LawrenceBender Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Who wants to spend a beautiful summer evening inside an overly-air conditioned concert hall listening to a washed up politico, some gadget nerds, a NASA guy and a couple of Hollywood producers talk about the environment? Apparently, everybody. WIRED Magazine threw just such an event in New York City last night, occasioned by this week's release of Al Gore's global warming doc, An Inconvenient Truth, and judging by the clamoring crowds that spilled out of Town Hall onto 43rd street as far down as 6th Ave fifteen minutes before showtime, it was the hottest ticket in town. Boldfaced names in attendance reportedly included director Darren Aronofsky and his Oscar-winning baby mama Rachel Weisz, and Chelsea Clinton, who Gore took pains to point to from the stage as "a friend of the family".

But if we're talking about "hot" -- and, considering the bounty of temperature-related puns the topic at hand brings to the table, we most definitely are -- could anyone hotter have been in attendance than the guest of honor himself? Though it's way too early for it to mean anything (or, at least, for it to mean anything good), the liberal media is currently under the spell of a debilitating case of Gore Fever, They've got it bad, got it bad, got it bad - they're hot for an aging also-ran who won't even admit to thinking about running for President in 2008. Or maybe they're just, understandably, hot for the idea that liberal passion could actually mean something again. Or maybe -- and this is the one I'd like to believe -- we're talking about social movement that ostensibly thrives on dissent; Gore not only stands for the opposite of everything the current administration has come to represent, he's also the Anti-Hillary. You don't have to know much about global warming to warm to the appeal of the presumptive Democratic nominee's polar opposite.

The evening certainly wasn't billed as Al Gore's Coming Out Party -- in his opening remarks, WIRED editor Chris Anderson labeled the event as a celebration of  "a new kind of environmentalist" he called the Neo-Green, a gadget-savvy do-over of the spacey hippie drip of olde, one "that realizes that technology doesn't only create problems - it solves them." But from the standing ovation that met the Vice President's entrance, to the thunderous applause with which the audience punctuated his every minor point, it was clear that the mass assembled were there to hear a statement of intent.

They didn't quite get that, but most in attendance seemed happy enough with what they did get. At the very least, the event showcased an Al Gore to which jokes involving the words "bore" or "snore" did not apply. At most, it was a chance to contemplate a rabblerouser in the body of an elder statesman, and that in itself was a spectacle rare enough to rouse my interest.

An Inconvenient Truth is a filmed version of an introductory-level lecture on the perils of planetary warming that Al Gore routinely gives to college crowds and other interested audiences around the world. The lecture includes moneyed Powerpoint-like presentations, animation interludes, and even physical stunts; at one point, the portly politico squeezes onto a cherry-picker and ascends high off the floor to dramatize an off-the-charts spike in a global warming line graph. With a running time of less than a hundred minutes, the film is packed with portentous figures and graphs to illustrate the extent of the problem, but for those who are illiterate in the language of climate science, it also serves up some striking prima facie evidence of alarming environmental irregularities happening before our eyes. The notion of drowned polar bears floating around in the sea is more gut-grabbing than a hundred bar graph statistics.

Produced by Natural Resources Defense Council trustee Laurie David, An Inconvenient Truth contains a number of compelling environmental data points, and the science behind the message is more or less uncontroversial, but ironically, it's the unnecessary decision to puff the film up to feature length with biographical interludes of Gore that raises the biggest questions. These moments, which sneak in more and more as the film goes on, showcase Gore as a wandering Thoreau-like character who stares wistfully out of plane windows, remembers old friends long gone and stands outside of himself to mourn his razor's edge defeat in the 2000 presidential election. Flashback footage of that event is laid over with the same moribund, hopeless music that accompanies the visuals of our impending environmental doom, which forces anyone who is politically minded to do an involuntary mental recalibration.

Variety reports this morning that a team of four producers has picked up the rights to Terri: the Truth, Michael Schiavo's new book about his relationship with his wife, and his battle to fulfill what he said was her wish to die. Wow -- how can studios possibly say no to this one? The producers, including Mike Farrell (who was involved with the public battle, and argued for Schiavo's right to die) and Lawrence Bender, aren't yet sure if their film will be made for television or the big screen; a decision seems dependent on which industry shows interest in the project.

According to Marvin Minoff, Farrell's partner and another of the producers, "The story is almost Shakespearean in the warring of the families and the great love story between the [couple] ... It starts off so beautifully and then ends so chaotically." Well sure, that's one way of looking at it. Another way is that it's some people trying to make a buck off of a very personal tragedy; no matter what side of the issue you come down on, it's hard to argue that the situation was not a horrible one for everyone involved. While it's hard to say that Schiavo is being taken advantage of here, since one assumes he was involved in selling the rights, but how could this movie possible be done in a way that's not tasteless? Just thinking about the trailer gives me the willies.