Media Curmudgeon

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May 26, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth

I have been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest for the last month settng up my new Web business--an hysterical website called DailyComedy.com that features "America's funniest comedians. Fresh every day." It will launch June 15, so mark your calendars, log on, and laugh out loud.

I won't be blogging except on an occasional basis until the fall, but I had to pass on a review in the usually pro-business, conservative Wall Street Journal of Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth."

My wife, Julia, and I saw it last night, and it was a life-changing moment. I'm a convert and a true believer. You will be, too, if you see the movie. Please go, please sell your SUV, plese walk or bike ot workk, and please turn out all lights and appliances when you're not using them. Join me and Julia in doing what we can in small ways to save our planet.

Here is the WSJ Review:

"An Inconvenient Truth"

In the course of "An Inconvenient Truth," a strikingly relaxed and personable Al Gore tells us that he comes from a family of slow learners; they continued to grow tobacco long after the Surgeon General's report in 1964. Then his sister Nancy died of lung cancer, and his father finally shut the business down. He says this by way of noting that we're all slow learners when it comes to the subject of this film, global warming. Davis Guggenheim's documentary is framed as a teaching film with motivational, even inspirational overtones; it's an expansion, with elegant visual aids, of the lecture Mr. Gore has given more than a thousand times all over the world. The film succeeds powerfully, even though it's short on practical solutions, makes some questionable statements of fact and, given Gore's current ambiguous position in public life, requires a tighter focus on the message than on the messenger.

'An Inconvenient Truth' presents a case for how global warming is altering the landscape.

He refers to that position in what's become his standard introduction: "I'm Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States." (When this gets a laugh, he says "I don't find that particularly funny," which gets another laugh.) It's unclear, of course, whether his political ambitions are past tense, so one inevitable question about the documentary is whether it's also a campaign film. Perhaps that is what it will prove to be, but political considerations don't lessen the impact of its argument -- that human activity is the cause of global warming, that soaring volumes of greenhouse gases are already working vast changes on our planet's climate, and that action is urgently needed to prevent unimagined catastrophe.

The greatest value of "An Inconvenient Truth" is the cumulative force of its graphic images (glaciers melting, ice caps shrinking, myriad species in retreat from rising temperatures) and the gravity of its projections -- whole civilizations beset by changes of a biblical scale in the all-too-foreseeable future. Though many voices in government and industry continue to question the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures, the film insists that the basic facts are no longer in dispute, and casts the call to action as less of a political issue than a moral one. Allowing catastrophe to overtake the world inherited by our children, Gore says, is "deeply unethical."

He speaks of his own children -- most specifically about the near-death of his young son in 1989, and how the possibility of losing what was most precious to him "changed my way of being in the world." This is not Al Gore the policy wonk (who, as we learn, has been studying and preaching about global warming for several decades). Nor is it the slightly robotized presidential candidate, but a good teacher who makes connections between love of family and concern for the health of the planet -- a planet whose atmosphere, he tells us, is as thin as the varnish on a globe.

Posted by Charles Warner at May 26, 2006 01:05 PM

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Media Curmudgeon at May 26, 2006 04:33 PM writes:

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