An Inconvenient Truth, 2006. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. Created by and Starring Al Gore (and, yes, today’s politicians are stars).
An Inconvenient Truth has been marketed, without a hint of irony, as ‘the most terrifying film you’ll ever see’. There’s some truth in that, though not, I think, in ways the filmmakers intended. For myself, watching Mr. Gore speak with passion and eloquence made me wonder just where this guy was back in the year 2000, and what this country would be like today had he emerged six years ago. To me, that’s terrifying.
An Inconvenient Truth serves two functions: to warn people about the dangers of global warming and to spring Al Gore back into the public eye. It succeeds quite well in both accounts, although I can say that, for myself, virtually none of Gore’s information was new. The film is terrifying if you’ve had your head in the sand for fifteen years or have gleaned all your news from Newsweek.
For a movie that claims to be bi-partisan, Truth clearly serves to jab at the current administration (no argument here) and gives us quite a personal bio of Mr. Gore–in fact, it often appears similar to those patriotic bios they show at conventions.
What concerns me is that An Inconvenient Truth, in my mind, has no place on movie screens. I don’t know quite how we reached this point, where our nation’s theaters have become marquees for what really amounts to propaganda–lest we not forget that propaganda is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we agree with it. But does it belong in a movie house? Look around, and now we’re seeing documentaries taking up tremendous amounts of space in our art-house theaters. There’s Michael Moore’s films, Super Size Me, The Yes Men (horrible), and the forthcoming Who Killed The Electric Car? and The US v. John Lennon… all of these films could be shown on PBS–Ken Burns does it, after all, to greater success than many of these movies–and leave the little space we have for foreign and indie films alone. By showing Truth in a theater, you’re really only attracting those people who are willing to go out of their way to see it. And those people are pretty much in your camp, anyway.
Gore is still his stiff self at times, and I’ve heard from not a few critics and friends how he still hasn’t got it, as in how Al Gore still couldn’t hold a crowd like, say, Jeb Bush. Which is sad, really: it shouldn’t matter whether a guy can’t come off as being someone you’d want to have a beer with, or whether he can do the job. At times Truth veers into the bizarre, such as when there are animations of polar bears and cute frogs. “You’ve got to save the frog,” Gore laughs. But then there are a few arresting images to go along with his portents of gloom and doom, such as giant fishing boats rusting in the nearly barren Aral Sea, an image of startling and terrible beauty. Perhaps someday Gore’s message will finally sink in; perhaps when he is someday president. An Inconvenient Truth seems aimed at both goals.
X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006. Directed by Brett Ratner, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. Starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellan (still the best reason to watch this series), Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romjin, Kelsey Grammar, Patrick Stewart, James Mardsen, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Ben Foster, and character actors Josef Sommer, Anthony Heald, Michael Murphy, and Bill Duke.
X-Men III is a decent picture, a comic book picture, which is two strikes already in my book. The X-Men franchise has fascinated me predominantly because of the complexity of Magneto’s character. As played with great relish by Sir Ian McKellan, this Holocaust survivor is easily the most fascinating person in the whole franchise, someone you can relate to as well as hope for defeat.
As usual, the humans mean absolutely nothing, and it strikes me as the greatest weakness of the series that a relationship between a human and a mutant was never explored. Humans are so weak in these films that inevitably the plot always comes down to battles between the mutants, which leads me to wonder why in the hell is earth even in the picture? You could put the whole kit and caboodle on another planet, and you wouldn’t lose anything.
Once again, discrimination is the name of the game, and supposedly the X-Men series is a great lesson on the perils of prejudice. Hogwash. No one who cares watches X-Men for anything other than brain candy, and those who could stand to learn something about bigotry don’t learn from a comic book movie. In this episode, there’s a strong gay subtext: the father of a mutant seeks to ‘cure’ his son, who is about as homosexually iconic a character as I have ever seen in a mainstream film: young, with blonde locks, bare chested and in tight jeans, with angels wings. It’s as if Tony Kushner wrote the damn thing. Again, nothing’s wrong with this, except that this character has virtually no purpose except to fly around and save his father from peril.
X-Men has been rightly criticized for its ham-fisted direction, although I’ll say that Bryan Singer isn’t much better–a decent technician with little emotional connection to a plot. Brett Ratner just lets the thing fly, lots of explosions, lots of overacting that’s not kept in check (it wasn’t under Singer’s hand, either). There has been much worse fare this summer.
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