BEFORE: Hot town, summer in the city - the icecaps are melting, and it's not pretty. Hey, I'm back with another hot summer film today, and I mean that, sincerely. It's hot out there in New York, heck, it's hot everywhere, and summer just started a week ago! By the end of July we'll probably all spontaneoustly combust or something. What better time to stay indoors with the A.C. on and watch a movie about how doomed we all are, in part because people won't stop using their A.C.s. No, the irony is not lost on me, but what can I do? Use a FAN like a commoner?
Bill Clinton carries over again from "RBG" - and did you notice that since the Walter Cronkite part of the chain, I've only used politicians to make my links? Ed Koch, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Ronald Reagan, then Clinton. Who will be next? For that matter, now that I'm about 1/3 of the way through the documentary chain, which politician is leading in the polls for most appearances this year? Right now, before counting today's appearances, Barack Obama is in the lead with 9 appearances in 2019 films, followed closely by a three-way tie between Clinton, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, each with 8. Then comes Nixon with 7, and JFK is way back with 5. It's still a close race, and any of these contenders could easily beat James Franco's appearances and take the year - I think Obama's got the inside track because I'm watching so many docs that were made during his presidency, but don't count out Nixon, he's a sneaky one.
THE PLOT: A decade after "An Inconvenient Truth" brought climate change to the heart of popular culture, the follow-up shows just how close we are to a real energy solution.
AFTER: I didn't watch the Democratic debates, but I started to watch my talk shows and comedy news shows for the week, so I'm starting to see clips from the debates. Here's the problem with all of the Democratic contenders, to me - they all want the job. This may sound silly, but I don't really trust anybody who WANTS to be President. It's a terrible job, only an idiot would want it, and I'd make a Trump joke here, but it's too easy, plus I think we've collectively establish that even HE didn't want it, he was only running because he didn't think he'd win. So of course, he won and he's stuck for four or even eight years doing stuff he's no good at and doesn't even like doing, because to get out of it, he'd have to admit that he only ran to get his name in print to sell more bad steaks and terrible vodka. (It was a long hustle, and it failed miserably...)
So I mentioned at lunch yesterday (at one of my jobs, the staff all eats lunch together) that I would be more likely to vote for someone who DIDN'T want to be President, that could be somebody with a good head on their shoulders. See, I definitely didn't want Trump to be President, but I was also a little iffy on Hillary Clinton, she just wanted it a bit too much, with a little bit of "I deserve this" thrown in for bad measure. I didn't support Bernie Sanders, but he seems a bit like a guy who doesn't want the job, but he'll do it if he has to, because nobody else is as qualified. But at lunch, the interns were confused - how can you vote for someone who doesn't WANT the job, and it's a fair question, because our system is broken and is not merit-based, it's become just a massive popularity contest, and it's therefore too easy to elect someone liked by many (for whatever reason) but clearly incompetent. However, I couldn't think of a good example of someone who was qualified, eligible but DIDN'T want the job.
Now, two days later, I've got one - Al Gore. He could have been President in 2000, perhaps he SHOULD have been President, we'll never know (thanks, Florida) but maybe he's President in an alternate reality. And he says several times in this sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth" that he's made his peace with what happened in 2000, and the fact that sometimes you have a plan and things don't go your way (and that's a fact that some people never learn but should) and that he's a "recovering politician" who no longer wants to be President. Well, he's got my vote, then. I don't know how I'm going to convince 200 million other Americans to write his name in, but I'd better get started.
If you saw the Democratic debate (again, I only watched some clips on the Colbert show) it seems like there were so many other issues to talk about, and so many people talking over each other, that I'm not surprised to learn that global warming doesn't seem to be at the top of any candidate's to-do list. Joe Biden wants to cure cancer, but that was the job Obama gave him, does he have any ideas of his own? Elizabeth Warren, former economics professor, probably wants to balance the budget, which is noble. But put Al Gore in the Oval Office, and we'll all be on solar power and wind power before you know it, and that's not a bad thing. There's enough energy coming from the sun in ONE HOUR to give us humans the same energy we get from fossil fuels in a YEAR. Why the hell are we wasting most of it? There's so much space out in Nevada or Montana or Arizona that they could put up a solar array the size of a small city, and boom, suddenly we've all got energy to spare. What. Is. The. Hold-Up. Here?
Plus it's CLEAN - no emissions, no fumes, no carbon. We're supposed to be weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, anyway - you know they're going to run out, right? If they do then there's going to be an agonizing waiting period while they put up windmills and solar panels, and that means a few months with no internet, no phones, no lights, no motor cars. (Aha, have I got your attention now, millennials?) But no, go ahead and listen to Commander Cheeto when he tells you that "windmills cause brain cancer". Umm, how, exactly? Does he think they make noise, and that noise goes through your ear and into your brain and then cancer? WTF?
Anyway, this film shows Al Gore taking a break from his never-ending PowerPoint presentation around-the-world tour and using a DIFFERENT PowerPoint presentation to train a new batch of his eco-warriors. And he addresses the concerns of the naysayers who ask, "Well, what about global COOLING?" and "How come it was so COLD last winter, then?" Because it's a statistical trend, just like the trend among climate deniers to have statistically lower I.Q.s than the people who know how to read a chart or a graph properly. Part of the climate change equation is the tendency toward more extreme weather, which means the hot days get hotter, the rain and snowstorms dump more volume on us, and the superstorms pick up speed over warmer water, making them deadlier than ever. But if you want to believe that hurricanes are God's vengeance for being sinful, please, go right ahead. Me, I can live just fine with Florida being under water, as long as Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris go down with the ship. (I may forget, but I don't forgive.)
Then it's off to the 2016 Conference for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, pronounced "unfuck", appropriately enough) where Gore casually bumps into super-hunk Canada PM Justin Trudeau (sorry, Al, he's married...) and ends up negotiating a deal for India to move toward solar power and get off of the fossil fuels. The politicians from India are very upset that America and other Western countries got to pollute for 150 years, and they're just getting started, so they want the same rights to pollute as we had. Umm, yeah, that seems fair on paper, but it's just not a workable plan, we REALLY polluted for a long time, but we learned from the experience, can't they just trust us on this one? Like, we left garbage in SPACE and on the MOON, and now we're working on the oceans, so you're just not going to beat us.
Al gets one of the solar companies he's got a relationship with to share their technology with India, which is probably like a loss leader for them - sure, they've got to sell a ton of solar panels to India at little or no profit, but if that ends up working, they get to approach other countries and say, "Look what we did for India, we got them off the fossil fuels, and we can do it for you, too." It gets their brand name out there, theoretically they should be able to write their own ticket after that. Provided some idiot doesn't decide arbitrarily to pull our country out of the Paris Accords....
Gore made a comment in this film that while working to fight climate change, he's seen his share of setbacks. Essentially, he's gone back and forth between hope and despair. And that sort of sums up my documentary chain, so far at least. For every film that gives me hope, there's one that brings me down. NASA sent men to the moon in "Apollo 11", but nobody could stop a man on a Texas tower from shooting a bunch of people. The laws in the South after the 13th Amendment, along with the war on drugs, have sent a generation of black men to prison, but then again, Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought for equal rights for women. Fred Rogers talked and listened to children, and taught them lessons in the Land of Make-Believe, while Michael Jackson did terrible things to children in Neverland. Ed Koch saved New York City from bankruptcy, but then Enron and the sub-prime mortgage scandal caused a financial collapse. So, hope and despair, strikes and gutters, it's all part of this crazy mixed-up American landscape. 11 down, 18 to go.
NITPICK POINT: Even though the Paris Accords were very important, I kind of have to wonder about the futility of flying SO MANY world leaders, and all of their entourages, to Paris just to talk about ways to conserve energy. How much jet fuel was used in getting all of those people there? The world leaders don't exactly fly on commercial planes, but private jets instead. That's even worse - how could the organizers of this event be so unaware of the message they were sending? Why couldn't some of those world leaders carpool there, or, umm, planepool? Shouldn't they be doing all this via teleconferencing by now? Same goes for Al Gore, who's traveled all around the world just to give a PowerPoint talk that could just as easily have been delivered over the internet. Just saying.
I'm still also riding the fine line between hope and despair - can you blame me? One day there's a story in the newspaper about how we'll all be dead in 40 years, tops, and then a week later Robert Downey Jr. is holding a TED talk to say that we CAN clean up the oceans, we CAN stop global warming, if we use robots. Umm, OK, but aren't those robots going to need some energy to power them? Maybe we should get all the solar panels up first, then power the robots to clean up the planet. Otherwise you just know they're going to have like a thousand robots ready to clean the ocean, the day before we finally run out of fossil fuels...
Also starring Al Gore (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Cory Booker (last seen in "13th"), Al Franken (last seen in "Long Strange Trip"), Francois Hollande, John Kerry (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Angela Merkel, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin (last seen in "12 Strong"), Justin Trudeau, Jinping Xi, Laurent Fabius, Karenna Gore, Chris Hayes, Eric Schneiderman, with archive footage of George W. Bush (also carrying over from "RBG"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Donald Trump (ditto), Barbara Boxer (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Laura Bush (ditto), Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Dick Cheney (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Ted Cruz, Andrew Cuomo (last seen in "Koch"), Lester Holt (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), James Imhofe, Joe Lieberman, Mitch McConnell, Scott Pruitt.
RATING: 5 out of 10 carbon offset credits
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