Labor Day Movies

This is typically the weekend I head to the Telluride Film Festival, for a weekend of movies no one's ever heard of. As you may have noticed from previous posts, I don't have much vacation time to spare this year, so I'm still in Denver for a lazy weekend instead.

Yesterday Dave and I watched two movies, and I like to think they were in homage to Telluride. The first one was just as dark and disturbing as anything I see there. (Although with a lot less shooting and stabbing -- Telluride loves to keep you on pins and needles. It's worth observing here that Edmund has not yet been released to the public.)

The movie was Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. I can't believe it's taken me this long to see it, and in fact the reason we went is because it may be close to leaving theaters. As I had hoped and expected, this was an incredibly powerful thing to see, and it really moved me. The environment, like eating right and working out, is one of those topics that people would rather be ignorant of, so they don't have to feel guilty on a conscious level. But I hope that we are becoming more advanced than that. Apparently the movie has been attended by about 2.5 million people, so that must be a good sign. And although it was SHOCKING to learn about what is happening to the earth while we've been looking the other way, it's also very empowering to find out that we can still turn things around.

For me, the most meaningful part of the movie was when Gore talks about what will happen to the world when we allow the ice caps to continue melting to a certain threshold. He projects that the sea level will rise 20 feet. And that doesn't sound like too big of a deal until you realize how many people will be displaced -- New Orleans will look like a joke. When you combine the coastlines of China and India alone, we are talking about 100 million people with no home. Closer to our own hearts, the site of the World Trade Center will be under water. How's that for a little painful irony?

He also mentioned the Pine Beetle, which has become a sad topic around Colorado. These beetles, which used to be prevented by cooler temperatures, are killing many of the trees in our mountains. It's terrible to see the increasing mix of brown with green, but even worse is imagining the fires of these dead trees that are surely inevitable.

The website promoted at the end of the film is a great one. One of the more interesting features is a calculator to tell you your personal impact on the planet's CO2 level. I took it, and am sorry to tell you that I am contributing about 18,000 pounds of CO2 per year.

This movie has been on my mind since I saw it, and I've been reflecting a lot on how to talk to people about something I believe in so strongly. Why is it that conversations about health, finances, smoking, and the environment *gasp* make people squirm? If I tried to convince a friend with a sports utility that a Prius has merits worth considering, it's possible that someone could even get offended. But why is it so sensitive, when they know in their hearts that it's true? Maybe because we all prefer to get away with convenience, instead of a responsible -- even moral -- choice. It's more comfortable to eat fries at McDonalds than to have a salad, who knows that better than me? But I would never argue that it's the right thing to do. So now I am asking all my loved ones to be moral and responsible! Be accountable for your decisions, be proud of them, have a backbone, and go see this movie.

Personally, I've set some new goals for myself. I've been pretty slack on the carpooling, and I'm going to make an effort to carpool 1-2 times a week. I also need to start riding my bike to work every once in a while. And when the lightrail starts up this fall, I definitely want to experiment with that.

This week I also want to test drive a Prius. Why not?

Ok, after we got home, we decided something lighter would be nice, so we picked another documentary -- Mad Hot Ballroom. This is about a program for nine year olds in the NYC area that started 12 years ago, and now includes 6,000 school children. It's a dance class that culminates in a city wide competition, and the kids' drive to practice and win was amazing. The movie was alternately hilarious and touching, I completely loved it. How amazing to see these children -- mostly poor and from tough family situations -- learning the tango, rumba, foxtrot and swing.

So one movie on how to save the planet, and one movie on why. It was a great day.