Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Louie Psihoyos.
Description: A documentary which investigates a shocking true story of animal cruelty. With the help of dolphin activist Richard O'Barry and his friends in the scientific community, the film ventures to the little town of Taiji in Japan, where traffickers select the strongest and most personable creatures from a hidden cove for dolphinariums and sea-life parks and slaughter the rest, offloading the slain creatures to local school lunch programmes.
Country: US. 2009. 90mins
In at the deep end: The Cove uncovers the secret slaughter of dolphins
Richard O’Barry came to fame in the Sixties as the dolphin trainer for the popular Flipper series.
Ever since, he has fought to persuade us that capturing dolphins and forcing them to perform makes for cruel and dumb “entertainment”.
This story is only ancillary to Louie Psihoyos’s fine documentary, but it is indicative.
The central narrative of The Cove tells how O’Barry and his team infiltrated a lagoon near the Japanese town of Taiji, where local fishermen, having tempted the human-friendly dolphins there, slaughtered them to make “whale meat” for the locals.
Cast in the form of a thriller, the film unites free-divers and other activists in the plot to uncover the fishermen’s guilty secret.
Along the way, we see the Japanese government’s diplomatic wavering and the inadequacies of the International Whaling Commission.
The team, headed by O’Barry, plant thermal imaging cameras in fake rocks around the bay.
They watch as trainers from Sea World fly over the captured dolphins to pick out which ones to use for Flipper-like training before the slaughter begins.
Frankly, The Cove makes you despair but for people like O’Barry. “I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be,” he says.
Not any more. But it clearly wasn’t easy to make so good a film out of his redemption.
One would imagine, and hope, that an Oscar nomination beckons.
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