If you like watching people preach to the converted, you'll love AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Al Gore, at his pedantic, self-satisfied best, delivers his well-honed global warming presentation to an audience that hangs on his every word. Gore's presentation combines data, images, and even a Matt Groening video in its efforts to convince -well, by the looks of things, people who need no convincing. He uses straw man arguments to dismiss "critics" (You can practically see the quotation marks he puts around the word.), he milks the current administration for easy laughs (not that that's hard to do), and he generally plays to his base.
This is fine, particularly if you're his base, but then the movie can't help but get us into Gore's personal life, or at least whichever aspects of his personal life he chooses to exploit for the purposes of the film. There are plenty of shots of Apple board member Gore working with determination at his Apple computer, looking pensively into his Apple computer, and just generally promoting the Apple brand. There's Gore sitting down with "cutting edge," as he describes them, (fully vetted) representatives of the PRC, home of some of the world's most polluted cities, talking about their solutions. There's Gore navigating the backstage labyrinth, causing me to hope, for just a moment, that he'd stop and ask someone for directions. Oh, it was horrible.
If I had to boil AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH down to just one word, that word would be "Insufferable." I went into this movie feeling neutral about Gore and generally sympathetic toward his cause. I came out of it actively disliking the man and neutral toward his cause. This film's success is a mystery to me.
3 comments:
Thanks for reinforcing our reasoning in "not" watching this film (we can only watch so many). Already strong believers in the cause (also in Macs for that matter) we were literally afraid to watch the wrong man take the wrong path in enlightening the wrong audience (those in no need of enlightenment). Looked like a waste of time to us. A wise man would have slid into the background and used a more appropriate "messenger", delivering it tuned for the masses who are neither hypnotized by the social-darwinist right or enthralled by the pedantic-behaviorist left.
Come on I thought you would have loved the 2 hour long MAC ad. I was expecting the I'm a Mac and I'm a PC guys showing up to and becoming the I'm a evil polluting conservative and I'm a hip mac using enviromentalist. I saw it with my wife and I did not hate it or like it, kinda left me with a blah feeling. My wife made a good point that it points out all these problems, but really provides no solution or guidance on how to solve the problem.
I think we have a problem that we need to address, but this is not the way.
Hey, I wrote that review on a Mac. Maybe I'm just bitter because I never bought the stock.
Here's the thing - I think this movie got its accolades due to its subject matter, not to its quality as a film. More of the latter might have helped sell the former, however.
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