Earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to watch "The Cove," which is among the cooler documentaries I've seen in a long time, a very crisp piece of advocacy journalism that can be described not entirely inaccurately as "Oceans 11 with dolphins." It's the story of a man named Ric O'Barry, the original dolphin trainer from the TV show Flipper, who came to the realization that keeping dolphins in captivity is wrong and made his life's mission freeing them. He discovered a small town in Japan that is the hub of dolphin trade, where thousands of dolphins are slaughtered there every year. He decided to expose this story to the world, and enlisted a crew of filmmakers, divers and diverse other folks to help him break the story and make a convincing case that you should care about what happens to dolphins a world away. Besides the general excitement of cracking a dedicated cover-up, the film also touches deftly on the international politics of ocean regulation, the problems of mercury poisoning, overfishing, cetacean intelligence and the ethics of animal training. It's definitely worth watching if you can find a showing in your city.
-- Tim Fernholz
