For most of us, David Attenborough is the voice of nature. His soothing narration has taken us across the globe, from the coldest arctic waters to the hottest deserts to the wettest rainforests. The 93 year old Attenborough has spent his whole adult life exploring the world and documenting nature. During that time, he has seen drastic changes, and he has taken it upon himself to try to help us avoid an impending disaster.
Themes of conservation are not new to Attenborough’s documentaries but Netflix’s new A Life on Our Planet has no time for subtlety. Clearly, Attenborough feels he has no time to waste, which is less a function of his age and more an indication that catastrophe is imminent. Wisely, Attenborough’s warnings are interspersed with the beauty of our world, to show what is at stake and what could be saved or lost depending on which path we choose. Even better, Attenborough lays out a plan for saving ourselves, which he presents clearly and sells by pointing out that our planet is going to keep spinning, but our place on it is not guaranteed.
Unfortunately, Attenborough’s pleas will probably be dismissed by those who deny the changes that Attenborough, and all self-respecting climatologists, are documenting. Instead of ignoring the problem, I wish the deniers would be honest in their selfishness, and admit they don’t want to make sacrifices to preserve the future for coming generations. Of course, that would require them to admit they’re bad people, so I’m not holding my breath.
It is up to the rest of us to take action. A Life on Our Planet shows us how to do it, and more importantly, Attenborough reassures us that we can still undo the damage we have caused. A Life on Our Planet manages to be hopeful without minimizing the problems we face. It is a nature film that is about us, and it is a fitting capstone for Attenborough’s life work.
Monsters and Men is that conversation piece. Moreover, it is one of the finest cinematic conversation pieces I have ever seen. What makes it stand out from the rest is that it tries so very hard to stay impartial (and succeeds), to the point that a black cop at a dinner party (
dust settles, 130 people are dead and 413 more are injured in a series of coordinated attacks at a number of locations throughout the city. The investigation quickly determines that the attackers are from Molenbeek, Brussels, the very neighbourhood where this barbershop is located. Of course, the attack becomes the main topic of conversation here, just like it was everywhere else.
Meanwhile, Justin Timberlake got some deserved flak for daring to wear a Times Up pin but refusing to so much as comment on his willingness to work with Allen. Both Selena Gomez and Elle Fanning have been unapologetic about working with him on A Rainy Day, a troubling trend for young women. Jude Law and Liev Schreiber have also remained mum. Scarlett Johansson, who has positioned herself at the forefront of the Times Up movement and has publicly criticized James Franco for his creepy sexual advances, has failed to comment on Allen’s though she’s worked with him repeatedly. And Alec Baldwin has of course been stupid enough to support him – I suppose abusive men have to stick together.
The residential school system is not the only black mark on our country but it has to be the darkest stain. We and our government could not have done worse by our indigenous people if we tried. We should have known from the start that this imperialistic plan would go horribly wrong. After all, we chose to put the Catholic Church in charge of many of these awful residential schools (and not just the Catholic Church, but a bunch of others share the blame, including the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Churches of Canada), because it wasn’t enough to tear children from their families and literally beat their culture out of them, it seemed appropriate for some reason to facilitate child molestation too, feeding 150,000 potential altar boys and girls to more than a few insatiable priests over the lifetime of the program. 150,000!
means 300k of the festival’s attendees were vying for just 1000 seats in the venue. Some people may be discouraged by those odds, but not Sean! He gamely spent hours lined up outside (while I watched 
to find a Gremlin long after he’d already approved the scene, and he’ll continue to be surprised by Easter eggs (how fitting, for this weekend!), as will we. In subsequent viewings, you could easily play a drinking game with friends, or a Bingo game would be fun, just spotting all the cool things the brilliant art department and visual effects people slipped in there – it’s like the hoarders of movies with so many layers it’ll take forever before you reach the dead cat layer.
From there she was assistant costume designer on 2001’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and 2002’s 
that were then tailored to fit Gary Oldman in a fat suit. She was able to consult old photographs of him to get the details just right. He was pretty fastidious in his wardrobe and a bit of a “dandy” according to Durran. She had a replica of his watch and watch chain made by the original watchmaker, Breguet. She also sourced hats from Churchill’s preferred company, Lock & Co. All of these wardrobe foundations allowed Oldman to look the authentic part while still making the character his own. For Durran, the most fun was probably in dressing Churchill’s wife, Clementine, played by Kristin Scott Thomas. Clemmy was a bit of a fashion risk-taker and was once a milliner, so her wardrobe choices were a bit eccentric and she nearly always had a fabulous hat. You can imagine the kind of fun a costumer can have with that kind of starting point.
Durran chose not to recreate costumes in exact detail (which of course are lacking in simple line drawings). “My favorite bit of the whole movie is when Belle wakes up in the village, the window opens, and she says, ‘Bonjour!,’ and then you go into the song. You see the whole world of color and pattern—that’s how I wanted the village to be. That was created from an 18th-century reference: a collection of prints of French regional costumes,” says Durran. Emma Watson, who played Belle, informed a lot of the costume choices. Watson wanted Belle to seem like a more modern kind of princess, and her famous blue dress was made to be functional, allowing for movement and activity. The yellow dress, of course, is where the big time and money were spent. “In the end, it came down to the fact that, really, whatever you want to do with the dress, there is an expectation based on the animation. If you stray too far, it feels like you’re not giving the 
audience the dress they’re expecting. . . . But if I had actually produced the animated costume, it would have been quite simple and flat and lacking in detail. It’s not a very detailed drawing, when you get down to it. So, I looked to 18th-century France as an inspiration—the historical date and location of the movie. Also, Disney and everybody involved wanted Belle’s dress to be different from the Cinderella dress [in the 2015 live-action movie]. Emma didn’t want to be corseted. She was a more modern princess.” Not to leave out the Beast. Durran had painstakingly recreated the Beast’s costume down to the very last detail but in the end, the studio went with a CGI beast instead, and Dan Stevens ended up wearing one of those monstrous CGI motion capture suits instead. Durran sent her costumes to the animation lab where they studied the fabrics to capture the form and motion. But when he’s not the Beast, the costume work is incredible: “An amazing amount of work went into the prince’s costume in the opening ball sequence, which you don’t really see. It’s got a whole custom embroidery of different kinds of grotesque animals stitched into the pattern. It’s embellished with 20,000 Swarovski crystals that took five days to stitch on.”
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 