Well, if you are going to sit down and watch a documentary about how the world is slowly going to hell in a hand basket, you might as well get to look at some pretty pictures along the way. It worked for Werner Herzog in his film Lessons Of Darkness about the Iraqi oil fires during Desert Storm, so it might work again with Manufactured Landscapes.

Variety announced that US distribution rights for the documentary film have been purchased by Zeitgeist Films. The film is directed by Jennifer Baichwal, and is about the environmental impact of the new industrial revolution in China. The film uses Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky and his photographs of the construction of China's Three Gorges Dam project as a commentary on industrial pollution. This is Baichwal's second project with Zeitgeist Films; her first was about the author Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky). Burtynsky is an award-winning artist known for his large-scale photographs of landscapes that might appear beautiful, but are of some of the worst ecological danger zones -- and they are amazing photographs, inspiring competing feelings of admiration and horror.

Unlike a documentary like An Inconvenient Truth, which handles environmental subject matter in more conventionally informative way, Manufactured Landscapes is a little more abstract. The question is, will audiences still get the message?

There are plenty of ways to promote a movie, but Sweet Land by Ali Selim might be the first to try and use the label "Environmentally Friendly" as a selling point. The real question is: Do audiences even care?

The environmental impact of movie making is something most of us have never given any thought to -- after all, it's not exactly the sexiest topic in the industry. Yahoo! News spoke to Sweet Land director Ali Selim about the decision to run a "carbon-neutral" production. What that means is that the production calculated all of the carbon dioxide emitted during the production. The total was measured against the productions investment in renewable energy -- Selim chose to invest in a reforestation project in Germany and a windmill project in Jamaica. The emissions report cost the filmmakers five thousand dollars to perform plus the cost of their investments. Selim extended this eco-friendly way of shooting into all aspects of the production. He encouraged the crew to carpool, maximized location shooting to limit traveling, and even used natural light whenever possible.

Sweet Land is not the first film to use this model, both Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth commissioned similar reports. As admirable as Selim's method might be, is "environmental friendliness" the best marketing strategy? It seems pretty unlikely that an audience would flock to a movie because it got great "emission reviews." Would a film's impact on the environment impact your decision to see it?

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.