« The Foley Affair | Main | Tuesday's »
October 3, 2006
Under the Peg - Al Gore Under the Peg
I recently went to see Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth," and despite a few obvious flaws, I'm willing to call this a positive experience.
The movie did have some key problems. The most notable was that the people behind the movie allowed Al Gore to do all the talking. While he is a good public speaker, he is a bit of an egomaniac, and he did swerve the subject to himself far too often. He had interesting data, and he did do a fair job of presenting the data in a logical manner, but just as he had your attention with photos of melting glaciers, or charts of the increased global CO2 amount, he'd lose you with a story about how his son got hit by a car or how his sister was killed by cigarettes.
His term usage was another problem. He used the phrase "global warming" way too often. In the first five minutes he must have mentioned it at least 10 times. For most other phrases in the english language this isn't a problem, but the phrase "global warming" has a lot of baggage associated with it.
Possibly the biggest problem with the movie was that Gore kept saying that global warming wasn't a political issue, and he kept going back to politics. Personally, I got the impression that he was trying to keep politics out of the speach and he was just bad at it. I took a count of the number of times he brings up the 2000 election, and the number of times he bashes G. W. Bush. He mentioned the election three times, and bashed Bush twice (and the last one might have been a bit of a stretch [he claimed that scientists had predicted just how much water would flood into New Orleans when the levees broke]).
Overall, it was better than I thought it was going to be. It was more about the changing climate conditions than a propoganda piece. My main complaints were that he should have tried harder to keep politics out of the discussion, and we didn't need to hear any of his stories about his life as a child, or about his son's accident. The movie had a very good ending though. The last three minutes detail what we as individuals can do to solve the problem, and he said that he had faith in the American people to bring about this great change. If the last three minutes of the movie had been the last half hour of the 90 minute movie, it would have been great. As it stands: not all bad, but not all of it is worth seeing, a possitive experience but it's not something I would pay money to see, or see more than once.
Final score: 5.5 Pegs out of ten.
# At Tue 11:42 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Under the Peg | Tags: Al Gore environmentalism Global Warming
Leave a comment
Leave a comment