Tell It to the Swordfish.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

There are movies that make you hate your own species, and several of them have been playing at your local theater this summer. Scary Movie and Me, Myself and Irene, for example, films so derisive of humanity that you would not want your pets to see them, lest they lose all respect for you and loud fart-producing life forms in general. But for a more thought-provoking critique of the human species, you cannot do better than Chicken Run and--for reasons we'll get to in a minute--The Perfect Storm. After seeing these, the attentive viewer will want to don a Kermit suit immediately and go through life trying to pass as an amphibian.

Chicken Run (best known for putting millions of American children off their McNuggets) may be the only movie in history in which there are no bad guys--only a bad species, and it's ours. The setting is an English egg farm strongly resembling an avian Auschwitz and ruled over by the evil--and we must note, thoroughly banal--Mr, and Ms. Tweedy. Here the chickens attempt to lead a normal lower-middle-class British life knitting and gossiping--never mind that the Tweedys routinely butcher and eat any hen whose egg production falls below quota. The lone exception to the general complacency is the plucky--ouch, block that adjective!--hen Ginger, who sets about to organize a jail break.

The stakes rise precipitously when Ms. Tweedy decides to switch from eggs to the more profitable production of chicken pot pies and installs a huge, ghastly industrial device--a gas chamber analog, one readily guesses--for this purpose. Long story short, Ginger finally succeeds in enlisting her comrades in the construction of a giant chicken-shaped flying machine in which they escape, after many close calls, to a beautiful human-free chicken utopia. The children in the audience cheer wildly, while the adults wonder what in god's name they're going to get away with serving for dinner.

Moving along now to The Perfect Storm, we find a movie that begins in a deceptively pro-human vein. For the first half hour or more, humans are displayed at their most lovable--swilling beer, fussing over their young, and preparing to spawn still more of their kind. In case the audience doesn't understand that it is supposed to care whether any of these bipeds ends up in Davy Jones's locker, the camera continually zooms in on couples embracing while the heavy-handed score soars to violin-drenched heights--leading my companion, the cynical gay dermatologist, to...