In today’s Washington Post, journalist William Booth highlighted Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and Gore’s efforts to sound the alarm on the effects of global warming.
From Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, Booth opened his article with this:
Has ever a little indie film faced a greater hurdle? Imagine this sales pitch: Babe, it's a movie about global warming. Starring Al Gore. Doing a slide show. With charts. About ‘soil evaporation.’ Improbable? Perhaps. So it's all the more amazing that "An Inconvenient Truth" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday night before an enthusiastic audience that gave the former vice president and his movie a big standing O.
Based on a slide show Gore assembled himself, Booth adds: "Gore has traveled the globe with his bar graphs, staging event after event for small, invited audiences. Free of charge. And he's presented one version or another of this slide show, by his own estimation, a thousand times."
What is the message of Gore’s film?
Primarily, that "Earth's glaciers are melting....each year sets new heat records....The accumulation of carbon dioxide and other pollutants of the industrial age are increasing temperatures." As film-goers witnessed watching the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, Gore’s stats argue"that global warming may soon lead to catastrophic sea level rises, which could inundate cities such as New York (flooding the former site of the World Trade Center), producing scary nonlinear runaway spasms of extreme weather (bigger, badder hurricanes and typhoons), global pandemics and, depending on where you live, torrential rains or decade-long drought."
The official Sundance Film Festival guide calls the documentary a "gripping story" with "a visually mesmerizing presentation" that is "activist cinema at its very best."
I don't know about you. But I am interested in the topic of global warming. And this film interests me. (And yes, maybe I am biased. After all, I voted for Gore in 2000.)
Photo taken by Eric Neitzel.
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