Director : Nic Mathieu
Story : Ian Fried
Music : Junkie XL
Camera : Bojan Bazelli
Company : Legendary Pictures
Running :107 minutes
Country : United States
"The less you know, the better.." It's a common phrase used in all walks of life, and it applies perfectly to Nic Mathieu's Spectral. This high-tech scifi film was originally planned as a theatrical release but has since been relegated to Netflix, possibly because it's a movie based on a great idea that overshadows everything that could've made it great.
A war story with a science fiction twist, Spectral does its best to deliver on that promise. But as the film goes along it's a frustrating mix of high and low. The highs are many of the action scenes, which pit American soldiers armed like high-tech Rambos against an unstoppable ghost army. The lows are the rest of the movie, where the characters talk endlessly until they miraculously figure out what these beings actually are.
Of course, in a movie like this, the audience is doing the same thing. We desperately want to know what these beings are and how our heroes are going to defeat them. It's a nice mystery to have as a baseline for everything around it, but that's almost all Spectral has to it. Almost everything in the movie is in service of answering these questions and, unfortunately, it comes at the expense of character building, emotional stakes, or a compelling story.
Title : Owls: A Guide to Every Species in the World
Author : Marianne Taylor
Publisher : Harpercollins
Pages : 256
ISBN : 10: 0062413880
There is a lot more to know about owls than just the basic facts and mythologies about these remarkable predators. The best place to start may well be Owls: A Guide to Every Species in the World. This fascinating owl encyclopedia was written by Marianne Taylor, author of a dozen natural history books, including Beautiful Owls and Owls.
Her most recent owl book explores all 225 known species, from the snowy owl in the Arctic tundra to the burrowing owl of the Mexican deserts; from the enormous eagle owl that preys on young deer and foxes, to the elf owl that eats insects.
A visual guide that explores all 225 known species, packed with maps, photographs, illustrations, informative scientific details, and a bonus 35½" x 12" accordion poster illustrated with the true-to-size wing length of the largest owl, overlayed with the wing length of the smallest owl and several owls in-between.
Found on every continent other than Antartica, the owl is anything but an unexceptional bird. Their piercing gaze, uncanny ability to swivel their heads in the round, and their spooky stealth has long made them the subjects of art, literature, and films. And even those only slightly interested in birdwatching can’t help being thrilled by hearing or seeing an owl in the wild.
Apart from detailed profiles and images of each of the species, Taylor provides a lot of fascinating information about how owls see, hear, fly, hunt, mate, and more. In an email exchange with Voices, she shared some of the secrets of one of the world’s most charismatic birds.
Review Courtesy: https://www.harpercollins.com
December 15 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of filmmaker Walt Disney. Disney, was known for championing traditional morality and promoting nostalgia for a simpler past epitomized by small-town America. At the same time, he was widely recognized as a visionary futurist who enthusiastically embraced the new horizons offered by science and technology.
The film in the Disney canon that offers arguably the most explicit warning about the abuse of science and technology is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), still the definitive cinematic adaptation of the Jules Verne novel of the same name. 20,000 Leagues depicts a supposedly civilized world where international powers employ technology for enslavement and death.
The dangers of science and technology can also be seen in Disney's comic fantasies, especially The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963). But perhaps Disney's most scathing indictment of the dark side of technological progress came in a 1952 animated short based on the children's book, The Little House, which tells how a beloved house in the country is eventually swallowed up by the encroaching city.
Link: http://www.dw.com
Phylum : Chordata
Class : Mammalia
Order : Chiroptera
Family : Molossidae
Genus : Tadarida
Species : Tadarida brasiliensis
Facundo Bacardà Massó, the Spanish wine merchant who founded the Bacardi company in 1862 maintained a fierce opposition to Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba in the 1960s. Bacardi family fled Cuba when Fidel Castro’s government nationoalized the island’s distilleries in 1960.
But the compnay still uses bat as its icon which are remiscent of those lived in the original distillaries of the company in Cuba. Those bats are now identified to be the Mexican free-tailed bat also known as the Brazilian free-tailed bat.
The Mexican free-tailed bat is listed in the IUCN Red List as of least concern, yet it is considered to be a species of special concern. Its roosting habits make it easy for human interactions to harm the bat populations.
Habitat destruction is one cause for their declining populations. In a cave called Cueva de la Boca near Monterrey, Mexico, many endangered species including Mexican free-tailed bats are being protected by the Mexican environmental conservation (NGO), Pronatura Noreste.
Details: http://www.iucnredlist.org
