Jellyfish burger, anybody?

This post contains a bunch of videos from youtube, so if you can’t see them in your feed reader then please go over to my website …

One of my passions is watching films or perhaps I should say movies for my non-English readers. Recently I’ve been checking out the work of Isabel Coixet. I came across her first English language production five or six years ago. You can’t help but be captivated by Sarah Polley in ‘My Life Without Me’. I like to think I’m a pretty tough guy but you may have been able to detect a slight case of non-dry eye syndrome when I was watching it.

Sarah Polley is also amazing in Isabel Coixet’s ‘The Secret Life of Words’. It started out slowly and I thought, “uh, this is a bit boring,” but it totally lulls you into a false sense of security and again takes you on a dramatic, emotional roller-coaster of a ride.

A haunting soundtrack, performances and images. Isabel Coixet’s latest film, ‘Map of the Sounds of Tokyo’, is if anything, even more disturbing and beautiful. The way she captured my home city of Tokyo reminded me a little of ‘Lost in Translation’ but here the focus is on a darker reality of loneliness and pain rather than the lighter surreality of existential angst that appears in ‘Lost in Translation‘. Rinko Kikuchi puts in a suitably enigmatic and conflicted performance which reminds you a little of her performance in ‘Babel‘.

Rinko’s character works in a fish market. One of the young lads I teach had the misfortune of being stood up the other day. Sometimes you have to be careful when you ask people if they had a good weekend. Anyway, it gave me a good opportunity to dispatch a bit of avuncular wisdom by teaching the English cliché, “don’t worry, there are plenty more fish in the sea.” I’m sure everyone at the fish market would agree but as it turns out, it’s not true. As the documentary ‘The End of the Line‘ suggests the old view of the sea that it is “huge, beautiful and inexhaustible” is no longer true. Fish species after species have collapsed and whether we’re talking about a fall in fish stocks of 75, 80 or 90% it doesn’t matter. It may already be too late.

Anybody who eats fish should watch this film and think about where the fish comes from. The images, statistics and facts in this documentary really may you stop and think. For example, they explain about how ships pull massive trawling nets along the bottom of the ocean, ripping up any ocean flora or fauna that get in the way and capture all sorts of unwanted marine by-product which is just thrown dead, back into the sea. Did you know that the world’s largest trawling net is big enough to hold seventeen 747s?

I started getting interested in the marine world when I attended an event organised by a friend to generate funds for his organisation PangeaSeed which is dedicated to “educating and raising international awareness on the plight of sharks.” I ended up buying a cool t-shirt and watched an interesting documentary about sharks called ‘Sharkwater.’ Check out the Shark Angels, who get up close and personal with the “world’s most misunderstood animal:”

I stumbled upon some shark fin soup in a Chinese restaurant in Bangkok fifteen years ago by mistake. It was just a salty chicken broth with this cartilaginous lump in the middle. Nothing special at all, so why are people so keen to eat it?

So, no fish, no sharks and turns out that there are not too many whales or dolphins either. The award-winning documentary, ‘The Cove‘, is a dramatic expose of the truth of what really happens out of sight, out of mind, in the hidden cove in the town of Taiji, Japan.

Documentaries are a great way to learn about what’s going on in the world. I don’t like spending money buying Hollywood blockbuster movies but I think it’s important to support documentaries that tell us the truth about the world that we’re living in. So, if we don’t want to be eating jellyfish burgers in twenty or thirty years time (and I’ve eaten jellyfish – you can take my word for it, it’s not great) then I suggest we should all be promoting these films and talking about what they mean. What right do we have to steal from the oceans? What right do we have to steal from future generations?? Why shouldn’t our children’s children be able to see dolphins in their natural habitat or eat some tuna sushi???