When I was 20 I left a movie theater with a very nauseated feeling. It could easily have been the movie (Michael J. Jox’s Secret of My Success), but ever since then a kind of motion sickness makes sitting in any movie theater a struggle to keep from throwing up (and I’ve actually lost my lunch a few times). It’s gotten worse over the years and now I miss at least half of any movie I pay for, so I haven’t seen anything in the theater for almost a year.
But Al Gore’s film about the damage we’re doing to ourselves and our environment is getting some good reviews so, armed with dramamine, I’m going to give the movie theater one more try. Of An Inconvenient Truth one review says:
More than one person has asked me if the movie is deeply depressing, and there’s nothing cheery about the petroleum industry spreading disinformation or the Bush administration doctoring scientific data, both of which Gore documents in his lecture. But as he points out, the technical solutions to global warming are already well established; the only thing lacking is political will. Again he uses the fight against fascism as his model, citing the unprecedented military mobilization that followed Pearl Harbor and concluding, “In America, political will is a renewable resource.” In that respect Gore seems to be way ahead of the filmmakers: their half of the movie valorizes him, laboring under the old but still powerful delusion that history is made by great men, while his half focuses on educating people. After 30 years in politics, watching his own stock rise and fall, Gore seems to have learned that only the public can lead.
The Chicago Reader, June 2, 2006
I’m hoping to be able to sit through the whole film. I’ll let you know.
0 Comments