Movie Review: March of the Penguins et al

March of the Penguins
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Amazing movie...It is the story of the Emperor penguins and how they brave the winters and survive lack of food for months in order to keep their race alive... The movie is really nice but what we loved more was the story "Of Men and Penguins" by the directors Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison and were very impressed with their passion, perseverance and dedication in bringing antartica and the story of the emperor penguins to the rest of the world. Infact we liked their narration in this documentary much more than that in the movie by Morgan Freeman.

They talk about how much ground work they needed to do to shoot the film. While shooting, they lived in Antartica for 9 months away from the family and disconnected from the rest of the world. Everyday they would walk from their camp for about a mile in the ice and -58 deg weather dragging their equipment to film the penguins. Once while filming they were hit by a blizzard and they continued to shoot inspite of it for a while but eventually gave up. They got so lost in the blizzard that a rescue team was sent to get them back. Both of them had severe frost bites and knee injury and had to take a month off recuperating. As Laurent says in the documentary, "their nine months was spent as subjects of the emperor. They had no clue what they were going to do as normal people when they return to the normal world". I think everybody should get a DVD and watch the documentary even if they have seen the movie.

The DVD also has a national geographic piece on critter cam but this was not as close to the heart of the makers as the earlier documentary..

Capote
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Really good movie and very worthy of an Oscar. It is the story of how author/journalist Truman Capote befriends murderers in order to get a story for his book and how he sacrifices his integrity chasing fame and fortune. Philip huffman has done a wonderful job. Below is a line from Truman Capote and I am sure most people would have felt like this at some time.
" I have shed more tears for answered dreams than unanswered ones"

Memoirs of a Geisha
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Good movie. I would love to read the book now. The only part that I found missing was that Geisha's are considered extremely intellectual. They are very well versed with history, literature, etc. and can carry on an interesting conversation on any subject..but somehow this was never conveyed in the movie.