Posted by A rare and captivating glimpse of London’s busy streets, filmed in color during the summer of 1926, has been gathering a lot of attention on the web this week. The footage was shot by a pioneering British cinematographer named Claude Friese-Greene, as the final segment of a 26-part travelogue of the British countryside he had…
In the opening scenes of Star Trek Into Darkness, Spock (Zachary Quinto) is dropped in the middle of an active volcano. His mission? To stop the volcano from exploding before it destroys everything in its path. His equipment? A suitcase-sized “cold fusion” device, designed to destroy the volcano — and nothing else. Is this even…
Posted by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic 1925 American novel The Great Gatsby has been made into several films and TV programs over the years. Robert Redford played the title character in 1974. In the recent HBO hit Entourage, Vincent Chase (played by Adrian Grenier) starred in a critically lauded version helmed by Martin Scorsese. Australian auteur Baz…
Posted by Ground control to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield: Your videos from the space station really make the grade, especially your music video in which you sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and send your guitar for a floating journey. And the papers want to know: “What other videos have you made?” Here are some of my favorites:…
Posted by Who knew that a weed can smell the difference between a tomato plant and wheat, a tobacco plant can sense color, and a Venus flytrap can distinguish between the splash of a raindrop and a fly? Like so much in nature, it’s a matter of survival. Daniel Chamovitz, author of What A Plant Knows: A…
Posted by If you’ve been watching the FX network’s retro spy series, The Americans, which has its season finale tonight, you may or may not have noticed a recurring cameo by the National Geographic headquarters building as seen from the window of the show’s FBI headquarters (that’s us in the picture above, with our flat roof…
What do you do if you find a tiger in the bathroom? That was a plot point in the first Hangover movie, and now it’s a real-life story. The Salina Journal reports that last Saturday, a woman who’d gone to the circus went to the bathroom … and there was a tiger “at most two…
HBO is offering “An Apology to Elephants.” That’s the name of a documentary premiering on Earth Day – April 22 – at 7 p.m. The film looks at how humans have mistreated elephants: captured, crated to zoos and circuses (where they are roped and prodded with sharp metal “bull hooks” to force them to do…
Posted by In 1993, as a dinosaur-obsessed 13-year-old, I saw Jurassic Park in surround sound—the first movie released with the technology. For months I’d anticipated the film: reading fan magazines, making clay dinosaurs, and of course rereading Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel. This week, nearly 20 years later, I saw the film in IMAX with a new twist…
Eyes widened and jaws fell as contestants on Sunday’s episode of The Amazing Race took on the challenge of digging for scorpions in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert—then watched in bewilderment as their Bushmen escorts put the scorpions in their mouths. The show never made it completely clear why anyone would put a venomous creepy crawler in…
Posted by “Don’t Frack My Mother.” That’s the title of a catchy folk song now making the web rounds, written by Beatles scion Sean Lennon and performed by Yoko Ono, Liv Tyler, and assorted other celebrities. The song is intended to send a message to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who will decide, likely later this month,…
Posted by On Thursday nights, 10 million people are thinking about physics. That’s the weekly viewership for The Big Bang Theory, the CBS sitcom about a theoretical physicist, an experimental physicist, an engineer, and an astronomer. They hang out together, search for love, fight off rival scientists for grants, and squabble over who gets to visit the…
Posted by A novel told from a gorilla’s point of view won the 2013 winner of the Newbery Medal, the top honor in American children’s literature. The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate, is based on the true story of Ivan, a gorilla that was kept for 27 years at a department store in Tacoma, Wash.…
So maybe Life of Pi didn’t take the whole Oscar cake (forgive me, father, for my puns). But the movie was definitely a winner – best director, best visual effects, best cinematography, best score. It was also the highest-grossing Oscar nominated film … in India last year, where it took in a reported $17 million.…
Buzkashi Boys Trailer from Sam French on Vimeo.
In Buzkashi Boys, an Academy Award nominee for live action short film, two boys in Kabul dream of winning fame on horseback in Afghanistan’s aggressive national sport, buzkashi, where riders compete for control of the headless body of a goat. To learn more about this unusual sport, Pop Omnivore’s Brad Scriber talked with photographer Matthieu…
When it comes to generating buzz, it’s hard to beat the Insect Fear Film Festival, which celebrates its 30th anniversary on Saturday, February 23. The lights will dim in the Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The screen will light up. Skin will crawl— as will a cinematic parade of members of…
In the ultimate test of true love on last night’s episode of The Bachelor, Sean Lowe challenged some of his bachelorettes to plunge into a Canadian lake where the temperature sat just above freezing. With the exception of one (sensible) woman, the ladies stripped down to bathing suits for a complete (and quick) total immersion,…
Some people watch for the game. And others tune in for the ads. Indeed, Super Bowl commercials are a show unto themselves. This year’s batch, airing during the Sunday night broadcast but already available online, raise a number of questions that are in National Geographic’s areas of expertise. Here’s our take. Product: Skechers GOrun2 shoes…
Film director David M. Reynolds is obsessed with the fabled island of Atlantis. He’s so obsessed that he spent the past two years working practically nonstop (and with barely any budget) on five short films collectively called The Underwater Realm. In each of these four-to-five minute shorts, humans come into contact with Atlanteans, from a…
“He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake…” Who knows? Well, Santa of course! But how can he possibly keep up with every kid’s behavior record. According to some sources, he gets that information from a middleman: the…
At first everyone thought it was real: a viral video showing a bird of prey, allegedly a golden eagle, swooping down in a Montreal park to pick up a baby, then dropping the kid and flying away. Now the verdict is in: It was a hoax, concocted as an art project. Yet even a fake…
Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes place 60 years before the events in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy but returns to the same setting: Middle-earth. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, famously created a complex world for his novels, dreaming up languages and detailed histories…
“The answers, in no particular order, are A, B, C, and D,” the young ABC employee told the hundred or so of us sitting in folding chairs in a cavernous studio space near New York City’s Lincoln Center. Theater lights were clustered on tracks above us. Behind us, we could hear sets being moved and…
Posted by Inspired by an Arctic assignment for National Geographic, photographer James Balog chronicled disappearing glaciers through a three-year, three-million-dollar project called the Extreme Ice Survey that resulted in the new film Chasing Ice. He spoke to Pop Omnivore about the surprising drama and otherworldly beauty of glaciers—and about confronting the reality of climate change.
How do you bring the Dust Bowl back to life? Get Ken Burns to make a film about it. The preeminent documentarian’s latest act, The Dust Bowl, airing November 18 and 19 at 8 p.m. on PBS, is a two-part, four-hour look at “a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions.” In the 1930s, America’s agricultural…
