Oceans: Tastes great, less filling

Ok, this wasn't on the treadmill. For Mother's Day we all went to see Oceans at the local indy theater. If you're not familiar with the movie, it's the latest nature porn from Canal+, right out of the Jacques Cousteau/March of the Penguins mold. It was undeniably beautifully filmed, the kind of movie that you smile at the whole time you're watching it. My first impulse was to get out the scuba gear and book a trip in warmer waters (nowhere near the gulf coast, mind you.) Afterwards you think about how banal the anthropomorphism is or how the voice over added nothing at all to the gorgeous images. Why don't directors ever make these nature pictures without narration? The images certainly should speak for themselves. Seeing the movie also made me think about the futility of good-intentioned nature films like this. We're a generation raised on nature movies, yet as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrates, we haven't learned a damned thing. Just two years ago our presidential election debate on energy policy gave us the choice between "drill baby drill" (how's that look now?) and meaningless empty verbiage. Not surprisingly we still don't have a coherent national policy on energy. Industry can't self-regulate--it's purpose is to make money--and the government can't get its regulatory acts together. The only good thing to come out of all this is that our own governator has stepped back from his support of drilling off the California coast, a lesson we learned after the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil spill, but had forgotten in the space of one generation. So my review of the movie? Makes me cranky. Seen it before. We're a slow learning people.