Thursday, December 17, 2009

The Cove - An Intriguing Must See

I remember back in elementary school when every kid was doing their "research papers" on whales and dolphins.

For some reason there was a fascination, and this resulted in kids photocopying lots of pictures of bottle nose dolphins and humpback whales to glue to a poster board.

Everyone wanted to be a marine biologist.

I think in my mind it was the elementary-aged love affair with the dolphin that kept my interest love in the acclaimed documentary of the year, The Cove.

This is not the oceanic-dolphin-environmental-hold-your hands-sing-kumbaya type of film I expected.

In fact, it's far more like a spy thriller of unlikely activist. A film where DNA experts, deep sea divers, live concert roadie, military ops professionals, and Industrial Light and Magic play a hand in something bigger than Danny Ocean and his gang could ever pull off.

As this assembled team of specialist get together the film creates a true sense of suspense that many film fail to create, and in The Cove the suspense is magnified, because it is real, and has real consequences.

And while I was most surprised and entertained by the spy-intrigue this film melds together other unique, moving, informative and entertaining qualities.

You have a handful of conspiracy's revealed, within the multi-country governance of International Whaling Commission (IWC), as well as the Japanese food and health industry.

Beyond that you have the sentimental story of Flipper trainer Ric O'Barry, who's story is surprisingly touching and captivating.

And finally, you do have the majestic images of these beautiful sea mammals.

With all the other stories, interviews, high-skilled sneakery going on in this film, all with exceptionally documented footage, it's hard to not recommend this film. It's mixture of elements all formed around impactful story telling make it clearly one of this year's best films.

The Cove is surely on the path to an Academy Award nomination, if not a win in the feature length documentary category.

3 comments:

Anthony said...

Did I ever tell you about my 7th grade research paper on dolphins helping autistic children? I was SO proud of it, but I misspelled it "childeren" throughout the entire paper and my teacher took off points for EACH misspelling. I ended up with a low C on a paper that should've been a 100. I was devastated. And I still think about that paper every time I write the word children.

Anonymous said...

Anthony - that is so sad and so funny at the same time!

RC - I found this movie to be very fascinating. I was terribly impressed with the ecclectic expert team that was assembled to gain footage to document the slaughter of 24,000 dolphins in Taiji. I, personally, am not a big animal fan or advocate, but I was very moved by this movie.

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