We can apparently add Louie Psihoyos’s documentary The Coveto our list of Movies That Really Made a Difference. The secret-camera-employed expose on the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, is getting credit, at least in part, with a stoppage of the dolphin killing, the season for which would have begun this week.
Dolphin activist and trainer Richard O’Barry, who appears in Psihoyos’ film, showed up to protest as usual accompanied by a group of international journalists and media crews, only to find the titular location void of fishermen.
He immediately reported his happy discovery to Take Part, writing, “it is a good day for the dolphins. And for me personally, as the police only wanted to talk with me, not arrest me!”
While this is certainly good news, it’s also not surprising that a documentary dealing with the killing of animals would be more successful in its goal than the countless films raising awareness of human genocides and poverty.
Of course, this is a sign that documentary as activism can make a difference, so I don’t mean to be cynical. I honestly hope that The Cove will be made an example and that other films inspire similar change.
Check out what other film bloggers are saying about The Cove’s success after the jump:
How did Bill Maher and Larry Charles get religious figures to agree to be interviewed on camera by the notoriously hostile-towards-religion Maher for their upcoming doc Religulous? According to an interview the comedian gave Patrick Goldstein, they didn’t:
It was simple: We never, ever, used my name. We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’ … The crew would set up and at the last second, when the cameras were already rolling, I would show up. So either they’d be seen on camera leaving the interview and lose face or they’d have to talk to me. It was like–’And now here’s … Bill!’ You could usually see the troubled looks on their faces.
This method calls to mind two recent films: the Charles-directed Borat, which used these deceptive documentary tactics within the framework of fiction, and Expelled. The extent to which the producers and star Ben Stein misled some of their interview subjects caused a minor firestorm––which didn’t do anything bad for the film’s box office, but certainly damaged the credibility of the filmmakers and their argument.
I’m fairly certain Bill Maher doesn’t care about ethical credibility––he’s probably primarily concerned with getting a punchline by any means necessary. But *I’m* kind of concerned about this growing trend of deception in ostensible non-fiction. Or maybe I just didn’t think Borat was that funny. Thoughts?
With the Tribeca Film Festival beginning on Wednesday, Winter Miller analyises the festival’s “7 year itch” for Variety. “Logistics and that intangible thing known as the “festival experience” might well improve, but seven years after its founding as a call to bring the city together post 9/11, the fest is still seeking a clear identity,” hew writes. Perhaps the first step would be to do something about the fest’s institutional indifference to quality in its obsession with quantity, which Miller alludes to: “Unlike fests with mandates to screen what they perceive as the absolute cream of the crop, Tribeca wears its number of international and first-timer participants as a badge of honor.”
Martial arts epic Forbidden Kingdom grossed almost $21 million over the weekend, enough to take the top box office slot ahead of Forgetting Sarah Marshall; the latest widget from the Apatow factory earned a not-great, not-terrible $17 million. Also: the tactic of opening Expelled wide in rural and suburban communities paid off, as the doc made $3.1 million (and almost double per screen what Morgan Spurlock’s docu-farce Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? managed in a smaller run), in spite of almost universally negative reviews.
A former TV exec and a producer of Bend it Like Beckham have teamed up to launch Filmaka, a “a digital entertainment studio that sponsors worldwide contests for aspiring filmmakers.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, the first contest will be judged by a panel of filmmakers including Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Neil LaBute.
The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!
Scientific American has put together a list of Six Things In Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know. Ominous, right? Most damning, as far as I’m concerned: the film’s selective editing of a passage written by Charles Darwin, in order to suggest that Darwinism is fundamentally responsible for the Holocaust. Via Digg.
The National Center for Science Education has put together a site called Expelled Exposed, with details on the producers’ quasi-ethical interview tactics, and fleshed-out stories on “what really happened to the people [the film claims] were persecuted for their views.” Via Kate Coe.
Fox News gossip columnist/finger-on-the-pulse cultural critic Roger Friedman lashes out at Expelled for being “sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring)” and declares that Stein “is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.” After pausing twice to make fun of Ben Stein’s “whiny” voice, Friedman rails against the release plan for the film, which will put prints in front of “rural and poor” viewers at the expense of the Beverly Hills elite. “If I lived in the Deep South, I’d boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated.” Hint hint, Mississippi!
From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promotingExpelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.
Are you ready for Children of Men: The TV Series? John Brownlee isn’t! Alfonso Cuaron’s film is “genre-defying masterpiece, exactly as long as it needs to be, every shot and line perfect,” he writes at Sci-Fi Scanner. “So obviously it requires weekly extrapolation to dilute the effect.”
“It dawned on me as I was getting started that there is an important piece of information that many of you younger Pajibans may not be aware of. It saddens me to think this might be the case, and thus this review is given another purpose: to perhaps educate y’all. Because you see, here’s the thing: Eddie Murphy used to be funny.” Dustin Rowles watches 48 Hours with a hangover.
Tee hee. Critic of Creationism/science blogger PZ Myers was banned from a screening of Ben Stein’s anti-Darwin propaganda filmExpelled, but was told his guests could attend. One of Myers’ guests? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, whose arguments the film basically exists to refute. Via Boing Boing.
Andrew Bujalski has moved to Austin. He doesn’t know when his next movie will be finished.
Above: a nearly eight-minute “trailer” for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-Darwinism documentary starring and produced by Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein). The independently-financed doc will hit theaters in mid-April. According to Variety, Stein and friends have hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing firm behind The Passion of the Christ, who are the go-to guys for projects looking to tap into the elusive but potentially lucrative Christian conservative market.
What’s interesting is how aggressive the film seems to be about appealing to the audience’s latent desire to rebel against the establishment. The trailer focuses on Darwin-defaming scientists and professors who have been “shunned and discredited” for “suggesting that we aren’t merely mud animated by lightning after all.” Stein works hard to paint these guys as outlaws whose ideas are so “dangerous” that a giant conspiracy has sprung up to suppress him, led by insecure bureaucrats like…Richard Dawkins? He even warns the viewer that the very act of watching the film “could land you in a heap of trouble.” Sounds sexy, right?
I assume the hope is that college kids are so eager to embrace anything that has anything to do with saying “fuck you” to authority, that they’ll hop on the intelligent design band wagon just to be contrarian. And who knows…there isn’t any decent music for kids with a hardon for rebellion to get behind these days, maybe they’ll buy the Nixon speechwriter-as-institution smashing rockstar just out of desperation.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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How did Bill Maher and Larry Charles get religious figures to agree to be interviewed on camera by the notoriously hostile-towards-religion Maher for their upcoming doc Religulous? According to an interview the comedian gave Patrick Goldstein, they didn’t:
With the Tribeca Film Festival beginning on Wednesday, Winter Miller analyises the festival’s “7 year itch” for 
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