Tanner on Tanner, March of the Penguins, & Coyote Ugly

Tanner on Tanner was a little disappointing, being far more about the difficulty of making a documentary film in today's marketplace (well, at least in 2004, which I believe is considerably harder than in today's marketplace) than Tanner '88, which was a great look at running an underdog campaign. It, with my very little first-hand experience in doing so, seemed real. I have never tried to make a documentary film, but I have seen many, many movies about making movies, and very few of them bring much new to it. Day for Night is an obvious exception. But I just thought it was a little navel-gazing. They did have why Barack Obama is (fingers-crossed) going to be the next President of the United States, though, with the rhetorically brilliant, "The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states." Those lines right there. If only Kerry had half as much talent giving a speech as Obama does, we'd be working on re-electing John Kerry. And this country wouldn't be crappy.

March of the Penguins is 80 minutes of nature footage with a slightly boring narration by Morgan Freeman. How the hell did this make as much money as it did? Ok, looking at Box Office Mojo, it turns out it didn't break $100 million in the US, but still, it's a glorified nature documentary that isn't remotely as impressive as Planet Earth. Which is frickin' awesome if for some reason you haven't seen it yet. Also, what the hell was up with the 2005 Oscars? Crash I've railed against many times before, and I was disappointed with Tsotsi, but Darwin's Nightmare, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Murderball, and Street Fight all would have been better choices. Well, maybe not Murderball, but the other three were quite good documentaries. Nature films are interesting, but I never feel the need to see this, or think about March of the Penguins ever again. The others at least have some kind of relevance to reality. If I never knew that penguins marched 70 miles a bunch of times a year, my life wouldn't change. There are some issues with evolution (God, did you really need to make penguins do that? Really, you did? What a douche!) and monogamy that made this some weird cultural benchmark. Honestly, the movie would have been even more disappointing had I not seen it on blu-ray. I do wish the French soundtrack had been a different track (well, it may have been, but I didn't actually look for it), because that movie needed the penguins to talk and pop music played.

Coyote Ugly is terrible and almost unwatchable. Train wreck to an extreme. Do I need to explain why?