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AL GORE 2008!!!

May 24, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW

Warning of Calamities and Hoping for a Change in 'An Inconvenient Truth'
By A. O. SCOTT

CANNES, France, May 23 — "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

Appearances to the contrary, Mr. Guggenheim's movie is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a multimedia presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore has given many times over the last few years, interspersed with interviews and Mr. Gore's voice-over reflections on his life in and out of politics. His presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days. But really, the idea that worrying about the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.

In any case, Mr. Gore has long since proven to be a deft self-satirist. (He recently told a moderator at a Cannes Film Festival news conference to address him as "your Adequacy.") He makes a few jokes to leaven the grim gist of "An Inconvenient Truth," and some of them are funny, in the style of a college lecturer's attempts to keep the attention of his captive audience. Indeed, his onstage manner — pacing back and forth, fiddling with gadgets, gesturing for emphasis — is more a professor's than a politician's. If he were not the man who, in his own formulation "used to be the next president of the United States of America," he might have settled down to tenure and a Volvo (or maybe a Prius) in some leafy academic grove.

(snip)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/movies/24trut.html?ex=1180065600&en=42220907b0fd919b&ei=5083&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes
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Gore's 'Truth' is highly watchable
Updated 5/23/2006 11:43 PM ET
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Al Gore's 40-year-long passion on the subject of global warming shines through powerfully and lights up An Inconvenient Truth (* * * 1/2 out of four).

What could have been mired in political rhetoric or techno-speak is instead illuminating, fascinating and sometimes frightening. A thought-provoking cautionary tale that is also lively and entertaining, An Inconvenient Truth showcases the dedication, warmth and, yes, charm of the former vice president.

By delving into Gore's personal tragedies and setbacks (the near-fatal accident of his son, his sister's death from lung cancer and his oh-so-close loss of the 2000 presidential election), director Davis Guggenheim reveals an Al Gore who is admirably resilient. After his loss to George W. Bush, Gore chose not to retreat, instead hitting the road on a mission to inform the world about the peril the planet is facing.

Gore's commitment to reversing global warming had its origins in his student days at Harvard and continues as he takes his multimedia show (a blend of scientific data, startling photographs, statistics, cartoons and humor) all over the USA and abroad.

(snip)
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/2006-05-23-inconvenient-truth_x.htm
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Fahrenheit 2050
The man who would've been president warns of an imminent deep impact
by Rob Nelson
May 23rd, 2006 3:59 PM

With ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and Poseidon sinking fast, this is no environment for any disaster movie, particularly a real one, to take our interest for granted. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, named for the super-bad news of global climate change, isn't just another lefty doc for the art house set, but "by far the most terrifying film you will ever see," according to the ads, which feature a trio of smokestacks spewing what looks like the perfect storm. Fear sells . . . usually. But how scary is it that this sugarcoated pill would be administered by Al Gore, an activist whose seemingly pharmaceutical calm is almost as alarming as his message? Credit the "former next president" and his director, Davis Guggenheim, with recognizing that their film of Gore's self-described "slide show" might come across as a bit more human with the help of a supporting player—namely a Pixarish polar bear whose would-be ice rafts crack under claw.

Seriously: That sad CG creature, left to drown in warm arctic water, emotes more poignantly than Gore or even the prehistoric casualties of Ice Age: The Meltdown—a crucial achievement for a summer movie whose truth runs the risk of remaining merely inconvenient if it can't compete with fiction. Suffice it to say that the Al Gore concert film ain't exactly Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Onstage, pointer in hand, the pedant Gore mounts a hydraulic lift to follow the climb of carbon dioxide literally off the charts—a dramatic high point of his presentation. More effective in attention-getting terms are the Cameronian computer images of the ocean engulfing Lower Manhattan (the projected result of the Greenland ice sheet's shrink by 2050) and Gore's commentary: "Is it possible that we should guard against other threats besides terrorists?"

An Inconvenient Truth, produced last year but released, conveniently, during a new low for both presidential approval ratings and SUV resale values, isn't afraid to Bush-bash even at the risk of appearing partisan (or petulant) on the part of its leading man. Gore asserts in the film that the issues facing the planet are, above all, moral—an argument that would seem hard or impossible for anyone outside of the current administration to refute. Yet the personal is political, as the saying goes, and whenever Guggenheim departs from the show-and-tell to sketch the speaker's motives, the film makes for compelling psychobiography despite the fact that Gore, stiff as an air-conditioned breeze at the Four Seasons, isn't the least bit compelling himself.

"Well, that was a hard blow," the un(s)elected candidate declares with body-snatched understatement over the usual TV news montage of Florida's sudden climate change from blue to red. "What do you do? You make the best of it." Gore's election "loss," added to the lingering effects of family tragedy (his sister's death from lung cancer, his six-year-old's near-fatal accident) and his college science prof's persuasive weather predictions, is used to explain the pol's resolve to take his global warning on a world tour. Guggenheim's backstage repertoire consists mainly of Gore looking pensively out the windows of airplanes and town cars, the activist jet-setter's fuel-burning justified unconditionally by his urgent need to get out the message (if not the vote).

(snip)
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0621,nelson,73313,20.html
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An Inconvenient Truth (review)
Category 5 Storm Warning

Where was this man in 2000? Matters of global climate change aside, that was the primary impression I was left with at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, the one question I wanted to scream with rage and frustration. The Al Gore here is thoughtful, intelligent, engaged with the world, passionate, relaxed, inspiring, even funny. That he was smart was never in question -- that he was any kind of leader, a man with the power to make you share his passion, was.

No more. The answer to my question, I suspect, is that this Al Gore did not exist in 2000, not quite -- I suspect that he was forged by the fire of being treated like a buffoon by the press before the election (and letting the press get away with it) and by the fiasco of the post-election legal nightmare in which he put being gracious above playing to win. You can forget everything you knew about the “stiff,” “wonky” Al Gore of 2000: the Gore of 2006 has clearly learned a hard lesson about fighting like you mean it and not letting the other side’s propaganda frame the issue.

But, amazingly, An Inconvenient Truth isn’t a political film, not really, even if the debate about global climate change has come down to “sides” in the same idiotic way that the debate about evolution has, in the same way that the debate about heliocentricity once was. Because you don’t need to like Gore, or trust him, or even believe him to get a swift kick in the pants, one that’ll scare the hell out of you, and Truth isn’t really about Gore at all, except accidentally.

Since 2000, see, the ex-vice president has been traveling the globe giving a slideshow presentation about climate issues to anyone who’ll listen, and documentarian Davis Guggenheim pretty much plopped some cameras in front of one of those presentations to create Truth. If you’ve been following climate science -- not climate propaganda -- little that Gore says will be news to you, but he puts it all together in such a devastating way that the impact is enormous nevertheless even to the initiated. To anyone who’s only paid attention the mainstream press, which continues to insist that there is no scientific consensus that we’re totally fucked unless we do something soon, Truth will be like an atomic bomb going off in your brain.

(snip)

http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2006/05/an_inconvenient_truth_review.html

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An Inconvenient Truth
from Jurgen Fauth
"A Nature Hike Through the Book of Revelations"

As I prepare to review An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, my news feeds inform me that
America's "fair and balanced" news source is already launching a frontal attack on the movie. "If people buy into Gore’s] global warming hysteria, will it put him in the White House and our economy on the skids?" Fox News host
David Asman asked of his guests this weekend. Note the clever framing of the question: the hysteria is a given, and
all we're supposed to be interested in are the consequences, most likely dire. Other commentators are even less
circuitous in their slander.

And Fox News is not alone. Pundits all over the blogosphere are wondering aloud if the movie marks the beginning of
a possible Gore run for the Presidency in 2008--and what about his tuxedoed appearance at Cannes!? With all the
noise, one begins to suspect that their true purpose is diversion: if we focus on Al Gore's personality or spend time
speculating on his Presidential aspirations, perhaps we won't take notice of the film's carefully elaborated argument.
Maybe we'll even forget about global warming.

"Hysteria" is just about the last word that comes to mind in describing An Inconvenient Truth--the film's approach is
rational to a fault. With a little help from Simpsons creator Matt Groening and state-of-the-art flat screen monitors, An
Inconvenient Truth lays out Gore's case: we are now seeing the beginning of a climate crisis that threatens life on
Earth as we know it. The on-screen evidence is difficult to dismiss--charts and graphs reveal frightening trends, and
the film loses no time showing us the destruction of Hurricane Katrina along with a series of comparative photographs
from disappearing glaciers around the world, footage of collapsing ice shelves, data on the record numbers of storms,
floods, and other kinds of extreme weather, animations of the effects of rising sea levels, new diseases, photos of
dying polar bears and disappearing coral reefs. "A nature hike through the Book of Revelations," Gore calls it.

Gore, who estimates that he has given his global warming presentation about a thousand times all over the world,
builds his argument with measured, road-tested ease. He is no scientist, but he manages to convincingly portray
himself as an expert on the topic. Short segments offer brief biographical sketches that dramatize Gore's personal
dedication--here he is onboard a nuclear submarine surfacing in the Antarctic, here he is reminiscing about the 2000
election and his sister's death from lung cancer. These digressions always tie back into the film's argument rather than
functioning purely as puff pieces.

(snip)
http://worldfilm.about.com/od/documentaryfilms/fr/incovenient.htm
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Devastating in Its Implications
Go see Al Gore’s new documentary—and then pay attention to who attacks it.
By David Edelstein

As the controversy over The Da Vinci Code makes clear, a vast majority of Americans—among them our president—regard the divinity of Jesus as a fact, not a theory. So what’s a theory? Global warming, of course. And it’s a theory that needs more study, preferably carried out by the unbiased scientists at ExxonMobil and their past or future colleagues in the Bush White House.

On the other hand, someone who would treat as fact the self-serving yammerings of Al Gore must be an environmentalist wacko, right? So let’s have a good laugh at An Inconvenient Truth, a feature-length lecture directed by Davis Guggenheim (there’s a limousine-liberal name for you!) in which the failed presidential candidate (lampooned a few weeks ago on the libertarian-tinged South Park, where he raved about a creature called “ManBearPig”) drones on about cracking ice shelves and disappearing permafrost and soaring temperatures and rising sea levels. It’s obviously just a tedious, 96-minute presidential-campaign commercial, right?

That, in any event, is how much of the mainstream media is likely to characterize this new documentary of Gore and his traveling global-warming slide show: Anything else would invite charges of liberal bias. But the fact is—the fact is—that only a brainwashed audience (and their brainwashers) could portray anything in An Inconvenient Truth as even remotely controversial. Gore has all the graphs and charts and time-lapsed photographs and peer-reviewed scientific studies he needs to underscore his message about where the planet is heading—and sooner than we think. So be afraid. Be very afraid.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim weaves together the ex-vice-president’s speeches before a series of packed houses all over the United States and abroad. Casually dressed, Gore is less stiff than during his last presidential run, and he has learned not to drone. But he is still clearly in his element as a pedant. After introducing himself as the former next president of the United States (a joke that made at least one viewer wince at the thought of what might have been), he shows an image of the planet as it looked in the first pictures taken from space. Then he shows a picture of the planet as it looks now. Then he graphs the differences to show the acceleration of global warming. He debunks the theory that these changes are “cyclical”: Scientists have studied all the environmental cycles since the last Ice Age, he says. These are off the charts.

(snip)
http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/17092/index.html
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MOVIE REVIEW
'An Inconvenient Truth'
Al Gore warms up to a very hot topic.
By Kevin Crust
Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2006

Critics have labeled Al Gore and his decades-long crusade to curb global warming as "alarmist." But if you've been warning people that the sky is falling for more than 20 years and it really is falling (or at least heating up), don't you have an obligation to sound an alarm?

The highly persuasive documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" captures Gore delivering a multimedia presentation he has given an estimated 1,000 times since 1989. The talk is augmented with an impressive array of graphs, animation, anecdotes and statistics that convey a flurry of facts, projections and conjecture, all pointing to the ill effects the present rate of emissions has on the environment. A film with a clear point of view (and little room for others), it is the inspiration of producers Laurie David and Lawrence Bender, who attended Gore's lecture, decided it had to be made into a film to broaden the reach of its message and recruited director Davis Guggenheim to shoot it.

Guggenheim intercuts the lecture with footage of Gore on the road, studiously working out his presentation on his ubiquitous laptop, and segments that effectively show the crucible moments in his life that led him to continually rededicate himself to this topic. There's the college professor who first taught him about climate change in the late 1960s, the death of Gore's sister Nancy from cancer and the 1989 accident that nearly claimed the life of his son. While the vignettes establish Gore's long-term commitment, unfortunately there's a slickness to them that plays like a campaign film that might be shown at a political convention.

Gore might not be anybody's idea of a pitchman, but here he's matched with the right topic, one for which he demonstrates real passion. He's charming, intelligent, professorial and one might even say … presidential. In fact, more than one observer has commented that if this Al Gore had been more visible during the 2000 election there may have been a different outcome.

(snip)
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-truth24may24,0,577270.story?coll=cl-mreview

:kick:

AL GORE 2008!!!