The Shark Film Office

I have always been a bit cynical towards the notion of "Christmas in July". Everyone complains about how long the winter holiday season has gotten – even the wackos who continually yell about "putting the Christ back in Christmas" – but I have seen even the staunchest of their like get thoroughly disgruntled over being reminded that there are "just 87 shopping days until Christmas" sometime in late September. With the ever-inching advance of seasonal marketing over the past few decades, it is often unbearable. So, why is there this stupid notion of what should be a once a year, winter month thing also being forced upon us by various concerns in the middle of the summer? As far as I can ascertain, the thrust of so much (but not all) of this "Christmas in July" fanfare seems to revolve around and come from fairly secular activities and quarters. If anything, that probably makes all the Fox News alarms about the "war on Christmas" even mor...

This is Part III of a three-part recap of Shark Week 2016. To read Part I, click here . To read Part II, click here .] Friday, July 1 Shark Bait  --  More great white shark action (though really just standard great white shark action) this time on a research trip to Cape Cod, where Dr. Greg Skomal (a Shark Week regular) and crew seek to learn more about out why white sightings in the area have become more and more prevalent in recent years. The obvious factor is the resurgence of seals along the coast, with a population bulging to more than 20,000 in the last decade. Skomal and his crew take to the water to tag some great whites, but the visibility in the water -- described as "pea soup" -- makes it not only difficult to work with the sharks, but infinitely more dangerous. Skomal has to rely to aerial support, using helicopters to sight the fish from the sky above. Then, the team attempts to tag the spotted shark by the highly technological method of having a guy lay d...

[This is Part II of a three-part recap of Shark Week 2016. To read the introduction and Part I, click here .] Tuesday, June 28 Wrath of a Great White Serial Killer  --  As I mentioned in the prologue to this recap of   Shark Week 2016 , I disdain documentary titles that play off the shark’s image as nothing more than an unthinking eating machine or lurking monster. Equating them to a singularly human form of predatory slaughter is even worse. This series of docs is the worst offender in my mind, hosted by Brandon McMillan, who comes off (to me at least) as the John Walsh of marine biology, driven by personal near-tragedy to pursue the purpose behind a particular series of shark attacks. The lead case of interest here is a non-fatal (he says “nearly fatal”) great white attack on his friend, surfer Kenny Doudt, off the coast of Oregon in 1979. Kenny finally drowned off the same coast while surfing in 2010, but I don’t see Brandon trying to figure out why the same water t...

Like many people, I've had my philosophical and political differences with Discovery Channel's annual  Shark Week over the years. A couple of years back, when the channel decided that making their own fictional movies -- called "docudramas" -- was the new direction for Shark Week , I almost checked out for good. But, last year, Discovery seemed to have sworn off the fake Megalodon crap (I am not saying Megalodon was fake, just the fictional films that Discovery Channel made about the beast existing in modern times that that they disguised and hid among their actual documentaries), and made a full dive back into real science, or at least as close as you can get to real science when what you are really doing is selling advertising still at least partially based around the public's irrational fear of a naturally occurring sea creature. And d espite my own emotions over the programming ranging from disgruntled (over the barely disguised fishing shows that would sne...