Word: amazone
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...picketing Home Depot, the mammoth building-supply chain (sales last year: $24 billion). Customers will be offered "rain forest tours" through the store, spotlighting products made with trees from pristine, old-growth forests around the world: dowels and tool handles of ramin wood from Southeast Asia, doors of Amazon mahogany, cedar shingles and Douglas fir lumber from the temperate rain forests of North America, lauan plywood from the Philippines and Indonesia...
...rain forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate and with them, the cures for just about any disease imaginable. This is taught to every second grader, and it is one of the main themes in the new IMAX film Amazon. Now playing at the Boston Museum of Science, Amazon follows two medicine men--an American ethnobotonist and a tribal shaman--on their separate quests for new plants and possible medicines, before they are gone. Although it hasn't been as well publicized as Everest, the other IMAX film currently playing at the museum, crowds of a respectable size still...
...fortunate that Amazon relies so heavily on stunning cinematography, because as an attempt to tell a story, the film fails rather comically. It is not intended to be a documentary, and it doesn't try to do anything more than give a quick and superficial tour of the Amazonian rain forests. Even with all the colorful visual distractions sprinkled throughout the film, one can't help but notice the handling of this clumsy plot. The persistent "rain forests can cure anything" mantra is annoyingly condescending, but without it, one might as well be watching a per-flight nature video with...
...mighty Amazon river itself is seldom referred to or shown. Portrayed in popular culture as a romantic mystery of steaming jungles, wild native peoples and unpredictable currents, the Amazon river shown here looks calm and serene in the mid-morning sunlight...
While not as informative as a National Geographic special on a mediocre day, and not quite as entertaining as a decent feature film (which has a comparable admission price), Amazon still offers a fun alternative to staying home. It is worth both the time and temporary discomfort to the neck, even if only because it is an IMAX show. It might not be educational in the strictest sense, but that is not the point. Like most, if not all IMAX pictures, Amazon is all about being swallowed up by a world of vivid color and humbled...