Polar Bear Porn

This week seems to be a week for free movies - I'm seeing two of them! First up was a special screening of Arctic Tale, free tickets for which I got from work. Why my office got a bunch of free passes to this movie - well, your guess is as good as mine! Billed as "from the makers of March of the Penguins" this documentary follows Nanu the polar bear and Seela the walrus from birth until adulthood. Now, March of the Penguins was a pretty damn good movie and I was disappointed to discover that this film didn't even come close to measuring up. It seemed to be geared more towards kids, so there was far less info about the two species than I would have liked, and far more fart jokes. Oh, if only I were kidding about that! There was a long scene of walruses farting. Also, the narration by, "storyteller" Queen Latifah , was rather lame (e.g., saying things like "that's just way the walruses roll" and introducing the farting scene by saying "someone starts a game of pull my flipper") and the music sucked. They did, however, get some pretty amazing shots, including shots of the polar bear in her birthing den with brand new baby cubs and shots from under the water of polar bears walking on very thin ice.

Probably the worst part of the movie was when Queen Latifah basically calls all the walruses, other than Seela, a bunch of sluts. OK, so she didn't use the word "slut." I believe it was more something along the lines of "Seela isn't going to go with just any male. She has standards, unlike *some* walruses she knows." [showing picture of other walruses jumping into the water]. But she wanted to say "sluts!", I can just tell.

Probably the best part of the movie happened when Nanu the polar bear was all grown up and ready to mate. The deal with male polar bears is that they are pretty much the worst deadbeat dads. Not only do they take off after mating, leaving the female to birth and raise the cubs on her own, but if a male polar bear should run into a female and her cubs, he'll attack and kill them given the chance! Of course, when the female is cub-less and ready to mate, he's not violent. So the best part of the movie went like this:

Queen Latifah says: "After many years of fearing the male polar bear, Nanu now finds herself drawn to one," as images of Nanu and the male polar bear being all cuddly show on the screen.

Kid, says loudly in the otherwise silent the theatre: "Is he being nice to her?"

Um, ya, you could call it that [cue porn music].

So, in conclusion, I'm glad that I didn't actually pay to watch this movie.

Next up in free movieland is Skinwalkers, tickets for which Kalev won from the Georgia Straight and which we are seeing tomorrow night. It's a movie about warring werewolf packs. Coincidentally, also a documentary.