Thursday, March 22, 2007

Sharkwater… a review

No sarcasm in this review.

I saw Sharkwater last night and I don’t think I’ve ever been more depressed in my life.

You know, people can watch movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” and still leave the theatre thinking that a) we can still do something, or b) it’s just a theory, but you can’t watch Sharkwater and feel anything but anger towards Asia.

Here’s the movie in a nutshell. Asia likes to eat Shark Fin soup even though fins themselves have no taste because it’s a status symbol. Shark fins are going for about 200 bucks a pound and so every poor fisherman in the world is drift netting and long lining sharks to cash in on the craze.

The result is that 90% of the sharks in the world have now been killed and that includes Whale Sharks.

The money is so big that fisherman near the Galapagos islands threatened to kill all of the giant tortises unless they were allowed to kill sharks in the protected areas.

The money being made is second only to the drug trade which means that you can pay off government officials for the most ecologically sensitive areas to look the other way.

Very soon, there won’t be any sharks left.

This is the most important film I’ve seen in decades and it depressed the hell out of me.

http://www.sharkwater.com/

Here’s what you can do:

  • Dive and snorkel with sharks. The more money that goes into shark tourism the more people will realize the value of living sharks.
     
  • Refuse to eat shark fin soup and don’t eat at restaurants that serve it; encourage others to do the same.
  • Seventeen countries have already banned shark finning. Find out if your country is one of them. If not, write your local government official asking them to ban shark finning.
  • Demand that your country also stop the importation of shark fins.
  • Start a letter writing campaign to the Secretary General of the UN requesting international bans on shark finning and the importation of fins.

Posted by rtheygood at 13:14:13 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Friday, March 16, 2007

Shooter… a review

If you’re like me, the first question you ask yourself when you see a movie called “Shooter” is:

“How satisfying is the love story?”

Unfortunately for romantics, the answer is not like a rose by any other name.

Well, unless you’re calling the rose “Head Shot” in which case you’ll cry like a baby throughout the film.

I had heard that some men might be concerned about the gratuitous violence, but I’m here to calm your fears, because they don’t serve salads at the snack bar and besides, you need to get some rest because you’re having that ovary transplant in the morning.

“Shooter” stars Mark Wahlberg as an embittered ex soldier who just wants to live quietly in the woods until one day his world is turned upside down and he’s forced into battling overwhelming forces using nothing but his advanced survival training and marksmanship skills.

Sure some of you might be saying, “Hey that sounds a lot like ‘First Blood’” but there’s a huge difference in two movies.

For one thing Mark is much taller than Sly.

Secondly, this movie has one word in its title whereas the other one has two.

Shall I go on?

Towering fireballs, exploding head wounds, and gaping neck wounds aside, the story is complex and moves along quite quickly. There are some decent laughs and it has just the right mix of conspiracy and action to make the 2 hours seem like 20 minutes.

This is the best action movie I’ve seen in years.

 

 

Posted by rtheygood at 13:48:34 | Permalink | No Comments »

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Premonition… a review

Remember that great scene in “CaddyShack” where Rodney Dangerfield walks around with his putter bludgeoning homeless people to death?

Well if you were praying for a depressing remake of a funny film, I might just have the thing that you were looking for!!

“Premonition” is a lot like “Groundhog Day”, only with a corpse instead of a rodent.

Sandra Bullock plays a sleepy housewife who receives terrible news one day that her husband has been killed in a terrible car accident.

Emotionally shattered she spends the rest of the day walking around in a daze, but when she wakes up the next morning, she finds out that the whole thing was a terrible dream.

Well, that is until she goes back to bed and wakes up to find that her husband is back to being dead, but fortunately she wakes up later and find out that he’s still alive.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

It’s the depressing shampoo from the makers of “Mind Fuck”.

Each time she wakes up she’s either gone back a day before the previous one, or a day ahead of the last one.

I’m tellin’ ya, there’s nothing more suspenseful to me than opening up my garbage can to see if the dead bird that I threw away yesterday is still rotting. 

THAT’s entertainment!! 

Now, if there’s anything that cheesy science fiction movies have taught me over the years it’s this:

You can’t change the past.

Well, you CAN change the past, but then all sorts of terrible things happen like “the toaster was never invented” and people, I just can’t live in a world without toast.

The movie jumps back and forth between a troubled marriage and a grisly death which is the perfect metaphor for life.

In between we just pay taxes.

All in all it’s not a bad film but I shouldn’t have had that burrito before I went to bed. The damn thing kept repeating on me.

Posted by rtheygood at 15:41:12 | Permalink | No Comments »