Sharkwater - sometimes a movie just cuts through.
When I watched Sharkwater, I raved about it for a few weeks. Doc and Woody and Randall seemed disinterested, and paid little attention to my rantings. (As they did recently with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, going so far as to mock my taste in movies, sight unseen.) But then I managed to score an interview with the director of the film, an interview I posted in the “interviews” section on this webpage. And once they listened to the interview, they were all of a sudden intrigued. I had received two copies of this movie - a DVD screener from Alliance Films so I could familiarize myself with the movie before the interview, and an actual DVD copy. So the day after the interview, I gave one copy to Doc and one to Randall. (Not to Woody. He still has my copy of Knocked Up from a year ago, and my copy of A History of Violence from two years ago.) And they loved it. It’s a terrific documentary, after all, and it tells the story of the plight of sharks in the wild in a way that is exciting, intense and incredibly relevant to us, the viewers, as members of the human race.
Now, within the last two weeks, I have heard the movie mentioned over and over. My eight-year-old stepson was talking about an article he had read in a magazine about sharks and a movie that was out that told the story of how they weren’t really dangerous and we were killing them all. And I have heard of several children making school reports and oral presentations based on Sharkwater. One of them was my other step-son, who is thirteen. He wrote a report on sharks, as part of a class project where everyone wrote reports on sharks. Then he took the movie to school, and they started to watch it in class. However, halfway through, the teacher stopped it and they planned to watch the rest the following day. But in the meantime, I am going to assume that someone complained. I assume that a classmate of my step-son’s went home and told his parents all about this amazing movie they were watching in school, and those parents, without having seen Sharkwater, got freaked out and complained. Because the next day, the rest of the film was not shown - apparently, 13-year-old kids still have to get parental consent forms in order to watch movies rated PG. G is OK, PG is not. Parents could object, and I believe someone did. (This is the same school and grade, by the way, where they recently watched The Pianist. Which leads me to believe there was a complaint that brought this about.)
Anyway, I hope that this leads the rest of the kids to ask their parents to rent or buy Sharkwater, and the message will still get out. And I also hope Doc and Woody and Randall watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and then eat their words.