Scary Movie: An Inconvenient Truth

Film is primarily an emotional medium; a picture is "worth a thousand words" on when it comes to moving the heart or spirit. This is particularly true when dealing with complicated and abstract subjects, such as our changing climate, as opposed, say, to a film designed to show the horrors of war. But to explain science, or the vast sweep of history, film must always omit more details than the written word.

And so it was with low expectations that I rented the recently-released DVD version of Davis Guggenheim's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

I read a fairly good newspaper on a daily basis, and follow current events and science news from a number of sources, and so didn't slip the disk into my DVD player expecting to learn much that I didn't already know. My interest in the movie was more that of a cultural anthropologist than of someone wondering what all that global warming fuss is about.

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