http://www.badmouth.net Look, Ma! No pants! Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:04:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/ http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:01:27 +0000 Brian McDonough http://www.badmouth.net/?p=1151 [rating:3] Directors: Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield Starring: Lions, Elephants & Polar Bears, oh my! Here’s a fact: If you’re going to make a documentary called Earth and fit it into a ninety-minute run time, you are doomed to failure. Big topic, “Earth.” Even if you’re sticking to the natural world, and even if your main goal were to fetishize waterfalls and cute baby animals, you’re still never gonna produce a ninety-minute film worthy of being called … Earth. The first film to be released by the new DisneyNature label (timed to Earth Day!) is in fact a two-year-old BBC-funded documentary that was produced in parallel with Planet Earth, a series whose total ten-hour runtime sounds a little better-suited to covering the subject. Knowing this somehow makes one more forgiving of the flaws of the cinematic release. Earth feels like a poorly assembled hodgepodge of brilliant footage whose glory is nearly lost beneath weak storytelling (and a truly crap score). Imagining the filmmakers having to cut the 600 broadcast minutes they’d already culled from thousands of hours of video to get this hour and a half at least makes you appreciate how stacked against them the deck was. No related posts.]]> http://www.badmouth.net/earth-2007/feed/ 5