Again we enter the category of “it’s not even a movie so why am I reviewing it?” I kinda can’t believe I complained about the Ken Burns-ishness of In the Realms of the Unreal the other day when there’s a movie like this out there currently picking up Oscar buzz and getting an 8+ on the IMDb voting system. Sure, this thing carries a powerful message and one can just about get through it without falling asleep, but really it comes off in the end as a boring old guy wrapping up a global warming lecture in pretty packaging that at turns fails to resemble a Steve Jobs Keynote and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and the most ass-kissing audience I’ve ever heard, I swear there must’ve been cue-cards telling them when to laugh heartily etc. at his jokes.

I’m being overly hard on it, I know, but I get this way when the balance of opinion seems so weirdly out of whack. I like the tone Gore ends on, and the Melissa Etheridge song, and all the ideas that come up on screen during the end credits – I even noticed the movie carries a credit for “energy offset”, is this a first? It’s certainly a movie that puts its money where its mouth is, I guess. But it’s far from must-see material.

I’ll be sad to see this win the Best Documentary Oscar next year, but looking at the “competition” it’s really quite a sucky year. This really is the laziest documentary ever made. A movie needs to be so much more than this if it wants to change the world.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 2:09 pm in 2 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as documentary, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.