The Cove

I hope finals are as painless as possible for everyone right now. It's almost over!!



If you are looking for a break, or just a good movie, I highly recommend picking up from the video store (if they still exist), or sending to the top of your Netflix queue, The Cove. The Cove is a film by Louie Pshioyos, a professional scuba diver and prolific nature photographer who has taken many of the incredible pictures you see in National Geographic magazines. The film is incredible. It is shocking and unsettling, but also a film I think anyone could and enjoy and that everyone should see.



The premise is like something out of a Tom Clancy novel (admittedly I've never read a Tom Clancy novel, but I mean, from the covers I assume that comparison...anyway....) and centers around both a person and a place. The person is Ric O'Barry, a former dolphin trainer who trained and befriended the dolphins that played Flipper in the 1960s television show. Barry took great pride in this job until he realized the dolphins were incredibly unhappy. It wasn't until one of the dolphins committed what seemed to be some form of suicide that Barry realized that humanity's fascination with dolphins was slowly killing them. O'Barry quit his job and then, only days later, was arrested off the coast Bimini freeing a dolphin from a confinement pen. He has worked tirelessly since to help liberate dolphins and spread the message of their mistreatment throughout the world.

So Louie meets O'Barry in the place where most of the events take place: Taiji, Wakayama, a beach community in Japan that has long been fascinated by the dolphins and whales living off its coast, but which harbors unspeakable secrets. Together, Louie and O'Barry develop spy techniques, strategically place hidden cameras, and sneak into the hidden cove off Taiji to discover what is really happening to the dolphins and what Taiji's fishing industry is really selling to its customers (seriously people, you can't make this stuff up).

Called "Flipper meets The Bourne Identity," The Cove succeeds on so many levels and really needs to be seen. It won the Academy Award for best documentary this year, and got the unheard of rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes; so if my opinion isn't solid enough, you always have the film industries. Definitely check out The Cove. You won't regret it.