If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
But there was one thing missing from the final installment of Frozen Planet: in 45 minutes, not a word was uttered about why all that Arctic ice is melting. Discovery has admitted to wanting to avoid criticism from climate change deniers.
The struggle to overcome one's doubts, fears, and family's expectations is a theme that ran deep through three short films recently screened at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
The vision of a hapless seal being shaken off an ice floe by a school of hungry Orca whales is chilling. Or a pack of arctic wolves strategizing, isolating a bison, or a penguin becoming some creature's Happy Meal. And that's just above the sea's surface.
Even though I'm about as good as it gets, I realised that it is about that time of year to start thinking about how to better myself in the coming 12 months. I've drawn up three for now, let me know yours in the comments section.
The Downton Abbey special, to be screened on Christmas Day, has already come under fire for its misrepresentation of '20s fashions. Former editor of the Shooting Times, Tony Jackson has publicly berated the episode in the Daily Telegraph over a promotional still which shows a shooting party wearing leather gaiters. Disgusting, right?
Nature documentaries never aim to project complete realism onto our screens. Killer whales don't actually chew on penguins in slow-motion. The Antarctic landscape doesn't glisten and sweep like a David Lean epic, its inhabitants are not permanently viewed through a cinematic filter that would make a tramp's mongrel look like the most majestic of all God's beasts.
The final episode of Frozen Planet featured narrator Sir David Attenborough as he explained the ways in which shrinking ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic are radically changing life at the poles for all species, including humans. But the seventh instalment of the BBC's extraordinarily successful series has attracted undeserved controversy for its focus on the impacts of climate change.
For the millions of people who've watched and enjoyed Frozen Planet, this final episode may leave them with a clearer understanding of the very real threat that climate change poses to our beautiful and fragile polar regions.
Gazing in to her snow globe, Madeleine Wilson forecasts which top 10 travel destinations and trends have the edge for 2012 including, umm, Detroit...
We go through a guilty process of determining what we can manage to watch. Whales eating fish? No problem. And then there's the inevitable, heartbreaking narrative of the baby polar bears versus the baby seal cubs. That's the one that gets us.
