[VegChat] An Inconvenient Truth playing June 9-18 at the Bytowne Theatre

[Edelweiss D'Andrea]

An Inconvenient Truth
The film eloquently weaves the science of global warming with Al Gore's
personal story and lifelong commitment to stop global warming. A rallying
cry for action.

It took me 10 minutes to see the 2 minute 30 second trailer because of all
the traffic, but the second time it played right through. See the trailer
and you won't want to miss the movie.

Trailer (2:30) http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_feature.asp?id=11
Documentary
Rating: PG


PLAYING AT THE BYTOWNE THEATRE JUNE 9 TO 18

325 Rideau Street, between King Edward Avenue and Nelson Street


            Friday June 9, 7:05pm
            Saturday June 10, 9:15pm
            Sunday June 11, 1:30pm, 6:25pm
            Monday June 12, 6:30pm
            Tuesday June 13, 6:30pm
            Wednesday June 14, 4:45pm, 9:00pm
            Thursday June 15, 7:05pm
            Friday June 16, 4:45pm
            Saturday June 17, 4:15pm
            Sunday June 18, 1:45pm, 6:25pm









REVIEWS by Rachel Giese (CBC) and Roger Ebert

CBC: It’s Getting Hot in Here

Al Gore reveals the inconvenient truth about global warming
By Rachel Giese
June 2, 2006

      Al Gore addresses the effects of global warming in An Inconvenient
Truth. Photo Eric Lee. Courtesy Paramount Classics.

      At the beginning of the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former
U.S. vice-president Al Gore introduces himself as the man “who used to be
the next president of the United States.” It’s funny to a point, then not so
much, because it’s a reminder of what might have been.

      But don’t cry for Al Gore, people. He has moved on. Of the nail-biting
conclusion to the 2000 election, Gore says with typical understatement,
“well, that was a hard blow. What do you do? You make the best of it.” And
for Gore, that meant returning to the issue that’s obsessed him since
college: global warming.

      For the past few years, he’s been touring the world with a
surprisingly engaging slide-show talk on the subject — how it works, what
causes it and its very real, very dire consequences. Along the way, he
caught the attention of Laurie David, the high profile Hollywood
environmentalist who is married to Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. She
helped persuade Gore to participate in the documentary, signing on as a
producer and bringing in TV veteran (Deadwood) Davis Guggenheim to direct.

      Gore estimates he’s given the presentation a thousand times. After
failing to get the message out while in public life, he says he knows of no
other way to educate the mainstream, but “person by person, family by
family.” The show is an impressive affair. Backed by a slick presentation of
graphs and charts and corny animation — including a woeful polar bear
drowning when it can’t find a purchase on melting ice floes — Gore seriously
but amiably sets out the crisis. Rising carbon-dioxide emissions have raised
temperatures around world, triggering a complicated series of problems,
ranging from melting glaciers, to increased hurricane and tornado activity,
to drought and flooding. These phenomena, in turn, have exacerbated
political, ethnic and class tensions in places including drought-stricken
Niger and Darfur, and, closer to home, in the poor black neighbourhoods of
New Orleans.

      If the planet continues to warm up, rising sea levels from the melting
ice of Greenland and Antarctica will, within in the next few decades, engulf
large coastal cities, displacing millions of people. Shanghai, Beijing,
Mumbai and most of Lower Manhattan will be under water, Gore says, as a
computer image shows the flooding of the World Trade Center memorial site.
“Is it possible,” Gore asks in his one brief moment of petulance, “that we
should guard against other threats besides terrorists?”

      Still, for Gore this is “not a political issue, but a moral one.”
Trouble is, in America, morality and politics are increasingly intertwined.
When the religious right continues to amp up its battle against the teaching
of science in schools, how sympathetic will it be to scientific findings
about carbon-dioxide levels that date back 650,000 years? In some quarters,
suggesting the Earth is that old is akin to proposing that we evolved from
primates. So it’s no surprise that naysayers have written off global warming
as an unproven “theory” and dismissed Gore as tree-hugging alarmist.


      Gore with scientists in China. Photo Eric Lee. Courtesy Paramount
Classics.

      Yet in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore comes off as the avuncular voice of
reason. In this thoughtful and tightly paced doc, Gore makes the complicated
science of global warming accessible for a lay audience. Gore notes that the
upward trend of carbon-dioxide emissions and temperatures are currently off
the charts, wildly beyond the normal flux. He goes on to explain that in
more than 900 peer-reviewed studies in credible science journals, not one
has challenged the idea of global warming.

      However, most average folks wouldn’t know that. In the popular press,
53 per cent of articles about global warming have presented it as a
controversial idea. Gore points out that scientists have been cowed into
silence by the current administration; specifically, there’s the case of
Philip Cooney, a former environmental adviser to U.S. President George W.
Bush (though he had no scientific background or expertise in the field) who
edited a report on global warming by government scientists to play down
their findings. When his tampering was exposed, Cooney resigned and promptly
took a position at ExxonMobil.

      While Gore has been coy about running in 2008, this hagiographic
portrayal by director Guggenheim completes Gore’s transformation from
also-ran to eco-hunk. Interspersed with scenes of the lecture are Gore’s
thoughts on life in and out of politics (including his poignant memories of
nearly losing his young son after he was hit by a car, and his grief over
the lung cancer death of his older sister), scenes of him revisiting his
childhood home and a pointed montage of the controversial 2000 election
results.

      If Bush’s image machine has him in ever more butch poses — clearing
brush in a cowboy hat, strolling the deck of an aircraft carrier in a
crotch-enhancing flight suit — then Guggenheim depicts Gore as the warrior
of the laptop. He’s seen typing on planes, in deserted hotel coffee shops
and in the back of town cars, occasionally staring pensively into the
distance. It may not be as virile, but the way in which the doc contrasts
the former political rivals is deliberately stark. On one side is grinning,
heckuva job, good ole boy George W. Bush; on the other is wise, hard-working
elder statesman Al Gore.

      Since 2000, Gore has gained a few distinguished pounds around his
middle and, more notably, a sense of humour. He’s a terrific lecturer, in
the style of a keen academic rather than a slick politician. His speech has
the patness of repetition, but that doesn’t dampen his genuine passion. Gone
is the stuffed shirt, scolding pedantry that made him the smart but
unlikable presidential candidate of 2000. Here, he’s confident, worldly and
charming — a geeky, but beloved professor. Even his voice has mellowed into
the honeyed drawl of his Tennessee roots.

      Without the handlers and consultants and the pressure of appealing to
soccer moms and NASCAR dads, Gore is finally free to speak his mind.
Paradoxically, he now seems all the more presidential. His talk ends with a
rousing call to arms — he cites the abolishment of slavery, female suffrage,
the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of
apartheid as examples of the tremendous achievements of a united global
community. For sheer inspiration, it comes close to rivaling JFK’s “ask not
what your country can do for you” inauguration speech.

      According to Gore, the knowledge and technology exist to slow and even
reverse the damage of global warming. The only thing lacking is political
will. But, Gore adds, “political will is a renewable resource.”

      Spoken like a true candidate.

      An Inconvenient Truth opens June 2 across the country.

      Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

-----------------------------------------------------------
An Inconvenient Truth

BY ROGER EBERT / June 2, 2006

Cast & Credits
Paramount Classics presents a documentary featuring Al Gore. Directed by
Davis Guggenheim. Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG (for mild thematic
elements).

I want to write this review so every reader will begin it and finish it. I
am a liberal, but I do not intend this as a review reflecting any kind of
politics. It reflects the truth as I understand it, and it represents, I
believe, agreement among the world's experts.

Global warming is real.

It is caused by human activity.

Mankind and its governments must begin immediate action to halt and reverse
it.

If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a "tipping point"
and begin a slide toward destruction of our civilization and most of the
other species on this planet.

After that point is reached, it would be too late for any action.

These facts are stated by Al Gore in the documentary "An Inconvenient
Truth." Forget he ever ran for office. Consider him a concerned man speaking
out on the approaching crisis. "There is no controversy about these facts,"
he says in the film. "Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific
journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero."

He stands on a stage before a vast screen, in front of an audience. The
documentary is based on a speech he has been developing for six years, and
is supported by dramatic visuals. He shows the famous photograph
"Earthrise," taken from space by the first American astronauts. Then he
shows a series of later space photographs, clearly indicating that glaciers
and lakes are shrinking, snows are melting, shorelines are retreating.

He provides statistics: The 10 warmest years in history were in the last 14
years. Last year South America experienced its first hurricane. Japan and
the Pacific are setting records for typhoons. Hurricane Katrina passed over
Florida, doubled back over the Gulf, picked up strength from unusually warm
Gulf waters, and went from Category 3 to Category 5. There are changes in
the Gulf Stream and the jet stream. Cores of polar ice show that carbon
dioxide is much, much higher than ever before in a quarter of a million
years. It was once thought that such things went in cycles. Gore stands in
front of a graph showing the ups and downs of carbon dioxide over the
centuries. Yes, there is a cyclical pattern. Then, in recent years, the
graph turns up and keeps going up, higher and higher, off the chart.

The primary man-made cause of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.
We are taking energy stored over hundreds of millions of years in the form
of coal, gas and oil, and releasing it suddenly. This causes global warming,
and there is a pass-along effect. Since glaciers and snow reflect sunlight
but sea water absorbs it, the more the ice melts, the more of the sun's
energy is retained by the sea.

Gore says that although there is "100 percent agreement" among scientists, a
database search of newspaper and magazine articles shows that 57 percent
question the fact of global warming, while 43 percent support it. These
figures are the result, he says, of a disinformation campaign started in the
1990s by the energy industries to "reposition global warming as a debate."
It is the same strategy used for years by the defenders of tobacco. My
father was a Luckys smoker who died of lung cancer in 1960, and 20 years
later it was still "debatable" that there was a link between smoking and
lung cancer. Now we are talking about the death of the future, starting in
the lives of those now living.

"The world won't 'end' overnight in 10 years," Gore says. "But a point will
have been passed, and there will be an irreversible slide into destruction."

In England, Sir James Lovelock, the scientist who proposed the Gaia
hypothesis (that the planet functions like a living organism), has published
a new book saying that in 100 years mankind will be reduced to "a few
breeding couples at the Poles." Gore thinks "that's too pessimistic. We can
turn this around just as we reversed the hole in the ozone layer. But it
takes action right now, and politicians in every nation must have the
courage to do what is necessary. It is not a political issue. It is a moral
issue."

When I said I was going to a press screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," a
friend said, "Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor...ing!" This is not
a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore's
concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless.
In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here
they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you
have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be
"impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position
like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended. Sen. James Inhofe
(R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, "Global
warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I
hope he takes his job seriously enough to see this film. I think he has a
responsibility to do that.

What can we do? Switch to and encourage the development of alternative
energy sources: Solar, wind, tidal, and, yes, nuclear. Move quickly toward
hybrid and electric cars. Pour money into public transit, and subsidize the
fares. Save energy in our houses. I did a funny thing when I came home after
seeing "An Inconvenient Truth." I went around the house turning off the
lights.
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