Skip to Content

Make smart financial decisions with DailyFinance

The Truth About An Inconvenient Truth

Filed under: Documentary, Independent, Paramount Classics, Movie Marketing, Politics, Cinematical Indie

Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells opened up a politely-worded can of whup-ass the other day all over MCN's David Poland for what he called Poland's slamming of the Al Gore-global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as a film "no one really wants to see" (note: I tried to find the actual piece where Poland wrote this and couldn't, so perhaps Poland said this in a private conversation). At any rate, as Mark noted the other day, Gore has been everywhere promoting his film, which he calls the "ultimate action flick", but Poland's not the only one questioning whether people really care enough about the issue of global warming to shell out their cash to see the flick, much less make major lifestyle changes as a result.

The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson wrote a piece the other day on the filmmakers' tireless promotion of the doc, which will be showing at Cannes in spite of having already opened at other fests, and how Paramount Classics is taking a risk opening a documentary about global warming against X-3 on Memorial Day weekend.

As I said in my review of the film during Sundance, I'm not sure how this film will play to mainstream audiences. It's an engaging film, yes. It's being pushed in the trailer as "the scariest film you'll ever see", and that may not even be an exagerration, and the topic -- the possible End of Life As We Know It -- is way more important than seeing Wolverine kick someone's ass (or should be, anyhow), but will Middle America care? I can see the film doing well in arthouse theaters and in environmentally-conscious, liberal cities like Seattle, but will it play in the Midwest and South to the "red state Humpty Dumpties" Wells so scathingly refers to?

I don't know what things look like in your neighborhood, but here in the suburbs of liberal Seattle, the streets are crammed bumper-to-bumper with well-heeled duel-incomers cramming their massive Hummers and SUVs into compact car spaces, and $3-plus gas prices don't seem to be putting a dent in that. What will it take to really make people care about -- and act on -- the message of An Inconvenient Truth? Maybe Al Gore needs to go around the country to screenings, lighting folks on fire with post-show Q&As, to really get people to translate any sense of alarm the film generates into action.

Related Headlines

 

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

| 1 | 2 |
.