The Cove Trailer

for those of you interested here is a trailer for the review below...

The Cove

review by Jonny

If The Cove were a fiction film, it would be derided as far-fetched, contrived, even hard to swallow. The fact that it's nonfiction doesn't make it any easier to believe -- if only because the footage is so horrifying, the facts so disturbing. It's not that you can't believe it, but that you don't want to -- and that’s what makes The Cove not only the best film of 2009 thus far, but one of the best documentaries I've ever seen, period. It's not just that these filmmakers expose vicious, inhumane and ecologically dangerous practices, apparently sanctioned and covered up by the Japanese government and its media, but the filmmakers have done it while risking their freedom -- even their lives -- for the cause. The result is the year's most exciting film -- as well as a documentary that can't help but leave you upset and outraged.

The film is directed by photographer Louis Psihoyos, a magazine photographer and documentarian whose head was turned around when he met dolphin activist Ric O'Barry. Once one of the leading dolphin trainers in the world -- his final job being TV's "Flipper" -- O'Barry flipped to the other side when he realized how miserable (he would say suicidal) the captive dolphins were. He became a vigilante about freeing dolphins that were part of marine-park dolphin shows (hello, Seaworld?) and swim-with-the-dolphins parks. O'Barry, in turn, told Psihoyos about Taiji, Japan, which is secretly the world's largest unofficial abattoir -- slaughterhouse, in other words -- for dolphins. Though the Japanese government protects the locals who undertake this barbaric practice, O'Barry knew that this one place accounted for the senseless killing of tens of thousands of dolphins each year.

Essentially, each year, as dolphins' migratory pattern takes them past Taiji, fisherman herd the dolphins into an inlet, which they then wall off with netting. The most desirable of the dolphins -- the bottlenoses that resemble Flipper -- are captured and sold to marine parks, aquariums and dolphinariums around the world. The rest are herded into a cove and slaughtered for meat -- despite the fact that they contain a high level of mercury.

But the government helps keep this practice secret by preventing anyone from witnessing this. While you can watch from land as the best dolphins are picked out of the first culling, the cove itself where the slaughter takes place is hidden by hills -- and the national park of which it is part is guarded and patrolled. Anyone caught trying to see what's really going on is arrested.

So Psihoyos recruited a mixed bag of specialists/commandos to make his own video assault on the cove. And that's the story of The Cove -- how, against the odds, these filmmakers captured on high-def video horrifying footage that the Japanese government does not want you to see.

At the same time, Psihoyos uses the film to clearly examine the politics of the International Whaling Commission, a seeming regulatory agency for the slaughter of cetaceans (of which both whales and dolphins are examples) that serves as an ineffective puppet for Japan and other whaling nations. He lays out the strings Japan pulls to get countries that have no fishing industry to vote their way through large infusions of cash.

In writing about this film, it's hard not to simply go off on a rant about Japan, which is not just the enabler but the muscle behind the efforts to keep this program secret. Psihoyos points out the sordid history of Minamata, the town where a powerful Japanese corporation, Chisso, routinely dumped mercury into the local waters, which accumulated in local seafood, poisoning the locals and leading to thousands of deaths and children born with deformities. The government fought efforts to publicize the problem, then to hold Chisso to account, for years, until the international outcry was too great.

The Cove is guerrilla journalism at its best. Structured and paced by director Louie Psihoyos as a thriller/caper movie, it brings audience-grabbing cinematic conventions to work in telling its story of dolphin genocide. It's a movie that should be seen by everyone, right now. It’s so well done that it plays like one of the better spy capers I’ve seen in recent memory. Indeed, this film could launch a new sensibility for environmental documentaries. This is no dry PowerPoint lecture or sentimental tree-huggery. It's an adventure with a charismatic and soulful cast, topnotch production values and the canny storytelling of a riveting drama. I give this movie an...

TRIPLE EXTRA LARGE BAG OF POPCORN

District 9

There are so many praiseworthy things about District 9 (its originality, the thoughtful, allegorical nature of the script, the fact that it's writer/director Neil Blomkamp's first feature, how far he and his crew made their relatively meager $24 million budget stretch) that it's hard to be too critical of it. Some movies pack such a terrific central idea, even their flaws can't stop the train. District 9 is -- almost -- one of them. In its first half it barrels along with the velocity and assurance of a new classic; then it settles for being a good, splattery addition to the venerable aliens-come-calling genre -- and it feels like a slight letdown.

Right from the get-go the film does a terrific job of dropping you into the action while simultaneously building the back story with clips of mock TV news footage (credit should definitely be given to cinematographer Trent Opaloch, who, using a palette of washed-out greys and browns, lent a great gritty realism to the film -- so real, that I found myself thinking "This is exactly how something like this would happen"). As things unfold, the real problems arise. The pace becomes unvarying as opposed to exhilarating. As the film focuses increasingly on the plight of an alien father and son who hold the key to their species' survival, the movie tips into more conventional and even sentimental territory. The film goes from being a penetrating, thoughtful Sci-Fi film that harkens back to classics such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, to just another action movie -- and that's a real shame, because it could have, and should have been way more than that.

As a Sci-Fi film, District 9 instantly takes its place as one of the best additions to the genre in years; however, it had potential to transcend the label of “genre film” but unfortunately, it rests on its laurels a little too much. This film, by all accounts and measures, should resonant deeply, but it's just this kind of underlying resonance that is missing from District 9, a film of stunning visual imagination that never quite succeeds in tapping its vast metaphoric potential. I give this movie a...

Large Bag of Popcorn

Time Travelers Wife

May I make a quick note. As I was buying a ticket for this movie a man probably in his 50's was buying a ticket. He walked up to the front of the line and said "May I have one ticket to Time Travel." I just thought that was funny.

Dear Ron Livingston,

I really like you. I feel like after watching Band of Brothers…finally, I have developed a bit of a man crush on you. You’re role in the Time Travelers Wife was small, but never the less very important in my eyes. I hope that one day you give up that sidekick gig and go back to your office space roots, and be a leading man once more. Your fans need you, I need you, Corny Reviews needs you.

I will not be as harsh as I was on Bandslam because I enjoyed parts of the Time Travelers wife. Eric Bana is basically this guy that travels through time at any moment and when he arrives in those different time slots he is naked, and some how meets up with Rachel McAdams most of the time. He says that big events pull him in so after so many times seeing Rachel McAdams he ends up doing the only thing logical marrying her. It seems weird to me too? This movie was truthfully confusing. It jumped time slots a lot, and a few slots were so irrelevant to the movie it made it at times frustrating to watch. Lets put it this way if you’ve seen the Lake House; you have pretty much seen this movie. Also for a PG-13 it had language pretty much throughout the movie, so in terms of bringing the family...maybe not. Now the Time Travelers wife isn’t awful either. Ron Livingston is great as Eric Bana’s friend, and it does serve its purpose for a romance movie, and it caused my wife to cry. I usually would cry during these kinds of movies, but for some reason not this one. So if you can make my wife cry, but not me that means you didn’t fully do your job as a director. So I give this movie a…

MEDIUM BAG OF POPCORN

Bandslam

Dear Friday Night Lights Actors,

Stop acting in movies. Just because you all of sudden get famous because you are on some cult hit TV show doesn’t mean you can go and make crap movies like Bandslam, and Post Grad. To be fair Jason Street you were decent in Speed Racer, but come on Bandslam? You and Matthew Serecen need more acting under your belt before you can go and be in movies. I did not like your character in Bandslam, and you really are a bad actor in general. Please stop because I actually really love Friday Night Lights.

Sincerely Yours,

Corny Reviews, and Taylor Allen.

I actually wanted to like Bandslam. I really did, but it just didn’t do it for me the way other teen movies usually do. This movie tried to hard. That is the bottom line. Most teen movies are usually bad, and you can kind of expect that, and then you end up enjoying it just because it was fun. Bandslam was far from fun. Besides the awful sound issues in the movie theatre, the movie changed paces so many times it was hard to follow. Each time the director wanted you to be emotionally upset, or sad the scene following would attempt a joke that no one laughed at. I thought the only good part of this movie was…scratch that there was no good parts to this movie. For crying out loud this movie used MySpace to promote their band, and MySpace is seriously out. It felt out dated, and not fun. I wish I would have seen another movie, but the 15 jr. highers I took to it seemed to enjoy it, so I guess it was worth it. Seacrest Out! I give this movie an…

EXTRA-SMALL BAG OF POPCORN.

Julie & Julia

Julie & Julia is just one of those movies that you should see. Whether or not you like the movie, its just something that if you don’t see it now, I guarantee you later in your life someone will say;

“remember, like in Julie & Julia”

and then you will say…

“I haven’t seen that movie.”

and then they will say…

“oh well you have to watch it.”

If you take my advice then you won’t have to go through this later in your life. So basically I am doing you a favor. Trust me, this has happened to me with You've Got Mail.

Nora Ephron the director created a movie that was nearly perfect for her audience. It was different from here previous [sleepless in Seattle, you’ve got mail] in that this really wasn’t a human love story; rather it was about love for food. Julie Powell is nearly obsessed with Julia Childs who wrote a famous cookbook about cooking French food in America. She starts a 365-day blog that follows Julie as she cooks her way through the cookbook. Along the way she faces trials, and has one to many meltdowns. We see the back-story of this book and how it came to be with Julia Childs. I almost feel like I have to review this movie in 2 parts. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the real Julia Childs played by Meryl Streep. Her on screen chemistry with Stanley Tucci was in my mind beautiful. Their LOVE for not only each other but for food as well is something rare that you don’t see on screen these days. Stanley Tucci deserves major credit for probably one of his best performances yet. Watch out for him in Peter Jackson’s new movie called the Lovely Bones, where he plays a killer. Meryl Streep was great as usual, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets nominated for an academy award.

On the other hand I didn’t really like Amy Adams portrayal as the nearly 30 government working blogger Julie Powell. Is it just me, or does Amy Adams always look like she is crying. She is a complete pessimist, and it just rubbed me the wrong way at times. She was so uptight, and really did sacrifice everything for this “deranged project.” Her husband Eric played by Chris Messina [Vicky Christina Barcelona] was really what made Amy shine at times. He loved her enough to stick around while she grew more and more uptight. As a whole I really only like the Julia Childs part. Their was so much passion into her character and one truly amazing scene when she receives a letter from her sister. I give Julia Childs side of the movie an…

EXTRA LARGE BAG OF POPCORN, but as a whole I have to give this movie a…

LARGE BAG OF POPCORN.

G.I. JOE [Rise of the Cobra]

Dear Hasbro,

Really you need to go and make another movie based on Toys that used to be popular even before I was born. That’s fine as long as you get really good Actors. Ok wait, as long as you use really cool special effects. Uhh-well maybe if you just have a good story. If you can’t do that, they just make a movie that is purely fun, making the audience from the start lower its expectations almost immediately. If you can do that you have a successful summer blockbuster…and that is exactly what you did, so thank you!

As I pulled up to the theatre I thought to myself why am I seeing this, especially at midnight, as I drove away I wasn’t exactly going off about how awesome the movie was, but I wasn’t going off about how bad it was either. This film is exactly what it was always intended to be. Its exactly like the cartoons from many years ago. Corny, bad acting, terrible special effects, and a mediocre storyline [a double crosser wants to take over the world with basically those little bugs from the mummy. They eat metal, and sell movie tickets]. Some of the redeeming qualities were the 2 cameos from previous Stephen Summer movie characters, such as the THE MUMMY. It even features the back-stories of a few characters in the movie, which was surprisingly cool. I am really going to make the call of whether or not you should see this movie totally and completely up to you the viewers. I thought this movie was a fun little action adventure, and nothing more. Marlyn Wayans actually provided in that fun a little bit of humor. If you are a Lost fan keep your eye out for some new, and old faces in G.I. Joe. And now you know what I thought of this movie…and knowing is half the battle. I give this movie a…

MEDIUM BAG OF POPCORN

Funny People

Jonny is such a better reviewer than me, oh well thats why I hired him to make me look good.

Funny People, the latest offering from the reigning King of Comedy, Judd Apatow, feels like an attempt to graft the writer/director/producer's patented brand of semi-raunchy character comedy of latent male adolescence on to the template of a certain kind of studio film rarely made today -- think 1980s Oscar bait, like Terms of Endearment, The Accidental Tourist or even Beaches: the gently melancholic dramedy in which someone in early middle age is suddenly forced to reconcile their lives. This unlikely hybrid serves as the vehicle for a meta-epic work of autobiography that pays tribute to one of the writer/director's oldest friends/collaborators, diverges into a love letter to his wife, contrives to get the wife and the friend in bed together, and then drags in Eric Bana to get them out. All the while, Seth Rogen is milling about, mostly as a surrogate for the filmmaker, until he suddenly switches over and starts speaking for the audience -- during the film's draggiest stretch, he is very vocal about not wanting to be there.

If this sounds bizarre, it is. What's more bizarre is that this mix of personal project-as-product sort of succeeds -- at least intermittently. Though not formally bifurcated, Funny People practically plays out in two sections (another 80s flashback: it feels like the kind of film that used to come packaged on two VHS tapes). It peaks emotionally at about three-quarters of the way into the first section and then rapidly devolves from there into a domestic sitcom that can only resolve itself in a "girls may come and go, but bromance is forever" fade out. By the time that statement arrives in the 146th minute, it's almost redundant. Very litle attempt has been made to veil the correspondence between Funny People's narrative beats and Judd Apatow's actual life history. Laura is played by Apatow's real-life wife Leslie Mann, whose actual pre-motherhood career is sampled here as Laura's "acting reel," and whose real-life daughters make their second appearance afterKnocked Up as her daughters on screen. After George and Laura share what is -- as far as I remember -- the first genuinely tear-jerking scene in Apatow's canon (involving what is certainly one of the most human-esque acting work Sandler has ever committed to screen), the film takes an even more abrupt shift: breaking out of George's house, jumping ship from what seemed like its reason to exist, and suddenly becoming an adultery farce. Funny People feels like two films stitched together, in a manner reminiscent of a messy epic likeReds. The second half of Apatow's film -- like the back end relegated to the second VHS tape of Warren Beatty's -- couldn't exist without the first half, but it carries on with a completely new set of stakes, a completely separate emotional arc.

Though Funny People is the first Apatow film to not be shot like a comic strip, the director has not, in his previous directorial efforts, been all that shy about his evident desire to push beyond the generally accepted boundaries of the modern "dudecom" genre. Funny People is a much more ambitious film than The 40 Year-old Virgin or Knocked Up, and a far less audience-friendly one. Though gently funny throughout, there is no comic set piece here on the order of the mushrooms scene in Knocked Up. There's nothing as quotable as the "bags of sand" bit from Virgin. None of the characters seem as destined for viral iconhood as McLovin. It's hard to imagine this film pleasing an audience drawn in by its stars -- one man's catharsis is rarely another's invitation to escape.

I have nothing but respect for Apatow's ambition. What I struggle with are his instincts as a director, which, from an artistic standpoint, tend to be bad. If there's no one telling him he can't make a 146 minute Adam Sandler film, it’s not surprising that there’s no one dissuading his natural proclivity to get crazy indulgent with the montages. In this film, that tendency teeters on (but unfortunately, doesn't cross) the line of self-parody with a Dying Man Finally Learns How To Live sequence, set to a cover of the posthumous Beatles tune "Real Love," sung on camera by a guitar-strumming Sandler. Like the song, you’ll find nothing real, love or otherwise. And this is the central problem with Funny People: Apatow has taken blisteringly personal material and filtered it through tropes and cliches borrowed from trite, mainstream factory-line cinema of another era. Judd Apatow, the writer, deserves a better director. I give this movie a...
SMALL BAG OF POPCORN

The Great Buck Howard [DVD]

Recently I received the movie The Great Buck Howard in my mailbox. I was unsure about it because Colin Hanks [Buck Howards assistant] has had a few flops lately [the house bunny, untraceable], but I decided to give it a try. It’s a story about Buck Howard who is one cooko mentalist that is living in the past when he was on the tonight show with Johnny Carson 61 times. This movie follows John Malkovich [Buck Howard] as he strives to still be in the spotlight, and do something amazing. As my wife and I continued watching this movie I found the charm not only in this movie, but in the characters as well. They truly believed in what they do no matter how many people want them to give it up. Buck Howard was looking for just one more appearance on the Tonight Show, and his assistant wanted anything but Law School. As both these characters reach their crossroads you begin to fall in love with this movie. It is a quick watch with minimal laugh, but lots of charm. I give this movie a…

LARGE BAG OF POPCORN

(500) Days of Summer

Dear Marc Webb,

I thought you did a beautiful job with this movie. Coming from directing only a 3 doors down, and a Jesse McCartney music video I give you major probs. I must say that you have tremendous amount of go nads to do half the stuff you did in your movie. It was almost like you didn’t care if the audience didn’t like the unique storyline, or the excessive use of the color blue, you were going to do it anyways. In my opinion you made an incredible movie, and I knew it was incredible when Joseph Gordon-Levitt was walking down the street to a song and dance of “you make my dreams come true.” The very thought of doing something like this scene makes me love your no holds barred filmmaking, and I cannot wait for your next movie.

Does this directorial debut have flaws? Yes! Is it totally worth seeing? Absolutely! (500) Days of Summer clearly states that this movie is not a love story, and if you walk in with those expectations you will severely be disappointed. It’s a story about love that the average male, and female can relate to. There are no good guys or bad girls in this movie, just 2 people with very different views on LOVE. As you watch this movie you have to appreciate the directors unique style. He puts together a movie with so much guts, that you at least have to love it for that. If you don’t understand what I mean watch the movie and compare to any other movie you have seen in the last year…it’s just different. I am all about different, and that’s why I give this movie an…

EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF POPCORN