Winter in Pittsburgh is for pansies.

I must admit my excitement when I saw that my parents had purchased the March of the Penguins DVD. Antarctica has always fascinated me; places with vast open spaces and few human inhabitants are rare indeed these days. Rarer still are glimpses into what goes on in such places. Plus, I figured that a documentary about such a mundane group of animals that did so well in the box office had to be good. I mean, from what I've seen, penguins spend most of their time standing around making noises at one another with occasional trips into frigid seawater to feed. Surely a film about things as dull as that had to be great to get so many people out to see it. But clearly I should have known better. After all, this is a country just over half full of people so stupid and clueless that they elected the village idiot as their President. Then again, documentary films like Buena Vista Social Club and Bowling for Columbine did well at the box office too, and dammit, I wanted to see a film that takes place entirely in Antarctica, so I borrowed the DVD from my parents and watched the thing.

As you might be able to tell from that less than enthusiastic opening, I didn't much like March of the Penguins. In fact, I nearly turned it off about 20 minutes in when the mating scene began. Morgan Freeman has a good voice, but even he can't save a script with more meaningless, cliched phrases than this week's State of the Union Address and such clunky language that my 18-year-old composition students could have written something better. And the music! My God; I didn't think it was possible to compliment such awful voice-over with worse music, but these uber-talented filmmakers did just that. During the mating scene, while Morgan Freeman went on and on about these birds' love for each other and the screen displayed seemingly endless beak-to-beak action and penguin neck rubbing, the speakers blared the most awful, tinkly-piano laced, lovey-dovey string music ever conceived by man. But I did make it through the mating scene, and gradually I learned to tune out the ridiculously bad voice-over that kept attributing human emotions and thought processes to birds and implying all kinds of crap about the penguins' caring, spectacular, monogamous mating relationships while also informing the viewers that each penguin chooses a new mate every year.

But those filmmakers did get some spectacular footage. The shots of Antarctica look amazing, desolate, beautiful. The shots of the penguins' claws catch viewers unaware, and all the footage of penguins transferring their eggs back and forth and waddling around balancing the eggs on their claws looks unbelievable. The process through which these penguin eggs reach maturity and hatch (or don't) could be fascinating subject matter. And the underwater scenes with penguins darting this way and that so quickly seem so surreal that people might wonder whether or not they're computer generated. What a shame that such amazingly good footage has to go to waste. But maybe not. Maybe after they've had a few good beers, people could watch the film on mute and fast-forward through the mating montage.