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November 17, 2006
Happy Feet
(out of four)
In the wonderful documentary March of the Penguins, Morgan Freeman describes emperor penguins as "not that different from us, really." They love, they mate, they mourn, they shuffle 70 miles across the frozen Antarctic tundra to feed their adorable fuzzy babies.
Happy Feet takes a subtle, but critically different approach to those same fascinating flightless birds. Instead of turning penguins into people, it transforms people into penguins. It's a device as old as Aesop, using animals to illustrate a parable about human nature, and nobody does it better than director George Miller, creator of the Babe movies.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
Fur
(out of four)
People don't pay to be psychoanalyzed at the movies, but maybe they should. You will learn virtually nothing about legendary New York photographer Diane Arbus — except that she pronounced her name "Dee-Ann" — and everything about yourself in Fur. That's because the movie isn't a literal history of the artist's life at all, but a metaphorical examination of the process by which a docile and obedient housewife finds it possible to embrace beauty in what those around her deemed "perverse."
Biopics, as a genre, famously distort the facts to suit the screen, inciting all sorts of fervor among the detail-mongers of the world.
Posted by Peter Debruge at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)