I have to be a little delicate about this: I just got back from a preview of an upcoming environmental documentary by a famous former Growing Pains star/iceberg collision non-survivor. I got to skip out on work to do so — I guess there’s a chance we may have some sort of involvement with the project’s promotion. I really hope we don’t. Nevertheless, discretion is the watchword, lest googling reveal the privately-held opinion of this particular worker bee.
The screening occurred at the MPAA’s DC headquarters, which I hadn’t realized is mere blocks away. It was kind of awesome being in the belly of the beast. Amusingly enough, the theater boasted what I’m pretty sure was an anti-piracy device: a speaker-looking thing just above the screen with a matrix of of dull red points of light spread across its face. I’m pretty sure those were infrared LEDs, and although I suppose there’s a slim chance that they were part of an assistive-audio system, it seems a lot more likely that they were providing non-visible illumination. A camera on the lookout for the bright glare of digital cameras’ infra-opaque IR filters would be able to spot a phonecam or mini DV rig easily. So good job on protecting your intellectual property, MPAA! Now just work on getting the projection in focus…
As for the movie — well, I’ll start off by saying that I really liked An Inconvenient Truth. It was convincing, affecting and cogently presented. It’s clear that LD liked it, too — a lot. But his movie is much, much worse. In fact, if anything it seems likely to provide an excuse for people not to take An Inconvenient Truth seriously.
The film consists of a bunch of talking heads who have been sat down and apparently asked what their eco-grievances are. They ramble in varying directions. Comfortable-looking Californians with “executive director” in their titles tell us that other people need to work and consume and generally want less. Neo-hippies tell us that the solutions to our ecological problems really come down to love, man (this was the first point at which the audience laughed). Somber crackpots explain that the real tragedy won’t be the necessary elimination of billions from the earth’s population, but rather the non-human species we take with us. Self-assured sophists educate us about how defense spending is an insignificant portion of America’s GDP and how no study has ever shown any living system not to be in decline. In between all of this, genuine experts offer genuinely interesting thoughts, which are edited together into incoherence: air pollution’s effect on childhood asthma prefaces concern about overfishing; deforestation segues into using fungi for heavy metal mitigation. Accompanying it all: a parade of stock footage, much of it at best tangentially related to the subject currently being discussed (we do get a quick, grainy shot of LD in a sweatlodge, though, which is pretty hilarious).
More than anything, the problem is the writing. LD can’t write effective rhetoric for his monologues — he’s like Al Gore, except actually boring. And the film is horribly disorganized. It’s nothing that a freshman writing seminar or two couldn’t fix (although it might require a particularly merciless TA). But as it currently stands, watching the film is like listening to an ecologically-focused 90-minute monologue by A.J. Soprano circa the end of season six.
Oh man, I’m kind of dying to see this now. I feel I should note that my impression is that the narration was actually written for the most part by Lei/la and Na/dia Con/ners, who are both actual writers, so it’s disappointing to hear it turned out that badly.
Well, LD’s got a cowriting credit. The Con/ners might be fine writers, but there’s not that much narration. The main problem is just that the talking head clips are arranged in a way that’s not coherent. Then occasionally LD shows up, says something obvious (and disconnected from what’s come before) in a stupidly-wordy, then the talking heads resume.