The Cove

If you’re looking to seriously bum yourself out, an evening spent watching The Cove ought to do the trick. It’s a profoundly upsetting movie, but one you need to see, nonetheless. And, though it will certainly bring you down, it’s also a very taut suspense tale, an earnest documentary with a real-life sense of menace. The film has won just about all the awards there are, including this year’s Oscar for best feature documentary. There’s a very real hero in it, too, in the person of Ric O’Barry, the guy who once trained Flipper for that long-ago television show. His experience with dolphins set him on a mission to free them from captivity throughout the world, and to protect them from the kind of slaughter depicted in this film. There are alarms going off all through the movie—about mercury in the food supply, about the impending collapse of the world’s fisheries, and about human obstinacy in the face of all that. But there are also things we can do, and the film is part of a global attempt to organize in defense of dolphins, and of oceans. See it. Visit TakePart.com. Get involved.