After having lunch at Restaurant
Raphael [review,
discussion],
Lloyd and I attended the matinee showing of Winged
Migration, a lovely film about migratory birds. I will not attempt a review
here but just to comment on the experience. (If you want discussion of the film
read some reviews at RottenTomatoes!)
Unfortunately, I was a bit tired and ended up zoning out at times. But that
seemed okay with the spirit of the film, which was unhurried, moving at nature's
pace in some sense (As Lloyd said, some of the scenes were rather dreamy --
so falling asleep on my part does not imply a fault with the film, but more
about my not getting enough sleep to take in serious art!).

The most basic thing that the film did for me is to help to see birds in a
new light -- and to not take for granted (to "problematize",
if you will) long migratory patterns of birds. (How do birds individually and
collectively decide it's time to fly? How do they end up at the same spots?
Do young birds learn from old birds where to fly? We saw certain birds get stranded
-- what happened to them? Why do some birds fly so much farther than others?
Do birds just get tired and fall out of the sky? And so on....) Not to overintellectualize
the film as I'm wont to do -- because the most amazing thing I saw was just
seeing birds fly close up, in a way I would never see otherwise It's actually
incredible and weird that birds would routinely fly thousands of miles. Is that
type of migration really necessary or some crazy extravagence?

(I didn't realize that Lloyd was seeing the film for the second time until I posted my reaction! Read his first and second impressions.)