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Al Gore: the second coming (from Al Guardian)
Celebrity took an unusually nerdy form at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The man everyone wanted to meet, talk to and be seen with wasn't a film star or daring new director. It was a politician, who is in his sixth year of retirement and more famous for what he didn't achieve than for what he did.What do you mean??? The man invented the internet for gosh sakes!!! Al Gore has been to Sundance before, but never as a leading man.He's a great kisser. This year he was appearing in An Inconvenient Truth, a 90-minute star-vehicle documentary.Truth and Gore in the same sentence is a oxymoron. If 'former vice-president turns movie star at the age of 57' sounds improbable, remember that this is also Al Gore: famously wooden, inauthentic in front of a crowd, closed down in the face of a television camera. Al Gore, who ran a plodding campaign for the presidency and whose main response to accusations that he came across as pedantic and patronising was to wear more earth tones.Well at least they got him down right! Yet An Inconvenient Truth sold out at Sundance and received standing ovations. The Q&As with Gore following the screenings were packed. 'The reception he got was extraordinary,' says the film's producer, Lawrence Bender (Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Kill Bill). 'He was a phenomenon at Sundance. He seemed larger than life.' That's because he is larger than life, dude. larger than a fridge, or a VW Bug for that matter. Those who failed to get into the movie made do with catching up with Gore at parties, where he was 'He was the celeb of the week,' says the Village Voice's Amy Taubin, 'both in terms of reporting about him and people reporting to each other. They were all saying, "He's so amusing. Why wasn't he more like that when he was running?" There was a lot more buzz about him than there was about Paris Hilton.' Uhhh, no comment. What can a film that has helped make Al Gore sexier than Paris Hilton possibly be about?How about a Hilton-esque home movie with Tipper? Perish the thought. A partial list of its contents would include the greenhouse gas effect, the proliferation of carbon dioxide, the convection energy of hurricanes, the paradoxical flood-drought syndrome, melting methane in Siberia, the history of the Ice Age and the physics of solar ray absorption. It becomes no clearer why this film is having such an impact when you learn that it largely takes the form of a souped-up Powerpoint presentation. And the BS factor of researchers like NASA's Hanson who have a political axe to grind, and who ignore the 25 year NPO cycle and it's implications...but I digress. Read the rest. I think this is an example of the LLL's fascination of all things trivial and their inability to focus on what America really cares about. And why they will continue to lose elections everywhere but Massachusetts where the voters will prostitute themselves ad infinitem...but I digress. Posted by: anymouse 2006-02-06 |
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