Reading about a shortage of clean and usable water on a blog about the art of movies can be dishonest attempt at wasting your time. Would I be in the ballpark of honesty with that statement? Did you know that 97.5% of the earth's water is saltwater? For an educated person this little fact would provoke a common sense style “no duh” response. However, if you were to fill a bucket full of the ocean water there would only be a single teaspoonful that would be drinkable. How is that possible? Well, the water has to be processed to remove all the excess salt and other unsanitary debris that may be floating around in it. After all the garbage has been strained out of the water this leaves us with about a teaspoon of clean water to drink. According to The Water Project there is a high volume of water that is used during the process of manufacturing food for consumption. Here is a brief table of information they have provided on their website.
It would be safe to say that I am not a farmer by any means that is measurable. However, I do know that it takes quite a bit of water to raise a cow and a chicken to full maturity so that we can enjoy eating eggs and beef. At the pinnacle of water usage as listed in the chart it takes around 634 gallons of water to nurture a cow in order to produce a single hamburger. I am sure the process of arriving at such a mathematical conclusion is very fascinating, but remember all that water that was used to make that 100% Angus beef burger that you just purchased on your lunch break today.
At this point I wonder if you have been asking yourself what the correlation is between the use of water and movies. Every year in the middle of October it is tradition to partner up with Blog Action Day and write about a unified topic of social and environmental concern. This year the topic is about water in all its glory and shortfalls. In southern California, where I live and where Hollywood has called home for many years, there has been a long standing history of usable water having to be redirected from other parts of the state if not from pumped in from neighboring states. Immediately after discovering the topic for the 2010 Blog Action Day event I had remembered the investigation of corruption in the 1974 film Chinatown starring Jack Nicholson, hence the picture that I have added at the start of this article. In the movie Jack portrays a private investigator who is involved with discovering the details of a corrupted real estate plan of redirected water away from Los Angeles in order to force orange grove farmers to declare bankruptcy and sell their property for rock bottom prices.
It should be no surprise to anyone of us that Chinatown is not the only film to prominently feature water as an integral part of the story. Here are a few other water related films that I would like to recommend to you. Each film prominently features water as an integral part of the story and this list is comprised of my favorite films from a long run of "water" movies. My apologies to those dedicated fans out there, but Titanic will not be posted anywhere on this list.
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Shutter Island (2009)Director: Martin Scorsese.
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo.
[ Matte Havoc review ]
What marks this film particularly special in terms of water use would be that the entire movie takes place on an island completed surround by water. To make everything even more complicated the story centers around a lead character, prone to seasickness, has lost all of his children who drowned in a lake a few years prior to the start of the film’s story. In addition, once the story starts building up momentum there is a huge storm that crosses over the island creating a lot of wind and rain. It would be a safe assumption to say that water is portrayed as a tool of antagonism in the film. Need I say anything more about it?
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Psycho (1960)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock.
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh.
[ Matte Havoc review ]
When is the last time you took a shower or a bath? Did you use any water?
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Waterworld (1995)Director: Kevin Reynolds.
Cast: Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper.
[ Matte Havoc review ]
This movie would have to be a guilty pleasure of mine. I enjoy watching it despise the general consensus of over bloated hatred toward it. Water has such a strong presence in the movie that it even makes an appearance in its title! The premise of the entire film after all would be the mantra that dry land is considered a myth in a world completely covered in ocean water. In my opinion, this movie is the Mad Max of the ‘90s and that is a drawing factor for me. The ocean water is undrinkable as described in the bucket of water analogy that I had mentioned earlier. Purified water is referred to as Hydro in the movie and it is regarded as a valued commodity between the characters.
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Pirate Radio (2009)
Director: Richard Curtis.
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Nick Frost.
[ Matte Havoc review ]
What can be more entertaining than a radio station that plays an unrestricted playlist of music that everyone will want to listen to without any moral regulation? There was a group of radio broadcasters who discovered a nice little spot off the coast of England where they were able to play any kind of music they wanted to play without immediate regulation by the English government. Yes, they garnered a boat and anchored it in the ocean and began broadcasting their radio transmission to an adoring crowd of music fans.
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Dark Water (2005)Director: Walter Salles.
Cast: Jennifer Connelly, John C. Reilly.
[ Matte Havoc review -- COMING SOON ]
It appears this movie was brushed to the sidelines a bit here in the United States during its theatrical run. I am unsure how it performed in the international run, but the film is entertaining just the same. Just like the other under performing film that includes "water" in the title the story within this movie focuses upon water as a key element of the plot development. I do not want to ruin the ending by giving everything away, but let me just mention two words that are very important to the story: water tower. You may now proceed with any form of screaming, shouting, and cry baby whining how I just ruined the entire movie for everyone, but the important element that I would like to emphasize here is the integral use of water in the movie.
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Jaws (1975)
Director: Steven Spielberg.
Cast: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss.
[ Matte Havoc review -- COMING SOON ]
Has anyone noticed the names of the three lead actors all have R names? Who cares when the three of them combined have convinced us never to go swimming in the ocean ever again?
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Hard Rain (1998)Director: Mikael Salomon.
Cast: Christian Slater, Morgan Freeman.
[ Matte Havoc review -- COMING SOON ]
I think most people may have forgotten about this movie, but I remember it because it has one of the catchiest ending credit songs ever (Flood by Jars of Clay). The premise of the entire movie rests upon the concept of people going about their business during a torrential downpour of rain. Water, water everywhere and without a single glimmer of hope that the rain would stop pouring down. Would we even have a movie to begin with if the rain did happen to stop when it was convenient for the main characters? I doubt it. If you have not seen the movie then you may want to rent a copy of it this weekend. It’s a rocking good time of ‘90s style storytelling.
