There is a lot of doom and gloom in environmental news right now. By all accounts the Earth is going to hell in a handcart and it is a highly charged topic that has great scientific, economic, political and of course environmental implications.
“An Inconvenient Truth” follows Al Gore as he gives his global warming slide show to hundreds of people around the world. The arguments presented in the documentary are compelling although there are a few cringe moments. Al gets a little self indulgent at times, particularly when talking about the events that led to his epiphany. The claim that there are no scientific papers in the last few years that oppose the theory of climate change needs to be double checked, particularly if the likes of Bjorn Lomberg and the people behind “The Great Global Warming Swindle” are to be believed. (Though I have neither read nor seen these two counter arguments).
Although informative and well presented, there was little in the show that was new to me and  so the forehead slapping shock value that accompanied the release of this film did not occur with me.
In the last year or so both the Australian and US governments have started to take climate change a bit more seriously and I am sure that Al Gore will take credit for som of this.
It seems that the independent documentary is playing an ever increasing role in a society where our news programs and newspapers are heavily compromised by the politics of the owners and the concerns of advertisers. Whether you believe the message of this film its influence is likely to be up there with SuperSize Me and some of Michael Moore’s work.
I’d give it 3.5 out of 5.

This morning I finished watching “The Wind Gone With”. No that’s not a typo. Neither my wife nor I had seen “Gone with the Wind“, so we got it via the Big Pond Movies home delivered DVD scheme. The movie is so long (about twice as long as the civil war) that it takes up too DVDs. Big Ponds copy is a single double sided DVD something we had not seen before.

My wife put the DVD in the player, started the movie and I started watching a few minutes later. We watched for about 90 minutes and then paused the film as we prepared something to eat. We were at the stage of the movie where Rhett and Scarlet have a big fight and Rhett goes off to see Belle. It seemed to us as if the movie was starting to wind up but I hadn’t seen any of the civil war. There was also a reference to Rhett being the third husband, but neither of us could figure who the first husband was, or how Scarlet was Mellie’s sister. I knew that there was a big depot fire scene, but that had been during the war and I was wondering how they would work a flashback scene into the story. Then the penny dropped.

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A neighbour lent us a dodgy copy of the Da Vinci Code movie over the weekend. I had read the book and thought it was nothing to write home about. The gaping plot holes, inaccurate history, and surprisingly easy codes were carried on to the movie.

Many things didn’t make sense to me. At the start, the albino monk (apologies to the Society for the Fair Depiction of Pigment Challenged People in Popular Culture), intends to kill the old man. Despite having a clean almost point blank shot at his head, he decides to shoot him in the stomach, so he has time to run around the Louvre, writing graffiti near old masterpieces.
Just how did a GPS tracking system managed to track Robert Langdon while he was indoors, and was the mapping software really accurate enough to show the interior layout of buildings. I would love that sort of thing for Geocaching. Speaking of which I did a cache called “Play It Again Sam” by “The Odlids” which required much harder code breaking than it the Da Vinci Code. (Including reverse morse code sound files embedded in a word document using steganography software.)
Also, why did they take Silas on the plane? If someone broke into my house and tried to kill me, the last thing I would do if I managed to overpower them, would be to take them with me somewhere. Unless it was the nearest police station.
I can believe that Jesus was married, I can believe that he had kids, I can believe that this might change the story of the bible and the church might want to protect the power they have over the story, but I can’t believe that Tom Hanks would appear on screen with such a haircut.

The highlight of the movie was reading the sub titles. The copy we had was Russian, so the initial titles were over-titled in Russian, but then sub-titles came up in English. This was useful when the actors spoke French “merde!” but hilarious to read in English. My favourite was when a heavily accented voice said that Mary’s sarcophagus would be found under the “starry sky”. If he only had the sub-titles to go by, Langdon would be looking for her under the “storage guy”.
Oh, and not wanting to stereotype the French, but the three top billed French men in the film are all called Jean. The one saving grace of the movie is that Gerard Depardieu wasn’t included as one of the token Frenchmen.