Category Archives: Documentary

Coming to cable network Fusion and to VOD today, Monday, June 8: EXTINCTION SOUP

Philip Waller’s personal quest to help the world’s shark population debuted at the San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival last year. Since then, aside from Am Docs, the film has largely screened in smaller environmentally-themed and doc fests. Its release today coincides with Wold Oceans Day.

In a remarkably extended and overly conversational narration, Waller relates his past as a former child actor facing post-career doldrums, and how he stumbled into surfing and filmmaking. Continuing this irksome meta-filmmaking preamble, he explains that his original goal was to make a film about his friend Jimmy Hall, an extreme sports fanatic who turned his love of tiger sharks into a business giving shark tours. After Hall’s accidental death BASE jumping, Waller finally gets to the crux of his film’s thesis by deciding to focus on Hall’s bereaved girlfriend, Stefanie Brendl, and her efforts to get legislation passed to help halt the hunting of sharks for their fins. This practice has skyrocketed in recent years thanks in large part to an increase in demand for shark fin soup – associated with luxury and opulence – by the burgeoning Chinese economy, and as a result has decimated the shark population so dramatically that there are legitimate fears of extinction. Traveling back and forth between California and Hawaii, Waller follows Brendl as she assists in a not completely explained manner with lobbying efforts to ban shark fin possession, a measure that ultimately passes and begins to spread to other parts of the world. Despite his best intentions – and aspirations of creating the next BLACKFISH or THE COVE – Waller makes the fundamental mistake too many neophyte filmmakers do in thinking that the making of their film is the story that should be on the screen. Even if one were generously to forgive that essential error, what’s left – watching legislation pass, second hand – is not particularly engaging, despite Waller and Brendl’s impassioned efforts.