November 14, 2024

The Queen of Documentaries

Arts & Culture The Journal 2024

The Queen of Documentaries

By: Benjamin  He

It seems like finding a good show is getting exceedingly hard nowadays.

By show, I mean episodes. Something you can watch consistently. Although finding a good movie isn’t easy either. Sure Inside Out 2 blew up, but with Disney’s Wish completely flopping and Sony’s Madame Web, and I quote from slashfilms.com , “might have been a bad enough flop to kill the studio’s plans for its “Spider-Man” spin-off universe,” I don’t have a lot of hope for good media nowadays (not even on Youtube, where legends like Technoblade aren’t active anymore).

Desperate to witness some shred of hope that good media still existed, I decided to make one last ditch effort and swapped to an entirely new media type: documentaries. Lo and behold, I did find one released recently, National Geographic’s Queens, with Vanessa Berlowitz as the executive producer.

The show blew me away. It was easily one of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched.

The basic format of Queens works like this: it focuses on animals, but focuses on female leaders in the animal world. It zeroes in on pretty much all kinds of animals, from bugs to bears to monkeys. The show was four years in the making. One episode focused on a beetle and an ant colony, and I can’t imagine how hard those were to film.

The show was both formal and humorous at the same time (great narration from Angela Bassett, by the way), the writing was very well done. I highly recommend the show. I don’t know a lot about photography, the cinema and the cameras were well done, well placed, well everything.

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