BEFORE: I'm preparing to shut down the Movie Year for a week, so there's just some packing and clean-up work to be done, we've got to leave instructions for the cat sitter and make sure the mail gets taken in, plus make sure the DVR is programmed through the next week, even though we're going to try to keep current on TV while we're on the road. Tomorrow's going to be all about packing, there will be no time to watch a movie for Sunday so I've got to link to my Mother's Day film from here, but of course that's always been the plan. I know I've been back and forth on some movies that eventually had to be cut or replaced, but I always had my eye on the count and this is really where I planned on ending up today, so mission accomplished.
But first I'm due back at the stadium today for the first time in almost a month, they kind of shut down after the NBA season for a few weeks, yeah there were a couple of concerts but I'd already turned those shifts down because of a beer festival and a shift at the movie theater. Ideally when things are slow at one job they may get busy at the other, with all the thesis presentations from the various departments of the School of Visual Arts being held at the theater, I have been there quite a bit over the last three weeks. We'll see if it's enough to make up for the lost shifts at the other job. But today is the home opener for the NY Liberty, the WNBA team that actually won a championship in recent memory, so we'll see how that goes.
Andy Daly carries over from "Jules".
THE PLOT: In small-town Alaska, a reporter recruits his Greenpeace-volunteer ex-girlfriend on a campaign to save a family of gray whales trapped by rapidly-forming ice in the Arctic Circle.
AFTER: OK, I'm back from the Barclays Center, and I'm exhausted. It's tempting to put off my review until tomorrow, but I have one more film, the Mother's Day film, before I shut down. So even though I'm tired I'll try to muddle through with the help of some strong beer, and then I may pass out and just watch tomorrow's film tomorrow, we'll see. They put me on a real food stand tonight, which is unusual because I've been at the grab-n-go beer stand so much that I got rather comfortable there, also the last time they made me work a food stand, it was really a disaster. I didn't know my PIN to sign in to the register, nobody gave me any training on how to serve ice cream or cheesecake, I just had to figure it out as I went. They really throw me into the fire sometimes, so to speak, or maybe even literally because they wanted me to climb a ladder to put ice cream mix into the ice cream machines, and I can't do that, man, I've got an inner ear thing, my balance is off - I was afraid I was going to fall into the deep fryers and become the world's first human chicken tender. OK, that didn't happen - but tonight I was on falafel and hummus and popcorn and nobody really told me where anything was or how anything works, so yeah, I'm probably going to make mistakes if you keep putting me on food stands without giving me any real food handling training. If that's the way you want to run your business, fine, but I'm just telling you now I'm not responsible for any comic or tragic disasters that may ensue.
Tonight we're dealing with a real-life disaster, this film was based on a real-life incident that came to be called Operation Breakthrough, it happened in 1988 when there was an international effort to save some gray whales that had become trapped in ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. OK, so sometimes ice forms in the ocean, this is a natural thing that happens when you go above the Arctic Circle and it's October, so winter is starting to set in. Whales are not fish, it turns out, they're mammals that need to breathe oxygen from the air, which means they need to resurface every so often, and if the ocean freezes over or there's an ice build-up, well then, stuff like THIS is bound to happen once in a while. It probably happens all the time, what's rarer is that we humans find out about it, and possibly have the chance to DO something about it. Normally in a case like this, if whales got trapped under the ice and had no access to the air, people might shrug and say, "Eh, whatcha gonna do", or "It's the circle of life, ya know. Animals die sometimes because they swam where they shouldn't or winter came in too fast." Others might look at three whales trapped under the ice and think, "Ooh, easy hunting, we can harvest these whales and that will supply our village with food and blubber and whale oil and whale skin, what a great thing nature is!"
But that's not what happened here, because the news media got involved - a reporter stationed in Alaska did a piece about the trapped whales, and maybe it was a slow news week, but it went national (we'd say it went "viral" but that wasn't even a thing yet) and suddenly everyone wondered if there was a way to "save" the whales. Greenpeace got involved, sure, and we know where THEY are going to land on this argument, but also politicians on the local, state and national levels all got involved. Surely there MUST be something we can do, one of the whales may be injured so we're not inclined to let terrible nature just run their course, if there are ice-breaker ships or ice-breaking hovercraft, or de-icing technology of any kind, it needs to make its way ASAP to Point Barrow, Alaska, because three of God's creatures are at risk.
Jesus, even the oil industry executives here are eager to save the whales, I mean, they're doing it just for the publicity reasons, but at least if they're trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, then they're still trying to do the right thing. OK, we'd love it if they were doing the right thing for the right reasons, but honestly, we'll take what we can get. Everybody loves whales, right, I mean they're mammals like us, they form lifetime bonds like us, they have babies like us, it's just some cruel trick of evolution that made us evolve into creatures that live on land and them into creatures that live in water. Why did God make things work out this way, I don't know, but he works in mysterious ways, don't cha know, and he DID put us in charge of all the other creatures, or so the Bible says, so if we want this whale family to live and be free from the ice, then damn it, that's what we're gonna manifest.
This is a case where Greenpeace and the Reagan administration were actually working for the same cause, I can't say that ever happened again in the history of ever. Then you throw the Soviets into the mix, Reagan called his buddy Gorbachev and got the ice-breaking ship to head straight there, after the attempt to drag the ice-breaking hovercraft across Arctic tundra using two massive helicopters failed somehow. Yeah, I guess three stray whales in danger will do that, get the liberal hippie activists working together with the evil Republican White House and the even more evil Soviet dictator. Everybody wanted to see the whales live and be free to frolic in the wide, wide ocean, because having to tell all the U.S. school children that the whales DIED would be just too hard, all things considered.
Honestly I think you have to go back to Woodstock to find so many people who were peace-oriented and life-positive working together for a common goal - or maybe the moon landing, a point where everyone in the world just eff-ing STOPPED and thought about what was important, and was rooting for life over death, action over inaction, getting off your ass and DOING something over just shrugging your shoulders and accepting the futility of struggling against entropy. That's worth a thought or two, today or any day, right? And look, I hate to be the screen-door in anyone's submarine, but the real truth is that nobody really knows how long the whales lived after they were released into the open ocean, because they weren't tagged.
But still, it's a fine positive family-friendly film and I've had nearly a whole week of SIXES, so I can't really argue with that. Your friendly neighborhood movie whisperer is still trying to understand what message the chain has been trying to send him this week, I mean we've been all over the place with old people and young people, wrestlers and table tennis players, foxes and rabbits and snakes, then aliens and now whales. What the HELL, I mean really, WTF? But maybe that's the message, that this is one big crazy world that's full of all sorts of different people AND animals, and we all have to do our best to respect each other and try to share the planet - I mean, Earth Day is in the rearview now, but the message still applies, right? So there we go, it's a great big beautiful planet full of cities and oceans and when the aliens arrive, we'll work them into the mix too. Now if we can just get the Safdie Brothers talking and maybe making movies together again, can world peace be far behind?
Still, I think this is exactly the kind of movie that you watch ONLY after you have watched 5,324 other movies first that were more urgent. Sorry, that's just the way I feel.
Directed by Ken Kwapis (director of "He Said, She Said" and "He's Just Not That Into You")
Also starring John Krasinski (last seen in "IF"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Smile 2"), John Pingayak, Ahmaogak Sweeney, Kristen Bell (last seen in "Queenpins"), Vinessa Shaw (last seen in "Side Effects"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Heads of State"), Ted Danson (last seen in "Cousins"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "Scream VI"), Rob Riggle (last heard in "Strays"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), Ken Smith, Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), James LeGros (last seen in "Certain Women"), Mark Ivanir (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Stefan Kapicic (last heard in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Gregory Jbara (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Tell"), John Chase, Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, Thomas R. Daly, Maliaq Kairaiuak, Jeffrey Evan, Thom Van Dorp, Maeve Blake, Krista Schwarting, Liam Boles, Opal Sidon, Tim Palmer, Jason Arthur Martin, Bruce Altman (last seen in "Touched with Fire"), Anthony Fryer, Hillarie Putnam (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Brett Baker (ditto), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Kathryn Harris, R.F. Daley (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Quinn K. Redeker (last seen in "The Candidate"), Teresa Pingayak, the voice of Jeff Bergman (last heard in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), AF: Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Rather"), Dan Rather (ditto), Joey Buttafuoco, Connie Chung (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "The Saint of Second Chances"), Larry King (last seen in "I Am Sam Kinison"), Sarah Palin.
RATING: 6 out of 10 avocados used to make guacamole at the Mexican restaurant in Alaska
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