An Inconvenient Truth

Pretty good weekend, as far as time with the wife goes. The kids' behavior? That's another story and probably the reason I'm going to be grey headed by December. That or I'll have been in the hospital for my third stint in my veins due to my high blood pressure. LOL

In the world of entertainment, you may have heard that "Pirates of the Caribbean 2" shattered all kinds of opening records this weekend, bringing in a whopping $132 million, beating "Spiderman" as best opening weekend...EVER. Sadly, we were not part of the people contributing to the $132 mil but not for lack of trying. It's just that all the early shows were sold out here locally on Saturday night.

So, we ended up going to see the Al Gore semi-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". This is the film that chronicles Gore's recent speaking tour on the effects of global warming and it's continuing downward spiral trend, at least in regards to overall bad results. It was truly an eye opening experience to see, according to his data, all the ill-effects of the global gases that are building up at a staggering rate. I'm not into science and all the numbers he showed us but I can assure you it does not look good for the earth and it's problem of increasing warming trends.

To see the carnage that's being caused by pollutants in the air and the thickening of our atmosphere, which is supposedly keeping these warming gases earthbound, thus the rising temps worldwide, it's quite depressing and sad. I will say this about the movie though...

Mr. Gore, you had me with the facts and figures. You had me with your charts & graphs. You even had me calling my senators and considering trading my SUV in for a hybrid version...

UNTIL

You had to bring up the 2000 election and all the controversy surrounding it. This had absolutely NO MERIT related to the movie and was nothing more than an attempt to rip the scab off American voters' memories, further undermining the current administration. I'm not here to be a Bush apologist and I will agree with Gore's assessments that not enough is being done. I even appreciated his comments that this is not a political crisis but a moral one (very true). But to slag the President where the election outcome had nothing to do with your speech was a poor attempt to pander to your supporters instead of reaching out to others, like myself, to get on board and urge people to do what we can to save the environment.

I'll probably still look into the hybrid SUV's when they become available, as well as other energy saving tactics, but Al Gore's methodology to just sprinkle an otherwise very well done documentary with a liberal (no pun intended...I think) dose of partisan venom was sophomoric and lessened his argument's validity.

Get over it, Al. It's over & done with. Sour grapes are not what the American public needs to focus on. Changing our world for the better is. You've got a lot of potential to reach thousands, even millions of people with this message. Don't dillute it with political double-speak and hurt feelings.

Overall, I give "An Inconvenient Truth" 3 out of 4 stars on information content and keeping my interest. That's surprising too, considering the previews before it were all (obvious) anti-Bush/anti-establishment movies, except for the Nicholas Cage flick "World Trade Center". That one is going to be big and quite emotional.

In fact, you can imagine the emotional roller coaster my wife and I were on that night. We left our home in high spirits, glad to be alone together sans the chillins, ready to go eat and check out "Pirates" and keep our light-hearted moods going. Instead, the night became quite sober and serious due to the film topics we saw in the previews as well as watching "Truth".

I'd recommend this movie to everyone, regardless of political affiliation or pattern. I think this issue will affect us all much sooner than we think. Of course, the other side says global warming is all "hot air" (another bad pun) and is not nearly as bad as Al Gore maintains. I'm not so sure I'm going to just blindly follow any politcian's word anymore.

It's time to get off the sidelines and see for myself what the facts really are.