The Cove

Lloyd Dobler's boombox "serenade" outside his former lover's house in Say Anything... wasn't the romantic gesture people tend to mis-remember: it was a last-ditch act of desperation and defiance, driven by pain. The startling new documentary The Cove has its own boombox scene, in which former dolphin trainer---and current dolphin-rights activist---Ric O'Barry wordlessly storms a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, a TV strapped to his belly. On it plays the shocking, secretly obtained footage of the brutal dolphin slaughter that, every day for six months of every year, fills the waters of a remote cove in Taiji, Japan, with blood. The rest of The Cove is equally compelling, laying bare the shadowy world of mercury-laden meat, dolphin suicide and bribery that the anthropomorphism lovin' makers of Flipper accidentally wrought.