TDWP-2 and Mr. Serkis's AF - May 5

 

  On May 1, 2026, two very different films hit the movie screens in West and elsewhere: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’, on the one hand, and a new adaptation of George Orwell's ‘Animal Farm’, on the other. Pause.

   What do they have in common, it would seem? Nothing, at a first glance. One film was shot live, with live actors, while the other was animated; one is almost entirely original and independent, while the other is not; one is celebrated and actively promoted, while the other is being quickly and quietly forgotten; one is about the modern Western elite, while the other...

   Let us start with this. It has been forgotten for a while now, but the first "Prada" (2006) was based on a book of the same name, just as the ‘Animal Farm’ movies are. This, as I wrote earlier, is already the third adaptation to date – the first came out in the 1950s, the second in the 90s, and this one (set in 2026) is the third, and the least successful (for now). Why?

   Because ‘Animal Farm’ was entirely political— Orwell, I swear, was a Trotskyist, he had a decidedly negative attitude toward Stalin and Stalinism, as well as toward English capitalism, and so ‘Animal Farm’ ends with a fraternization between Stalinists and capitalists. History showed that Orwell was not entirely right, but he was not entirely wrong either—but the important thing for us is that Mr. Serkis, who brought ‘Animal Farm’ to the screen this time, does not have that plot line at all. His version of ‘Animal Farm’ is completely apolitical, and as a result, it failed. ‘Animal Farm’ without politics—especially international politics—is of no particular use to anyone.

   Let us turn to ‘Prada’. Where is the politics there? That is right – nowhere.

   What were the book and the first film about? Contrary to popular belief, the "devil" in the title is not Miranda; her last name, Priestley, suggests she's "only" a priestess of the devil. The devil there is the entire fashion world: rich, glittering, energetic, dynamic... empty. Miranda, Emily, and Nigel spend their entire lives "running" to stay current, afloat; there's no time left for family, personal relationships, or simple human happiness, and that's why Andy/Andrea departs from Miranda quite rudely (by the standards of the English language and manners anyhow) at the end of the book and leaves the fashion world. Already in the first film, all of this was toned down and reduced to the relationship between Miranda and Andy (Emily and Nigel are a bit different), and now it is completely gone.

   What is there instead?

   Let us look. On the one hand, we have Andy, an accomplished journalist who... was cut (like her entire department), and needs to reinvent herself. On the other hand, we have Miranda, who has finally realized she has to be accountable for her words and who is in trouble, from which Andy and... Emily will help her out, only it turns out the latter has only a Very Cunning Plan, according to which the ‘Runway’ magazine will end up in her hands, and Miranda will be screwed. However, with Andy's help, Miranda turns the tables and remains the head of ‘the Runway’; only the owner changes...

   On the one hand, it all reminds me of the Westeros from Martin's books—there, all those lords, knights, and other aristocrats actually fighting, warring, and scheming with each other, while the "third estate"—mostly peasants—is just somewhere in the background, of no use to anyone...

 Except that the aristocrats become less and less necessary as time goes on—in the books, everything was heading toward Jon and Dany taking the throne—but the ending of IT turned out pretty badly, it messed everything up, and now the books of this aspect of the franchise have gone quiet as well. Pause.

   Nevertheless, in "Prada 2," too, everything that happens is a game played by the elite, the patricians; the world of "Prada 2" is rather limited—it is all about fashion, from America to Italy, and so on. None of the "outsiders" care about these games played by Miranda, Andy, and Emily; Andy, having dealt with Miranda and "the Runway," is ready to be friends with Emily—and why not? Who knows what the future holds, and Andy no longer has her old friends (from the first film)...

   In addition, there is no politics either, just as there is not in ‘Animal Farm-2026’—it is just that ‘Prada 2’ is made several orders of magnitude better than Mr. Serkis's ‘Animal Farm’, and that is why people like it—many people want to see beautiful actresses and actors dressed in expensive clothes... and preoccupied only with themselves. Pause.

   So, I don't really want to talk about politics, especially old politics—more than a hundred years have passed since the 1917 revolution described in 'Animal Farm'—but! Vladimir Ilyich having enlightened the Russian-Soviet proletariat, turned it Red, and with their help, his team defeated the Whites, who were patrician elitists from a political point of view; and for quite a long time, the USSR had something like a "dictatorship from below," when everything (at least in words) was for the workers, peasants, and so on. Then everything became "ruined." Read that same Orwell—he blamed everything on Joseph Stalin; how right he is, I do not know...

   Leo Trotsky, on the other hand, was for permanent revolution, meaning an ongoing global (without quotation marks) war, similar to what is already happening around the world: in Europe – Putin’s Special Military Operation, in the Middle East – Iran vs. the USA, further east – India and Pakistan, and so on. Perhaps a shadow world government does exist... and it has composed of Trotskyists? That would be an interesting scenario for a film... and it will not happen, because by now the concepts of "politics" and "culture," especially for the masses, have become somewhat divided.

   ... The last Sovereign Emperors of the Romanov dynasty, and their European relatives—aka their uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.—also tried to keep the "cook's children," etc., out of politics. The outcome is well known. Read Orwell... and do not be like Mr. Serkis, who released a useless monster onto the silver screen. ‘Animal Farm-2026’ and ‘Prada-2’ are not twins, not twins at all, but they are siblings in their apoliticality, and that is sad.

   No matter how much you remove the people from politics, a new leader will still appear who will enlighten them, and then you will be hit on the head with the "Runway".

   After all, the Trotskyists run the world behind the scenes, it seems.

   End

 

Post-Shark Week rant

And so, Shark Week has come and gone, and all I can say is – fake. It’s, really, like the Animal Planet shows, like “Man-Eating Super Wolves” or whatever – deliberately fake information, pretending to be real. The only question is why.

I admit that unlike the AP shows Discovery has tried to make its shark week specials both entertaining and educational, but what it did instead was irritate various scientists who were quote mined by the shows, or downright tricked, etc. True, there was a certain catch-22 (or something similar) factor as well: the shows (and Discovery?) needed rich sponsors, but these sponsors wanted to sponsor something, well, respectable, and so Shark Week shows had to be both educational and entertaining...only they hadn’t.

Seriously, they could have just made them educational; showing, for example, how hammerhead sharks get measured up in the wild, live, is already very exciting – but instead Discovery made this a part of a program that mainly talks about a giant and mythical hammerhead, called “Old Hitler” and “The Harbourmaster”. This is simply wrong.

Firstly, and mainly, hammerhead sharks are less dangerous to humans than great white, bull and tiger sharks. Their particular head shape makes them better hunters on the sea floor, but less so in the open ocean (unlike the tiger sharks, say), and thus makes them less likely to encounter humans, even scientists and fishermen, live. 

And also, “Old Hitler”? Seriously? The chancellor of the Third Reich was a piece of shit accountable for 6+ years of blood, smoke and tears – much more than any shark, regardless of size, ever did. To name any animal (even fish) after him is just wrong. Also – rather dumb. Yes, you can give various animals human names, but they are not really their names, but names that people give them for their own convenience. If animals do have names that they give to each other, they probably do not sound very human...

Getting back on track, if you discount their latest mocumentary about the megalodon, Shark Week at least has tried to be somewhat scientific; its’ AP counterparts, like the before-mentioned “Man-Eating Super Wolves” did not. It even admitted that in the disclaimer, making one wonder why did it was made and aired at all? In the decades past, AP was educational, if somewhat naive (just look at the old episodes of “Wild Kingdom”), now it’s either pure make-believe (like the “Lost Tapes” series), something reminiscent of “Urban Tarzan” from Spike, albeit less staged, or something like “The Pool Master”, which isn’t about animals at all – and since the channel is called, well, Animal Planet, it makes one wonder why is “The Pool Master” aired there at all. At least “Too Cute” or “Pit Bulls and Parolees” have some animals in them, for example... But “Man-Eating Super Wolves” is fake, just as much as of the transformations in the latest “Scooby-Doo” movie are. At least “Scooby-Doo”, the hound that just does not die, is just a cartoon and does not pretend to be anything else. “Super Wolves” pretend to be real...

 

And so, in conclusion, I am forced to admit: Discovery channel has deteriorated somewhat in quality of the shows, but it is still far ahead in the same quality ‘field’ as compared to Animal Planet.

Upcoming 'Shark week' rant

And so, once again, Shark week is almost upon us in Canada. Hooray! Sharks, after all, are magnificent and powerful creatures, alpha predators of the oceans, just as big cats or bears are on land, and crocodiles and alligators are in fresh water.

Sharks are very varying creatures. For example, both the whale shark and the basking shark are filter feeders, but whereas the basking shark just swims around with an open mouth, with the water flowing in and out (through the gills), the whale shark actively pumps the plankton-filled liquid and in general is a more active fish among the two. The megamouth shark, which is also a filter feeder, does its own thing by actively feeding on plankton at night, when its competition (including the baleen whales) is asleep. 

The carnivorous sharks, of course, are an even more diverse group. The great white shark is Jaws, one of the most powerful denizens of the ocean; only the killer whale (and perhaps the sperm whale) can defeat it. The bull shark is smaller, but still very solidly built, and is one of the few fish that can live both in fresh and salt water. The sand tiger shark (no relation to the actual tiger shark) and the blue shark, on the other hand, are graceful inhabitants of the open waters, specializing in catch fish, not warm-blooded mammals and birds, as the great white shark does – and the list goes on.

Some of the sharks are downright bizarre – the aforementioned thresher shark with its remarkable tail; the hammerhead shark with its head; the sawnose shark which is similar to the better-known sawfish because it also has a saw on its nose – etc. All of these features make sharks stars of the ocean world – and of the Shark week that will be airing on the Discovery channel starting from August 10. 

Sadly, there is a rather big fly in the ointment, and it is called “Megalodon: The New Evidence”. It is a sequel to the previous mocumentary, “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives”. That particular film played with the concept of Megalodon surviving in modern times, feeding on such animals as the humpback whales...and for a while it led many people astray, by making them think that this was a real documentary instead.

Now, in part this is his or her own fault – one should not be so gullible about what one sees on TV or the Internet...never mind. I need to go a make an appointment with my vet about the health of my unicorn that I have bought on EBay. That is an old story. The thing is that Discovery channel generally airs documentary films and series, which are based in real life; even on such specials as Shark week what we usually see are documentaries; the Megalodon duology (and before that – the duology about the mermaids) are not – they’re fiction, just like the Sharknado or the Mega-Shark films are.

Now, Discovery channel currently does not have it as bad as the Animal Planet, by comparison; they still do not regularly air such tripe as “Man-Eating Super Wolves” or “Zombie Cats”, etc. But this is a disturbing tendency all the same.

If we are talking about sharks, what about Megalodon itself? Can it still be real? No. Sharks do not readily leave remains, other than their teeth and the occasional backbone vertebra, but their teeth quite take up the slack, and people find them very often. Megalodon teeth in this case take a very specific position: they are fossilized, not fresh. There are no fresh Megalodon teeth, which means – that there are no live Megalodon sharks living in modern oceans. Giant sharks, on the other hand, are a different story – in general, cold-blooded animals tend to grow throughout their lives, and great white sharks, in particular, can reach 3, or even 4.5 m in length: still smaller than Megalodon was, but far bigger than a human is. This is more than enough to fill-in Megalodon’s econiche.

And what econiche is that? That of a mega-predator, of course. Megalodon was the biggest shark of all times, of course, but it was also a part of the mega-fauna of the previous Cenozoic epochs. During that time, most animals were larger than their current relatives are, and the same goes for the sharks.

Speaking of relatives, there is some speculation that Megalodon might be related to the mako sharks. While the great white shark evolved into a powerhouse, the mako (two species) evolved into the aquatic analogue of the cheetah (sort of) – it is the only fish fast enough to catch and kill the legendary swordfish. Real life being what it is, however, sometimes the swordfish is the one who comes on top and dead or dying mako sharks were found, with pieces of the swordfish’s sword still in them – but that’s not the point. The point is that some scientists believe that Megalodon was more closely related to the mako than to the great white, and others – that the mako is the close relative of the great white, and Megalodon is related to neither, and if we don’t even fully know to whom Megalodon was related to, then how do we know what it looked like? Any depiction of the Megalodon is fully speculative, period – maybe it looked like a giant bull shark instead, who knows...

Back to the econiche. The great white shark has taken over Megalodon’s place – to a point: it still does not attack and eat whales. But it does not need to – the killer whale does it instead. Smarter and more social than any shark, even the great white, the killer whale does an admirable job of killing baleen whales, sharks, giant squid and other denizens of the oceans. Not bad for a relative newcomer to Earth – just like humans, the killer whale is very much a modern animal.

The shark, on the other hand, is very old – they have been around roughly since the Devonian, over 300 million years ago in the past, and they were able to handle everything that the Earth, and the universe, threw at them. Lately, this includes humans, who kill many more sharks than sharks kill people. To paraphrase Josef Augusta, a famous paleontologist, ‘the hunter man of the Pleistocene had little impact on nature, unlike the gatherer man of the Holocene’. These are true words, and hopefully, the upcoming Shark week shall discuss them as well.

End

Discovery Channel: Zombie Cats, and cats that are not zombies

I have re-watched the “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” last night. It could be considered a waste of time, but I have watched “Hit & Miss” mini-series, and was in the mood for something different, something simpler than the high-strung and high-notched criminal drama that “Hit & Miss” is. “Zombie Cats” did not disappoint.

What can be said about this special? I have mentioned it in the past, when I was discussing AP’s ‘monster specials’ in general detail, but this time I should describe “Zombie Cats” in some greater details: this special is not so much as non-scientific, as it is just lousy.

The concept in and of itself is not that poor, just poorly delivered and poorly developed: the canine distemper virus (basically, a form of the disease known as rabies) has infested the great cats, causing them to lose fear of people and begin to attack them. (Curiously, the smaller felines, like the domestic cats, have their own strain of the rabies instead.) Even on this level, this statement is undercut, as the humans’ encroachment on the great cats’ habitat is mentioned very often on one hand, and the whole topic of cats being infected with rabies is not being fully developed – it does not go much beyond what I have said already. Structurally, “Zombie Cats” consists largely of several enacted episodes of people (and their dogs) encountering large felines – cougars, leopards, tigers, etc – with various outcomes, intermeshed with much shorter statements about the distemper virus and the encroachment on the cats’ habitat. These various parts do not mesh together very well, and combined they make “Zombie Cats” sound like a very poor version of the now cancelled “MonsterQuest” series (a series not without its own problems, but quite coherent), and not a horror/monster special.

Secondly, the zombie aspect was actually undercut by the whole canine distemper virus angle. Animals with this strain of disease – dogs, great cats, racoons, weasels, etc – do not behave like zombies; by now the modern media has created a certain idea of zombie: it is either an undead corpse, animated by magic, or... still a corpse, animated by a virus or something similar; various shows, such as “Lost Tapes,” “Deadliest Warrior”, and, of course, “The Walking Dead” series have perpetuated this image far and wide. A single zombie is not a threat; it is just a shambling corpse, hungry for brains (and other fleshy part of the living) that it seeks out without any strategy or tactics: it just shambles on and on in a straight line, and while a crowd of zombies can eventually tear down any obstacle (such as a door), a canny and adaptable human can escape them by climbing a tree or a similar landmark, for a zombie can’t climb, and they generally aren’t smart enough to even look upwards or to the side.

Conversely, the great cats in the “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” did all that; they behaved the way that the normal great cats do, albeit ones thrust into abnormal, urban, man-made habitats. Naturally, tragedies occur at a regular basis. But the rabies, or canine distemper, virus had nothing to do with it; all of the animals featured in this show were quite healthy. The rabies does not make animals into zombies; it may force them to act slow and stupid (to human eye, at any rate) on occasion, but they are still quite capable of fast attacks – this is what makes rabid dogs, racoons and similar creatures so dangerous.

Either way, “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” is not about real life; it even is not convincing pretending that there is anything real. Some other specials, like the ones about the mermaids or Megalodon, have a healthy dose of reality; “Zombie Cats” do not. Instead, it is something of a “MonsterQuest” imitation and unsuccessful one – and that why it fails.

Animal Planet: more about the lamprey

And so, life goes on...

The “Man-Eating Super Wolves” have certainly made a reaction, just not the one that AP was probably aiming for – quite a few people and organizations (like Colorado Fish & Wildlife Center, to name one) are upset for their depiction of wolves as man-eaters. “Man-Eating Zombie Cats” (or super squid, or anything else) is one thing – there are plenty of fictional man-eaters, and wild cats infested with zombie virus are not that different.

The wolf situation is. There has been a time, and not too long ago, when wolves were considered man-eaters and were shot and destroyed by people accordingly – and it seems as if AP is trying to bring this time back. Strange, really, because AP is AP, and should be pro-animal, rather than pro-hunting, but there it is.

Anyways, the wolf situation has been measured and reacted against – there are petitions going around to forbid AP from showing “super wolves” and the like – so let us talk about lampreys and their blood lake.

The lampreys, as well as their cousins the hagfish, belong to jawless fish, the oldest group of vertebrate animals in the world. To use the term ‘vertebrate’ in relation to this duo is tricky – neither lamprey nor hagfish have actual bones, and some scientists actually think that the hagfish are invertebrates, just like the insects, the squid and the earthworm, and thus they are not related even to the lampreys. But let us ignore this for simplicity’s sake.

AP’s new monster movie about the lampreys made them a super-predator, almost like the shark with their sucker-like jaws, studded with teeth, looking rather leech-like. In the movie, the lampreys also behaved leech-like, not just getting out of water, but also crawling up the walls using the suckers. That does not work. The lampreys are not leeches; they are fish (technically speaking), and they cannot exist outside water. That is one.

Two, is that lampreys do not quite suck – they rasp. The adult lampreys are predators, they hunt fish that is sick, or weak, or injured, or somehow else incapacitated, (or else already dead): they grab it with their sucker-like mouths and begin to make holes into its flesh that they swallow completely. They do not attack warm-blooded animals, including humans, of course, and their larvae feed on plankton that is carried on the currents of water: they make burrows in sand and they live there – they are poor swimmers, even worse than their parents are.

The lampreys (and the hagfish, but they are trickier) don’t have any bones, but they do have a notochord that acts as a backbone – in some ways they are similar to Haikouichthys and Cephalaspis that were featured in the first episode of Walking with Monsters (2005). Unlike Cephalaspis and others (Ptersapis, Psammolepis, Drepanaspis, etc), they do not have any armor; they do not have any limbs either, but the lampreys, at least, are edible to humans, especially smoked.

The heyday of the jawless fish was the Silurian and the Devonian – they were never very large (about 20 cm long on average) and never too successful: first the sea scorpions and then the true, jawed fish dominated them and ate them. None of them survived the end of the Palaeozoic...but the lamprey and the hagfish did. Those basic, unarmored (save for the slime), homely models of evolution made it for millions of years until the present.

As one can see, the lamprey (and the hagfish) already has quite a few interesting facts and qualities behind them to make a documentary presentation, (as it was also done on River Monsters S5,) and AP did not have to air a sci-fi/horror film to make them attractive and interesting to their audience. But nevertheless they did. Sucks to be them, period.