After Harold and I put our two kids to bed, we usually have, oh, about 20 minutes to chill on the couch together before I pass out from exhaustion. Lately we’ve been watching some great movies in “installments” – the latest of which is the documentary The Cove. If you care about the environment, animals, the ocean, or simply want to see something really good, go out and rent this film now! On the movie level, it’s a fabulous film – suspenseful, beautiful filming, funny at times, inspiring, touching. A group of activists sneak into a restricted cove in Japan to film (using really cool high tech equipment) the annual slaughtering of dolphins. There are some great quotes (“There are 2 kinds of people – activists and inactivists.”) There are these hard core environmentalists of an older generation wondering who is going to take their place when they’re gone? There are convincing arguments about why you should never support or buy into swimming with dolphins in captivity. There is some tricky unspoken cultural stuff, too – look at how we Americans treat our cows and pigs and chickens…are we any better?

Along with Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, this seems like one more reason to go vegetarian, or at least to know who is raising your food and how they are raising your food. Some of the best scenes in The Cove are simply the underwater scenes with dolphins in the wild – and seeing them interact with humans in the open ocean. They’re beautiful, smart, playful creatures and one scientist argues maybe they’re even more intelligent than we are. At least they don’t go around slaughtering us using inhumane methods and then trying to feed our mercury poisoned meat to school children, right? I was hoping for some happy real life Hollywood ending (i.e. the dolphins are saved!), but sounds like the slaughter is still continuing. Read what you can do here.

{Photo from The Cove via A.V. Club}