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I was going to post a movie review here, but felt it was more appropriate for my other blog.  Feel free to head over and give it a read.

At the movies: Oceans (Disney)

We don't often see movies while they're still playing in the theatres, but thanks to a friend who had a free admission coupon, Eldest and I joined her to see the Disney movie, Oceans.  You can see trailers for it here.

It was an interesting experience.

Visually, the movie was fantastic.  Not as impressive as The Blue Planet, but still really great.  Unfortunately, they only included images from near the surface of the oceans - mostly the Sunlight zone, but a few Twilight Zone creatures, if they happened to be in the Sunlight zone.  It would have been great to see creatures from the deeper zones, but I guess there was only so much they could include.

The soundtrack was well done.  There were parts with just natural ocean sounds plus the soundtrack that Eldest says actually brought a tear to her eye, they worked so well together.  I particularly liked the soaring choral voices near the end.

Then there was the narration. 

The movie was narrated by Pierce Brosnan, and I have to admit, we were a bit taken aback when we saw his name.  We'd tried to watch another movie he'd narrated, Deep Blue.  It was truly horrible, and we actually had to stop watching it.  I think we gave up shortly after we got to the part with

"The ocean is deep...

(insert 5 minutes of crashing waves)

... and blue."

I was really disappointed to find out that was written by one of our favorites, David Attenborough.

Oceans, on the other hand, was written by seven people, according to IMDB.  Maybe it was a case of too many cooks spoiling to soup, but it really sucked.

The movie starts with a bunch of kids running over a dune towards the beach.  The cameras focus on one young boy, staring off into the distance.  It ends with the same boy, still staring off into the distance.  I wish I could better remember what exactly was said during these scenes, but it was really quite trite.  The movie could have stood on its own without the kids.

There are a couple of examples I remember well enough to quote to show just how bad the writing was.  At one point, they move to the Arctic. 

"If dragons really existed," Pierce Brosnan intones, "here's where you would find the narwhal...


...


unicorn of the sea."

Wait.  What???  What does that even mean?

Then there was the part where they were showing the Asian Sheep's Head fish.  At one point, there is reference to "this mask of wisdom."

"Mask of wisdom?"  Really? 

This is one of the Asian Sheep's Heads featured in the movie.


That is one freaky looking fish.  I love that face!! *L*  But "wisdom" is not the word that comes to mind when I look at this.





There were lots of fantastic scenes in the movie.  The ocean floor seething with spider crabs.  Incredible jellies, and whales.  Beautiful.

The movie did, of course, have its preachy moments.  While the narration started talking about the "melting Arctic" it showed scenes of waves breaking apart thin, surface ice.  One would have to know a decent amount about Arctic ice to recognise that this sort of temporary ice is constantly being formed and broken up, but the obvious implication is that this was ice melting before our eyes.  As the words "endangered species" were spoken, images switched to polar bears, which are far from endangered.  There were images of seals, crowded together on a piece of ice, red eyes rolling as they plunge into the water.  Dramatic music swells and, together with the narration, it's implied that these are animals desperately fighting over the last chunks of ice.  Never mind that right now, the Arctic ice has been increasing dramatically, that previous ice lows were caused by changes in wind and current due to the PDO shift, etc. 

These moments were thankfully brief.

There were also more real and serious problems highlighted, such as the proliferation of garbage in our oceans, and the horrifying tragedy and destruction of some fishing practices.

As mentioned before, the movie ends with the young boy staring into the distance.  The narration closes off with,

"So instead of asking, "what is the ocean," perhaps we should instead ask, "what are we?" "

Uhm... yeah.  I think they were trying to be all deep or something, there. 

It failed.

All in all, it was a good movie, and I'm glad we saw it.  Visually, it was worth seeing on the big screen.  The soundtrack is beautiful.  The writing was incredibly lame, however, and a few times we just stopped in amazement, asking "they didn't just say that, did they?"

I can live with that. 

review - AIT - the movie

Obligatory disclaimer...

Well, I've finally seen the movie. Actually, I had to watch it twice because our dvd player was dying and I couldn't really see it the first time, so a proper viewing had to wait until we replaced it.

Having already read the book, which I reviewed here and here, not much has changed as far as my opinions of AIT. I'm not going to go too much into arguing the "science" behind the movie, as there is just too much, and others have done it better than I have. I recommend this site in particular, if you want to see where Gore got it right, wrong, and something in between. There are only a few points that I will discuss that have not been discussed elsewhere that I know of.

As I expected, the book was pretty much the movie in print form, though the book was able to expand on some areas while some things were completely dropped. Most of the slide show images were in the book, plus a few stills from the video clips used. In general, the two were very much alike.

First, the good. Al Gore is a fabulous orator. In between scenes of his slide show, he narrates throughout the movie. He has complete voice control. All the inflections, emotions, pauses - he gets them all perfectly. It's downright poetic. He's also a very good actor, with marvelous control of his facial expressions, down to the subtle nuances. He is clearly able to connect to an audience, both live and through film. He earned that Oscar.

He's also very passionate about his subject. Whether or not that passion is genuine, I increasingly find myself questioning, but he is passionate.

That's about it for the good, unfortunately. Like the book, this movie is more about Gore and how wonderful he is, than about global warming. This could best be described as a vanity movie. There are lots of scenes of Gore working on his laptop (you get the impression that all he ever does on that thing is move around scenes from his own slide show). There are lots of scenes of Gore looking pensively out of windows, with serious expressions on his face. You see crowds of smiling, worshipful people crowding around and taking pictures of him. You see slide show audiences hanging off his every word, clapping and cheering, or looking serious and worried, in all the right places. And, of course, laughing at all his jokes.

Actually, it was the jokes that started to get to me after a while. They are mocking jokes. They are insulting jokes. They display his contempt of the "so called skeptics," all of whom are, according to Gore, in the pockets of Exxon Mobile.

Oh, that was another good one. He actually portrays himself as some sort of eco-Dick Tracey. In an obviously staged scene, he's in his office, working on his laptop and his cell phone rings. "What did you find out?" he asks. "Working for who?" He, you are made to believe, has just 'discovered' that somebody working in the current administration (because Bush=Evil) is actually under the control of Exxon. Have you also noticed it's always Exxon? There are so many oil companies out there, but only Exxon is the company named. Go figure that one out.

But I've gone too far ahead, here. It was much earlier in the movie that I saw a clip that quite literally had me sitting with my chin down to the floor. I'd heard about an animated clip by Matt Groening. I was stunned when I actually saw it. Picture cheerful, friendly Mr. Sunbeam, sauntering over to the Earth to say hello. Then he says good by and turns to leave, only to be accosted by a gang of greenish, leather jacket and hat wearing blobs of green house gas. They proceed to beat friendly Mr. Sunbeam to death.

That's right, you have an animated murder of innocent Mr. Sunbeam by evil green house gases. Soon, a pile of Mr. Sunbeams forms with their "rotting corpses" heating up our Earth.

And this is a movie schools require our children to see, and wanted to send home with kids this past summer? (Actually, I think they did, but I can't find the article to verify that.)

This was only the first of several clips I found disgusting. Gore is quick to bring in Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, blaming it on global warming, even though hurricane experts said otherwise. The movie goes back to Katrina later on, with plenty of emotional scenes of death, sorrow and destruction.

There are quite a few scenes used inappropriately. Among the more innocuous, but no less misleading, are the scenes of smokestacks while he talks about all the CO2 "pollution" being spewed into the air by industry. CO2 is an invisible gas. All those smokestacks? They're spewing steam, not smoke, not CO2.

Then there was a cgi clip of an anthropomorphized polar bear, swimming in the open ocean, unable to climb onto the one tiny ice floe it finds, complete with the sounds of distressed breathing, as Gore talks about how, for the first time ever, polar bears are drowning. Never mind that his claim is based on a report of 4 - that's right, four - polar bears that were found drowned after a storm. Never mind that the people who actually *live* in the north say polar bears have drowned before. Never mind that polar bears are land based animals, that happen to make use of the ice floes. Never mind that polar bears are far from endangered, but that their population has been steadily increasing. We can't let a few facts get in the way of a dramatic, emotional scene, now can we?

Speaking of facts, one of the things Gore brought up was what would happen if too much fresh water gets dumped into the ocean. This has actually happened in the past, when Lake Agassiz suddenly broke through an ice jam and emptied huge amounts of fresh water into the ocean in a very short time. I happen to be familiar with Lake Agassiz, since I grew up on what used to be the bottom of it. We had a gravel pit on our farm, and we frequently found fossils from when that area was underwater. In the movie, Gore says that the Great Lakes are the remnants of Lake Agassiz, and that when it broke through, it created the St. Lawrence Seaway. While Lake Agassiz had indeed drained in that direction occasionally, the Great Lakes are not remnants of Lake Agassiz, as you can see by the map here. Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba, Winnipegosis, etc. are the remnants. Also, the time Lake Agassiz suddenly drained into the ocean, it was through what is now Hudson's Bay.

There were many other problems I had with the movie. For example, the absolute focus on CO2, describing it as a pollutant, and the occasional interchanging of CO2 with Carbon, as if they were the same thing. There were also a great many references to "my friend" so and so, who did this study or that study. After a while, it seemed like so much name dropping. I wonder how many of these people actually know they are his "friends?" There was also the constant references of "they, them, science," and "scientists," as if Science were one great homogeneous being. There was his insistence that this is a "moral" issue, which of course insinuates that anyone who disagrees is, therefore, immoral. This was even more interesting, when you consider his love-in with China.

I could go on, but I'm already writing for too long, so I'll jump ahead. On the dvd, there were some extras. I never did finish watching them, as it went on so long, I finally stopped watching. I never got a chance to go back before we had to return the movie. From what I'd seen, it was a lot of Al Gore talking directly to the camera, with a few clips to illustrate, including a couple of extended scenes from the slide show. He goes on about how, since the movie was made, even more science has come out to "firm up the consensus." An interesting claim, since I've noticed that more and more scientists are actually willing to risk their careers and come out in public with their disagreements. Heck, even those that agree with him have objections to some of the stuff he has in his movie.

What I found almost funny, though, was when he started talking about population. In the movie, there's a slide show clip where he talks about how high the population explosion will be in the next while. In the extras, he does acknowledge that this is no longer believed to be accurate. But does he point out that, as nations become more secure, as people, especially girls, become more educated, as sanitation improves, and wealth increases, people tend survive longer, therefore they tend to have fewer children? Nope. According to Gore, the reason population *isn't* exploding as predicted in the past is strictly thanks to "science." That the population is expected to stabilize at 9 billion is a "success" story for "science."

Wow. And here I had the audacity to think that how many children we had was a personal choice.

Movie review: episode three

Obligatory disclaimer...

Today, the kids and I watched The Great Warming, Our Children's Planet, the third and last disc of the series.

I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't anywhere near as depressing as the others. LOL Actually, it was almost hopeful, and acknowledged a lot really great things.

Among the things they covered was an almost humorous look at the Future Truck Competition. Universities from all over send teams to this competition, all trying to build the greenest SUV, while still maintaining the power and usefulness of the vehicle. The Canadian team from the University of Alberta got quite a bit of air time - their vehicle's engine had caught fire the day before the competition, and on the day itself, the SUV still wouldn't idle right, and the clutch got fried. The winner used a combination of diesel and another type of fuel I can't remember anymore. All the teams had major problems. I found it interesting that the gas/oil consuming internal combustion engine is still the only one that really works. Mind you, none of the teams had anything like this.



They also featured an architect/real estate developer that specialized in building energy efficient green homes. I believe the total energy costs for a unit was something around $77 a year.

Among the other things discussed:

radiant heat.
active and passive solar
wind
geothermal - which is totally cool! though limited by geography, of course.
the use of energy recovery techniques, that reclaim energy that would otherwise have left the home
roof top gardens - now that's an idea I really like, though their implication that if all city roofs had wildflower gardens on them, it would eliminate the Urban Heat Effect was a touch optimistic.
The also covered the use of ethanol, hydrogen and harnessing the tides.

Now for the not so good.

Our view of the episode did a nose dive right at the start, when it opened with what was probably the most horrible rap group I've ever heard. It was barely audible, but they were rapping about all the terrible things happening to the earth. It took a while for the video to recover from that particular start. *L*

Once again, the terms "carbon" and "carbon dioxide" were used interchangeably. I've asked around a group that is far more knowledgeable about climate than I am, trying to figure out what I'm missing. Turns out I wasn't missing anything. Carbon, being particulate matter, is completely different from CO2 and does not have a green house effect of any kind. It does, however, play a part in smog - which again, has nothing to do with global warming. One of the people who responded to me mentioned that AGW advocates like to use images of industrial smokestacks to "show" CO2 and give a visual representation of global warming. When that was mentioned, I did realize that these discs were all full of images of smokestacks. CO2 is invisible and relatively harmless, but carbon in the air can be both visible and harmful. So the two are equated, even though the two are completely different and have different effects on the environment.

Another thing I noticed was how the term "climate change" was used. Global warming and climate change were terms also used interchangeably, plus climate change was also equated with tornadoes and other massive weather events.

All those good things I'd listed before were also tightly focused on reducing "carbon emissions" and CO2 levels. Just as an example. They featured a semi-nomadic goat herder in the mountains of Peru, who was also working to establish a tourism business - I felt he was a wise man to want to diversify his income in creative ways. He was interviewed through a translator, and he sounded very positive and hopeful.

Alas, according to the voice over (Keanu, at this point), our goat herder was also contributing to global warming! Along with his herd of goats, he had 6 tents, 2 refrigerators and a tv. Electricity was provided through the use of expensive diesel fuel. His wife cooked their meals on fires fueled by wood and dung. But, thanks to foreign investors, they were provided with a portable solar array and wind turbine. I don't know that these two items alone would be reliable enough to power his electrical needs - and there was no mention of his wife getting a stove of some sort to cook with instead of a wood and dung fire. No matter, with this new technology, our goat herder was no long contributing to global warming through his carbon emissions!

No mention that he would save money, which he could reinvest into his budding tourism business.
No mention of the improvements in living conditions by not having to breath in the particulate matter in the smoke of a dung and wood fire.
Nope, the *only* advantage to this guy having solar and wind energy is that he's no longer contributing to global warming!

It was the same with the green, energy efficient homes, or the farmer using no-till planting methods. Everything was about reducing "carbon overload."

They then went on to discuss other fascinating technology, from the Thames Barrier, to massive underwater barriers being built in the effort to reduce water damage to Venice.

Alternate technologies to fuel our home and vehicles were discussed, including the familiar ethanol and hydrogen for cars. Some had me worried. One used a sort of solar array that converter CO2 to CO, which would then be used to make hydrogen, which would then be used to provide power for homes. I'm somewhat concerned about converting the benign and essential CO2 into a poisonous gas to heat our homes.

It was the last example that really had me shaking my head. This technology would not only reduce global warming, but reverse it! Now, first off, I question that we actually want to stimulate global cooling, but that's another story. This is the idea.

Giant towers, which would act as artificial trees, would be built. A special coating on the surfaces would trap CO2 from out of the air. The CO2 would then be converted to calcium carbonate, which is the same thing seashells and corals are made out of.

Then, get this, the calcium carbonate would be collected, the captured CO2 is then "harvested for safe disposal underground, or for conversion into stable substances."

WTF!?!?!

First of all, since when was CO2 not a stable substance? And burying it? CO2 is being treated like some sort of dangerous, toxic substance, like nuclear waste!

It would be laughable, if they weren't actually serious.



.

Movie review: episode two

Obligatory disclaimer...

The Great Warming: Age of Uncertainty

The girls and I watched disc two of the series yesterday, and here are our thoughts.

In contradiction to the title, this episode shows no uncertainty at all. It begins with a projection to the year 2050, and proceeds to describe a world of climactic chaos and destruction. The language is in present tense. Had I not caught the reference to the year at the very beginning, I would've thought they were talking about right now. As it is, several moments of distraction had me make that exact error, sending me to the rewind button trying to figure out what why this was making no sense.

There was one section that seemed out of place to me - as much for what I found to be a bizarre statement made by the expert talking about it - was human sacrifice by the Moche. When he said that we "rarely find evidence of human sacrifice," I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Evidence of human sacrifice is plenty, especially in South America. These links are just a few of the ones I was able to find online. If they could miss such an obvious error, how sloppy is the rest of what is being said?

It is believed that the Moche disappeared after what seems to have been a period of 30 years of floods, followed by another 30 years of drought. I'd seen a documentary show about them several years ago, and there's plenty of physical evidence of their ritual sacrifices. Their temples were literally awash with human blood. The Moche apparently believed that their sacrifices would appease the gods and provide stable weather conditions. For a moment, I thought they (the makers of this movie) were going to find some way to blame this period of climactic variance on AGW somehow, but instead a connection was made between the practice of human sacrifice to appease weather gods 1500 years ago, to what we're doing now. I didn't quite get what they were trying to say and, to be honest, I have no desire to re-watch the movie to figure it out.

In this episode, everything is the fault of AGW, and our spewing carbon into the air (again, the terms carbon and carbon dioxide seem to be used interchangeably).

Water levels rise in one area, it's because of AGW.

Water levels drop somewhere else, it's because of AGW.

The weather is really hot, it's because of AGW.

The weather is really cold, it's because of AGW.

There are a lot of extreme storms? AGW.

No storms? AGW.

Flooding? AGW.

Drought? AGW.

On it went.

There were a lot of stories of past cataclysmic storms. Storms that couldn't possibly be blamed on AGW, but did cause a lot of devastation. These where then somehow correlated to predicted AGW storms, as well as recent extreme weather, which is also blamed on AGW. I have to admit, I didn't quite catch the correlation unless, perhaps, it was to illustrate how devastating these sorts of extreme weather events can be.

They then go on to predict what the weather will be like in the future but, like the beginning scenario painted for 2050, the terms used are ones of certainty. Not, "this might happen," or "we believe this will happen," but "this will happen," and "this is how the world will be like." I used the rewind button a few times in these sections because of the terminology.

And it's all because of carbon/CO2 and AGW.

Even when the odd person they speak to expresses the tiniest bit of disclaimer, such as "I don't know if it's global warming, but..." it's quickly brought back to AGW. You would think that absolutely nothing else effects weather and climate patterns, and that computer model predictions are infallible.

This episode did end on a vaguely positive note. It did acknowledge that people are trying to make a difference and trying to cause less damage to the earth. Which is perhaps ironic, since one of the problems identified was high intensity mono-culture agriculture (from the damage to land, to pollutants from the heavy equipment used), only to include the production of corn-based ethanol as one of the improvements people are making. It was just a tiny bit in the conclusion, but they did acknowledge that humans can actually do good things, too.

update:

Something else I wondered about in the movie. Among the things blamed on AGW is increased health problems, including asthma and other respiratory illnesses, because of smog. They spoke to a woman in Toronto who is a runner, and has asthma. She described how she would run a marathon, then the next day she would be out of breath just climbing stairs. She blamed it entirely on smog. This one had my kids and I looking at each other funny.

She has asthma.

She runs a marathon.

She can't breath the next day.

It's because of smog.

huh?

I would guess that, having asthma, if she ran that same marathon in the middle of nowhere, with no smog at all, chances are she *still* wouldn't be able to breath the next day. I'm not saying that smog isn't a bad thing, but... I mean really. She just ran a @#%!$^ marathon and is surprised she can't breath the next day? I know people who run. Marathons, half-marathons, 50k events... all in cities, with smog. They don't have asthma. They can breath just fine the next day. They may not be able to walk much because of the blisters, but they can breath.

It seems that people will find a way to blame *anything* on AGW.
.

Movie review: episode one

Obligatory disclaimer...

The girls and I have just finished watching the first disk (The Human Fingerprint) of The Great Warming, a 3 episode/dvd series.

In other words, we just spent that last couple of hours arguing with the tv. It's not actually that long, but we kept pausing it for discussion.

Just to give you an idea, this is how the episode starts. In the foreground you see faces of a sad little boy, then a sad teenage-ish girl. In the background are images of industries spewing clouds of pollution (at least the sepia tones make it look like pollution) into the air, etc. A child's voice sings

It's raining, it's pouring
The temperature is soaring
The air is thick, the ocean's sick
I won't wake up in the morning.

That pretty much sets the tone for the movie.

Narrated in Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, it seems to be Canada's answer to AIT. I'd originally thought it was older, but from the site, it seems to be quite new. I've yet to find an actual year of release, other than a dated quote from a NYTimes reviewer.

It was aggravating to watch. It's a mix of truth and inaccuracies. Things are being blamed on global warming that never have been before (including a medieval famine, which Eldest pointed out was caused by a combination was a downpour, a late spring, and unusually cool temperatures, leading to crop failure. Population density made it worse with the spreading of disease). I was also perturbed by how they seemed to use the terms carbon and carbon dioxide interchangeably. CO2 is a green house gas. Carbon isn't a gas.

All in all, the movie was pretty much what I expected, though I was hoping for at least some balance. The earth will soon fry to a crisp, and it's all our fault.

*sigh*