Saturday, April 13, 2019
Our Planet
New York Times – "Watching ‘Our Planet,’ Where the Predator Is Us"
"“One Planet” appeals to the sense of wonder as viscerally as any of its predecessors, but to a purpose. Here is this beautiful, rare thing, each episode says. It didn’t used to be rare! But it is now. And here is how we’re responsible. And here is a tangible thing we might do to fix it. The arc of each installment runs from beauty to loss to a concrete, hopeful example of a battered ecosystem that’s recovered."
...
"The understatement is potent. Attenborough describes a mating scene in a lush Madagascar jungle with typical verve, then drops a bomb: “Since these pictures were recorded, this forest, and the unique life it once contained, have disappeared altogether.” That celebration of life you thought you were just watching was, in fact, a funeral.
His voiceover is paired with images of destruction that are as breathtaking in scale as any mass migration footage. Satellite images of verdant green shrink to desiccated brown over and over. The rain forests episode closes with an aerial image of the wild Amazon tree canopy butting up against a homogeneous sea of agricultural palms, as sterile and monotonous as a computer-generated pattern."
...
"The last episode, “Forests,” winds up, of all places, in the ruins of Chernobyl, still depopulated after the 1986 nuclear disaster. The accident was a catastrophe, of course, for humans. But not for everyone.
The camera pulls back from an empty building, its Cyrillic letters crumbling — and there are trees growing from the roof. Everywhere in this desolated settlement, the forest, whose decline the episode had just detailed, is reclaiming its space. Hares and lizards scamper about the ruins. A fox creeps through an open entryway. A moose strides past a sign marked with the radiation symbol. Herds of endangered Przewalski’s horses roam wild.
Reader, I laughed. This vista was horrible, of course, apocalyptic, something from “The Walking Dead.” And it was amazing. We were gone, and life was springing back without us. This was the happy ending.
Whether a happy ending is still possible with us is the question “Our Planet” will leave you to sit with long after it ends."
The Remake of Dune
November 20, 2020
Based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert
Written by Eric Roth, Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Shooting in Budapest, Hungary and Jordan
Starring:
Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides
Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica
Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides
Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck
Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
Dave Bautista as Glossu Rabban
Zendaya as Chani, Fremen
Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho
Javier Bardem as Stilgar
Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Minnesota Direwolves
The Direwolves are Coming.
"In partnership with HBO and Game of Thrones, the Timberwolves will take place in a battle of the North on the 9th day of April and unleash the most powerful breed known to thee: the Direwolves. Their existence will be tested, the squadron will be challenged, but they will fight together with all eyes north.
Rep the Pack and stand as a ruler of the realm with special Direwolves gear only available at the Timberwolves Team Store. This is #ForTheThrone! "
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Chicxulub
New Yorker – "The Day the Dinosaurs Died"
By Douglas Preston
"One day sixty-six million years ago, life on Earth almost came to a shattering end. The world that emerged after the impact was a much simpler place. When sunlight finally broke through the haze, it illuminated a hellish landscape. The oceans were empty. The land was covered with drifting ash. The forests were charred stumps. The cold gave way to extreme heat as a greenhouse effect kicked in. Life mostly consisted of mats of algae and growths of fungus: for years after the impact, the Earth was covered with little other than ferns. Furtive, ratlike mammals lived in the gloomy understory.
But eventually life emerged and blossomed again, in new forms. The KT event continues to attract the interest of scientists in no small part because the ashen print it left on the planet is an existential reminder. “We wouldn’t be here talking on the phone if that meteorite hadn’t fallen,” Smit told me, with a laugh. DePalma agreed. For the first hundred million years of their existence, before the asteroid struck, mammals scurried about the feet of the dinosaurs, amounting to little. “But when the dinosaurs were gone it freed them,” DePalma said. In the next epoch, mammals underwent an explosion of adaptive radiation, evolving into a dazzling variety of forms, from tiny bats to gigantic titanotheres, from horses to whales, from fearsome creodonts to large-brained primates with hands that could grasp and minds that could see through time."
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