In a spaceship, in an underwater vessel or in an Arctic or Antarctic station, some of the best science fiction takes place in an isolated setting. More precisely, such locations are the convention of the narrower genre of sci-fi horror, in which remote environments combined with tight, claustrophobic spaces are perfect for the unleashing of our worst fears. This is, of course, obvious to any viewer, who recognizes these are places difficult or impossible to escape or be rescued from. But more importantly these settings allow for psychological conflicts that parallel, heighten or even overshadow the genre's typical conflicts with aliens, sentient computers or supernatural beings.

Take Larry Fessenden's latest film, The Last Winter, which is set in an Arctic station and follows all the rules of the sci-fi horror genre, while almost completely leaving out the physical conflict. Yes, it features a supernatural threat, but it doesn't need one, because the film works so brilliantly as simply a psychological mood piece. In most of these kinds of films, the creature or villain is the pay-off for the audience that seeks some sort of spectacle, or at least some material baddie to make for a cinematically appropriate, externally battled climax. In The Last Winter however, the spectacle actually falls flat because it consists of disappointingly horrible special effects.

It never surprises me when someone takes two movie trends and mixes them together. It makes sense for business, because two popular ideas can presumably lead to twice as much success at the box office. So of course it is obvious that someone would think to combine the fashionable fantasy genre with the hot topic of global warming. Novelist Michael Scott made the pitch to producers Arnold and Anne Kopelson (The Devil's Advocate) with a 15-page treatment for an as-yet-unwritten book called Otherworld. The book and movie will be set in the present and will be about ancient demons that are unleashed because of global warming. This is Scott's second movie-rights deal in a year; his upcoming novel The Alchemyst, which is the first in an expected series, was sold to New Line last fall. Unfortunately for New Line, the second book in that series may take a long time to be released. Considering Scott now has the Otherworld novel to write, and then he's set to write the screenplay himself, he sounds like he'll be pretty busy for awhile.

As much as I welcome any attempt to communicate the dangers of global warming, I can see Otherworld being about as silly as The Day After Tomorrow. Fantasy and science fiction rarely work when combined with real serious issues, because no matter how hard Hollywood tries to be important, they always end up being more interested in providing entertainment. And while serious discourse and entertainment can go hand in hand, a lot of filmmakers just don't know how to do it successfully. Hopefully Otherworld will be one of the rare films that doesn't end up being a hokey message movie rolled up in a blockbuster package.

It should be a green-tie affair at the opening night gala of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. The event, happening April 25, will be hosted by Al Gore and is set to feature some entertainment that will focus on the global warming issue. This entertainment is part of a partnership with the SOS (Save Our Selves) Campaign, which raises climate crisis awareness and will include live performances from some of the artists participating in SOS' Live Earth concert series happening on July 7. The acts set for the gala weren't revealed, but some of those involved with the Live Earth shows include Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Mayer, John Legend, Black Eyed Peas, Korn and Melissa Etheridge, who recently won an Oscar for the song she wrote for the Gore-featured documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Also, the night will include the premiere of seven short films, each of which deals with the problems and the solutions of the crisis and each of which is shorter than ten minutes. The directors and titles of these shorts were not yet revealed either, because the seven showcased films have not been chosen yet. They will be selected by the festival's planners from the 60 shorts that were commissioned by SOS. Some of the filmmakers who participated include Jonathan Glazer, Kevin Macdonald, Abel Ferrara, Amy Berg, Ari Sandel, the doc duo Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady and someone from Aardman Animation (Peter Lord? Nick Park?). It isn't completely made clear, but it seems that all 60 of the commissioned films will be shown during the Live Earth event. So, if you can't make it to New York City for the world premiere of the seven shorts, you can see at least those if not all of them at one of the concerts (so far the only locations announced are Shanghai, Sydney, London and Johannesburg, while the cities in the U.S., Brazil, Japan and Antarctica are TBA). I probably won't be able to attend the gala or one of the concerts, so hopefully there will be another place for me to see the films. After all, this is the best news for shorts fans since Cannes' announced its own opening night compilation.

Let's say you're both a filmmaker and an environmentalist, and you've made this great short film. Maybe you don't have Al Gore in your film all pumped up and talking about global warming, and you couldn't land Melissa Etheridge to write you a nifty theme song. But still, it's a pretty good little film with an environmental message. You worked your tailfeathers off making it, maxed out your credit cards, borrowed money from your folks and scrounged costume and prop pieces from all your friends, and at the end of all that, what are you going to do with it?

Lucky for you, we may have just the answer. The folks at Gen Art, in partnership with Planet Green Game (which is itself a partnership between Starbucks and Global Green USA) have announced a call for entries for the debut of Gen Arts' Online Film Festival.

A silly disaster movie released in 2004 was probably the single worst thing to happen to the global warming campaign in America. Yes, movies have more power than any one dissenting member of the Right (though perhaps not all of them together), and that fictional movie, The Day After Tomorrow, did an amazing job of getting the global warming debate into the minds of the people. Unfortunately, the subject was accepted as such a joke from its depiction in the movie, more harm was probably done than good.

In theaters right now, however, is the single best thing to happen to the cause. Yes, another movie, a documentary called An Inconvenient Truth. Not since the summer of 2004, when The Day After Tomorrow was in theaters, has the subject of global warming been given so much attention and sparked so much discussion. Luckily for the campaign, this time a film presents the topic seriously. Why do so many Americans get their information from, or at least because of, movies? I would suggest it has more to do with the news media than Hollywood, but that is a debate for another time.

On the heels of An Inconvenient Truth is another new documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? It only touches on the threat of global warming for a minute or two -- enough to show its side on the issue, of course -- but it presents a subject directly linked to it, and therefore it provides an interesting footnote to the much better An Inconvenient Truth.

"It must be nice to always know better, to always be the smartest one in the room."
"No. It's awful."

-- Peter Hackes and Holly Hunter, Broadcast News

For all of the talk about An Inconvenient Truth's ground-breaking nature -- a top-ten Box Office showing in its first week despite playing on less than 100 screens nationwide, a unique cinematic opportunity to have an ex-Vice President open up on film about his life and ideas, an unabashed attempt to try and change the direction of the planet's fate with mere storytelling and argument -- it also demonstrates one of the classic rules of indie filmmaking. If you want to get something on film fast, have the person you're filming practice, practice, practice. It works for adaptations of plays (like The Shape of Things or Melvin Goes to Dinner); it works for concert films (like The Last Waltz and Neil Young: Heart of Gold). There are no guarantees to success in filmmaking, but if your project involves pointing the camera at someone who's doing something they've done any number times before you've certainly narrowed down the number of things that might go terribly wrong.

And Al Gore has been talking -- and thinking -- about global warming for 30 years; recently, he's begun addressing crowds about the topic. Directed by high-end TV veteran Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth takes Gore's road show and makes a movie out of it. In many ways, An Inconvenient Truth is like the documentary equivalent of adapting a musical like Phantom of the Opera or Hairspray into a film. And in many ways it is not, because when you make a film out of The Phantom of the Opera, there's not a flurry of punditry about if The Phantom is going to run for President again in 2008.

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.

Back in January, former Vice President Al Gore impressed our own Kim Voynar with a sizzling Sundance Q&A session after a screening of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. At the time, Kim aptly noted the Veep's two separate modes -- Captain Boring and Fiery Desk Pounder -- and Fiery Desk Pounder Gore has recently been out on the stump for his new documentary about the dangers of global warming. Wait ... we're calling it global climate change these days, aren't we?  Whatever the issue is being called currently, Gore remains impressively passionate about it, and in talking with the Chicago Sun Times, he cracked wise in declaring his documentary to be the "ultimate action movie." This is by way of being a clever suggestion about his film inspiring citizens to action, which would in turn inspire politicians to action.* There's some more information in the article (which you can read here) about Gore's future political ambitions, but this site is a movie blog, not a politics blog, and this blogger knows better than to go there.

My question for you, readers, is how far pushed is your tolerance for political issue-oriented documentaries? Are you really into them, and glad they exist as another tool for furthering the debate, or do you just perceive them as yet another method for the talking heads to scream at each other while playing fast and loose with the facts?

*Okay, so this might not be top-notch comedy, but cut the man a break -- for a politician this is actually pretty high level stuff. Let's remember that in his world Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are the closest things he can find to comedy.

Yesterday  morning, at the practically unforgiveable hour of 8:30AM, I went to a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about global warming. Al Gore, who is featured prominently in the film, was on hand for a Q&A after. Sadly, I have no pics of the Q&A, because as I stood to take some I was accosted by a Sundance volunteer who hissed "No pictures!" at me. I looked around in confusion at the hundreds of flash bulbs going off around me. "Um....but this is a Q&A". "They told me NO pictures," she insisted. I pointed out that everyone else was taking them, but the logic of this failed to penetrate. "No pictures!" Okay, so no pics.

The Q&A itself was fantastic. Here's the thing about Al Gore: when he speaks, he's either he's so hot he's sizzling, or so boring he's a one-man sleep aid. Fortunately for me (because I definitely would have fallen asleep if he had shown up in his Boring Al persona) he was on fire  yesterday morning, and by the time he was done the crowd was ready to go march on Washington. Here's a brief summary. Gore started out by saying, "Young people led the way in the Civil Rights Movement and are beginning to lead the way on this issue (global warming)...when I say this is a moral issue as well as a political one, it is to unite Republicans as well as Democrats, conservatives as well as liberals, to join together on this cause."