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I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight, a film billed as an environmental cautionary tale, and it was two movies in one. One of which I liked, one I didn't.

The first movie, which really felt like the reason the film was made, was an Al Gore biography. Lots of closeups of his face, him making fake phone calls, him standing surrounded by light as if he was a diety, him talking about his childhood in reverent terms, lots of slow motion and old photos, and heart tugging music. That movie SUCKED. It was boring, insincere, and I felt like I was paying to watch a campaign advertisement.

They could have called the movie An Inconvenient Truth: Gore 08!

The other movie, however, was a slideshow that Gore has been traveling the world to show people, and that was a great film. The effects of global warming have become so distinct as to become unavoidable and undeniable. He skews his graphs so that they're not centered on 0, so the film looks a bit more sensational than reality, so it looks like we're all gonna be dead in 10 years instead of 100, but seriously, 100 isn't that long either. We're really screwing ourselves, and at this point, we all pretty much know it, but it's just so damn easy to keep doing it.

I still recommend this film to people even though half of it is crap, because the other half is something everyone needs to see. Watch lakes vanish and icecaps melt over the course of a decade, and try to tell me that you're not scared. We're a bunch of stupid shortsighted monkeys, and we need to cut it out, have less kids, and stop shitting where we eat. Well, the nondeveloped countries need to have less kids. We've already started doing that.

The only sad part is that this film could have reached so many MORE people if it wasn't an Al Gore ad. That's going to turn off the half of the country that voted against him in 2000. If it was all about global warming, I think it would have had a stronger impact. Instead it's a really good important lesson, smothered in ego.