Celebrating 20 years: The Whale

In April 2013 the Capital Times closed and my weekly gig went with it. It was a shabby clos­ure. Apparently the own­ers could­n’t make a weekly cir­cu­la­tion of 60,000 prof­it­able, espe­cially when they wer­en’t pay­ing many of their con­trib­ut­ors – me included¹.

In my final column I went into bat for a doc­u­ment­ary I was very fond of and demon­strated the folly of try­ing to pre­dict a future for films that I wanted to succeed.

Quietly bid­ing it’s time and hop­ing for a big school hol­i­day sea­son is Canadian eco-doc The Whale which blew me away the oth­er night. Perfectly pitched at fam­il­ies of all ages, it tells the story of a baby orca named Luna that gets lost in pic­tur­esque Nootka Sound off Vancouver Island. Killer whales are social creatures and – without a pod to call home – Luna befriends and bewitches every­one she meets. Of course, bur­eau­cracy being what it is, this couldn’t be allowed so the full force of the Canadian fish­er­ies pro­tec­tion people are enlis­ted to keep Luna away from the people she loves to play with.

A bril­liant story, superbly and power­fully told with won­der­ful pic­tures and a per­fect voi­ceover from exec­ut­ive pro­du­cer and Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds². I would be sur­prised if any view­er remained uncap­tiv­ated by one of the best nature doc­u­ment­ar­ies in years. Those last two sen­tences have been espe­cially craf­ted to go into news­pa­per ads – that’s how much I recom­mend The Whale.

The Whale sank without trace³ and is not cur­rently avail­able online in Aotearoa (although you can rent the DVD from Aro Street).

Also in that final column: Danny Boyle’s Trance star­ring James McAvoy (“minor Boyle”); self-funded Wellington sci­ence fic­tion Eternity (“Impossible to recom­mend to any­one except friends and fam­ily (just not my friends and fam­ily))”; and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

1. Our paths would cross again when I was edit­or of Fishhead and they were run­ning tour com­pet­it­or in the Wellington life­style magazine mar­ket, Capital. ↩︎
2. Reynolds exec­ut­ive pro­duced the film along with his ex-wife, Scarlett Johansson. ↩︎
3. It is, of course, not the film that most people think of when you men­tion The Whale. ↩︎