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February 06, 2006
Who is eating human flesh? Bear is eating human flesh!
Caught "Grizzly Man" this weekend.
Let's get one thing out there up front. Timothy Treadwell? Nutjob. Total nutjob. For those of you who don't know, there was this dude, Timothy Treadwell (real name: Timothy Drexler) who hung out with bears and foxes and other woodland creatures every summer on the Alaskan peninsula for thirteen years. Then, in 2003, on lucky year thirteen, him and his girlfriend got eaten by a big grumpy bear. The end. Sort of.
Turns out for the last few summers Timothy was bringing some video cameras with him out to Alaska to video tape his tomfoolery out in the wilderness. Postmortem this German dude Werner Herzog gets a hold of the tapes and edits them into a documentary called "Grizzly Man" which came out this past summer. Apparently I missed out, because everyone thought it was awesome. It was on a bunch of critics top ten lists and it garnered a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was okay, I thought there was a little too much camera time of people from Timothy's life saying "Yup, can't say I'm surprised that he got eaten by bears," and not enough of Timothy himself. Then again, had there been any more Timothy I might have started gnawing on my own arm. Why? Because Timothy = nutjob.
(That being said, pretty much everyone else in the film was certifiable as well. Friends, his mom, his fellow bear lovers, even the coroner who autopsied what was left of his body. The closest thing to a sane person in the movie was the pilot who dropped him off and picked him up every summer. And in any other movie he would have been the crazy person.)
(I will say that Werner Herzog is awesome though, just because he's not just a little German, he's super German. And, yes, also super crazy.)
Point is, I didn't think the flick was all that great. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had saw it up on the big screen with bears growling at me twenty feet tall, but probably not. Maybe I would have liked it more on DVD, but then I probably would have had to pay for it. So that leaves... the Discovery Channel?
The most interesting thing about "Grizzly Man" is that I saw it on the Discovery Channel. The movie came out August 12th in limited release in theaters, then on DVD on December 26th (no being mauled by bears for Christmas for little Timmy!), and it debuted on Discovery Channel bearly a month later on February 3rd. (I'm sorry.)
The catch of course is that Discovery took a 108 minute movie and turned it into a three hour marathon. So in the end it was approaching one half commercials. Dang. Fortunately there's TiVo, but sweet christ, if I was watching it with commercials it'd be infuriating. As it was it was a chore going through fast forwarding every seven or eight minutes.
Now for "Grizzly Man," yeah it was annoying, but I'm happy I didn't pay for it, and the structure of the film lent it self well to the frequent interruptions (if that's even possible). Basically it was: interview crazy person, commercial, interview crazy coroner, commercial, show Timothy talking to bears, commercial, interview crazy person, etc...
In the end though, hey, I watched it, and it was... how you say... bearable. (Last time, really.) I'd be all for more of these quasi simultaneous releases in the future. DVD comes out Tuesday, movie debuts on cable on Friday anyone? Would I watch the eight hour version of Peter Jackson's King Kong? Not so much. But I'd be down for Murderball on MTV or March of the Penguins on Animal Planet in a second.
Probably not "Country Bears" on CMT, though.
Wait, that's a real movie.
Posted by pat at February 6, 2006 11:14 PM
Comments
"this is her poop! it came from her butt! it was inside of her! i'm touching her poop!!!"
Posted by: ill-agitimate fundamentalist at February 6, 2006 11:34 PM
Yeah, we watched it this weekend as well and boy was he stupid! I mean I was expecting a little bit crazy from the guy, but he really took it to the next level. Best part was when the fox took his hat and scurried off to his den. You just know the whole fox community was pleased with that move.
As for the quick release thing, I believe Cuban has been talking about that quite a bit over on his blog. I think they may have done it with one of his group's movies or something.
Posted by: micah at February 7, 2006 08:38 AM