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison who thinks the film is too violent to be rated G, to which I call b.s. If anything, the movie cops out too much when it comes to the food-chain kills that every kid is aware of. Bambiis more violent than Earth, and I do honestly believe Ellison made up, or at least exaggerated, his observation of a little girl jumping into her father’s lap. There were kids at the press screening I attended too, but they were so visibly bored with the tameness of the movie that they were literally running up and down the aisle of the Disney screening room.
As for the other story, apparently all of the footage in Earth is recycled from BBC’s Planet Earthseries and basically only the James Earl Jones narration is fresh. Well, sure, maybe this is true, and maybe it’s a bit of a scam, but if so it’s at least a decent abridged and censored version with which to introduce kids to that series (since I’ve only seen bits of the series, I guess it was an introduction for me, as well).
So, I guess your decision to see the movie now rests on three things: you’re okay with a little implicit nature violence, you’re okay with an excellent nature series being retooled for your kids and shown on the big screen (where Planet Earth was not made available), and you want Disneynature to plant a tree in your honor, as promised by the studio’s genius promotion.
After the jump, some responses from the blogs, plus some bonus bloggery related to Earth Day:
As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more
Indiepix has sent word that they’ve set up a theatrical release for Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, a Gotham-nominated doc about The Mesa, a kind of post-apocalyptic, semi-communal community of veterans, runaways and assorted dropouts, who head deep in the desert to live “without boundaries.” Indiepix says they will open the film nationwide (although there’s no indication as to how wide), before it premieres on the Sundance Channel as part of their environmental advocacy programming block, The Green.
I saw the film at the Denver Film Festival and liked it a lot, but I’m curious as to how much success indiePix/Sundance will have selling this as a “Green” film. The film may depict an extreme green lifestyle (there is no electricity, little water and no formal commerce in the area, and many members of the community grow their own crops and rely on generators and/or solar panels for power), but I don’t think it necessarily makes that lifestyle seem attractive. Plus, it’s at least as much about post traumatic stress disorder, poverty, and anti-utopia as it is about non-industrialized agriculture and solar energy.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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