Review: "An Inconvenient Truth"
One of the glorious things about the summer is having a break from my television schedule. I'm not chained to my couch anymore, no longer juggling five or six must-see shows. Now it's just baseball games and Project Runway.
But last night there was nothing on. No Sox game, no nothing. Nothing worth watching. Mike was staying on my day-sleep schedule since he only had last night off, and works three nights in a row starting tonight, so he had slept all day and was in no mood to go out for a walk, or clean up our place, or something like that. Then he suggested a movie. Ah, a movie! Glorious air conditioning and relief from the doldrums! We wanted to see either "The Breakup" or "An Inconvenient Truth". We went with the latter, and it did not disappoint.
Based around Al Gore's global warming slide show presentation that he's given many times to audiences around the world, the pure, unadulterated scientific facts are laid out in a way that shows logical correlations; the side-by-side pictures of spots around the globe are eye-opening. Critics who say that the 50 year projections mentioned in the movie can't possibly be true need to shut the hell up (I'm looking at you, Dean, from WGN morning news). Those projections are based on undoubted scientific data with a large sample to back it up. These critics probably do not question, for example, weekend box office earnings, but it's the same math that projects those figures as well. You take a sample, and you project--simple as that. It's not a cold hard fact, but it's something that's exceedingly probable.
Anecdotes of Gore's personal life are sprinkled in between segments in order to drive home the concepts of change, introspection, and determination, and these do not detract from the movie's overall message. In one anecdote, he talks about his family's farm where they grew tobacco (or as he says, falling into a heavier accent, tabacky) and his older sister, who smoked since her teenage years, who later died from lung cancer. after seeing the correlation of her action leading to her death, and the family's growth of the product that caused it, they stopped growing tobacco.
Humor is well used to get their points across. A "Futurama" clip about global warming was hilarious, spotlighting the U.S.'s inability to come up with a lasting solution to our problem, going with band-aids and half-measures. Mike said before we left for the theater that he wondered if Kool and the Gang's "Celebration" would play. ("I will.") But unfunny Al Gore used the right amount of humor at the right times to help his message.
Unfortunately, the movie's weak link in showing the correlation of how what you and I do every day directly leads to global warming and it's disastrous results. It makes excellent mention of the U.S.'s unwillingness to join Kyoto and our inability to have more efficient and less polluting vehicles, but the movies seems to lay the blame on big business and the government, because they're easy targets. Sure, an Amoco plant puts way pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere than I personally do, but I can change what I do today. I can't change that Amoco plant today. (In fact, Mike also joked on the way to the theater that he didn't think Al Gore would be thrilled that we were driving to the theater, but I came back with, "Well, he wants us to see his movie, right?").
The lasting message of the movie is that U.S. big business and government don't plan on doing anything about it, and it's all up to us. We have to make the small changes, and those small changes will grow into big trends. The easiest way is to be less dependent on our cars and rely more on our own two feet or public transport. As a city dweller, that's no so hard for me (I take a bus to work and live very close to a grocery store, etc.) but for many people making these changes will be hard. but the rest of the world is doing it. Why can't we?
You can go to http://www.climatecrisis.net, the website related to the documentary, to see some of the facts and find out some of the things that you can do to help.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to write about this. Melissa Etheridge plays a song over the end credit, a song about as subtle as an anvil. It's fine if a Bond song sings about what happens in the movie, because that's the point ("Gold-fing-aaaah! waah-waaaaaah-wah"). But this is the equivalent of as if at the end of Titanic, Celine Dion's song was:
"We met upon the Titanic,
We fell in love so deeply.
Even when I thought you were a thief.
Then the boat, it sank down
The Irish guy got shot,
But I floated on a door all night"
Either way, the Melissa Etheridge song made it feel like I was being slapped in the face with a recycled newspaper over and over again. We get it. Jeez, I'll sell my car. Just shut up, Melissa.
But last night there was nothing on. No Sox game, no nothing. Nothing worth watching. Mike was staying on my day-sleep schedule since he only had last night off, and works three nights in a row starting tonight, so he had slept all day and was in no mood to go out for a walk, or clean up our place, or something like that. Then he suggested a movie. Ah, a movie! Glorious air conditioning and relief from the doldrums! We wanted to see either "The Breakup" or "An Inconvenient Truth". We went with the latter, and it did not disappoint.
Based around Al Gore's global warming slide show presentation that he's given many times to audiences around the world, the pure, unadulterated scientific facts are laid out in a way that shows logical correlations; the side-by-side pictures of spots around the globe are eye-opening. Critics who say that the 50 year projections mentioned in the movie can't possibly be true need to shut the hell up (I'm looking at you, Dean, from WGN morning news). Those projections are based on undoubted scientific data with a large sample to back it up. These critics probably do not question, for example, weekend box office earnings, but it's the same math that projects those figures as well. You take a sample, and you project--simple as that. It's not a cold hard fact, but it's something that's exceedingly probable.
Anecdotes of Gore's personal life are sprinkled in between segments in order to drive home the concepts of change, introspection, and determination, and these do not detract from the movie's overall message. In one anecdote, he talks about his family's farm where they grew tobacco (or as he says, falling into a heavier accent, tabacky) and his older sister, who smoked since her teenage years, who later died from lung cancer. after seeing the correlation of her action leading to her death, and the family's growth of the product that caused it, they stopped growing tobacco.
Humor is well used to get their points across. A "Futurama" clip about global warming was hilarious, spotlighting the U.S.'s inability to come up with a lasting solution to our problem, going with band-aids and half-measures. Mike said before we left for the theater that he wondered if Kool and the Gang's "Celebration" would play. ("I will.") But unfunny Al Gore used the right amount of humor at the right times to help his message.
Unfortunately, the movie's weak link in showing the correlation of how what you and I do every day directly leads to global warming and it's disastrous results. It makes excellent mention of the U.S.'s unwillingness to join Kyoto and our inability to have more efficient and less polluting vehicles, but the movies seems to lay the blame on big business and the government, because they're easy targets. Sure, an Amoco plant puts way pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere than I personally do, but I can change what I do today. I can't change that Amoco plant today. (In fact, Mike also joked on the way to the theater that he didn't think Al Gore would be thrilled that we were driving to the theater, but I came back with, "Well, he wants us to see his movie, right?").
The lasting message of the movie is that U.S. big business and government don't plan on doing anything about it, and it's all up to us. We have to make the small changes, and those small changes will grow into big trends. The easiest way is to be less dependent on our cars and rely more on our own two feet or public transport. As a city dweller, that's no so hard for me (I take a bus to work and live very close to a grocery store, etc.) but for many people making these changes will be hard. but the rest of the world is doing it. Why can't we?
You can go to http://www.climatecrisis.net, the website related to the documentary, to see some of the facts and find out some of the things that you can do to help.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to write about this. Melissa Etheridge plays a song over the end credit, a song about as subtle as an anvil. It's fine if a Bond song sings about what happens in the movie, because that's the point ("Gold-fing-aaaah! waah-waaaaaah-wah"). But this is the equivalent of as if at the end of Titanic, Celine Dion's song was:
"We met upon the Titanic,
We fell in love so deeply.
Even when I thought you were a thief.
Then the boat, it sank down
The Irish guy got shot,
But I floated on a door all night"
Either way, the Melissa Etheridge song made it feel like I was being slapped in the face with a recycled newspaper over and over again. We get it. Jeez, I'll sell my car. Just shut up, Melissa.