Pretty Big Dig

Pretty Big Dig is... ballet, with big yellow excavators.

Thanks to bats22 for pointing out this short documentary on the making of the clip, which is almost more cool than the ballet itself, because the artist's enthusiasm is just so infectious.

Now, if my next-door neighbour starts running his damn earth-movers tomorrow before 7am like he did this morning, I'm definitely going out to complain.

Old Clothing

Worth passing on, because I know at least some of my f'list has wondered about the same thing. (yay for composting fabric?!)

http://www.grist.org/advice/ask/2006/07/05/old_clothes/

I'm wondering about the best way to dispose of old clothes and shoes -- the tired, well-loved, and much-worn items that thrift shops really don't want. I wear my clothes until the bitter end, and then I just don't know what to do with them. Old T-shirts make great rags, but then what?

Best Documentary? (Review: Inconvenient Truth)

Best documentary I've ever seen? I'm not sure. I did a quick google search, wikipedia has its suggestions... I've seen "Columbine" and "Farenheit 9/11", I'm working my way through "Seven Up!" but there are a number in their list I've not seen. I'm even worse with imdb's list.

But Inconvenient Truth may just be the one. [edit: well, probably in the top five.] I think this is a documentary worth seeing, even if you're already sold on the argument about climate change. And maybe you can tell a few other people who might not be sold. If you know any.

This evening was great; saw it with lovecraftienne, aleriel, kourtneyshort, bridgeoutahead, and the_real_crispy. After, we reconvened for schmooze, pizza and beer around the corner.

The film combines a proper movie drama-arc with cuts from Al Gore speaking to live audiences. His speech is itself one of the most charismatic I've seen recorded. Yeah. Al Gore. Charismatic. Who knew?

By his count, he's given this speech over 1,000 times. That helps, plus it has some of the most evocative animations I've seen in a documentary.

Not to make it seem like all flash, but there is a lot of flash. The obvious manipulation is... annoying, but still effective. Three particularly effective bits:

Gore tells us that right now the polar ice caps are melting, polar bears are drowning in thin ice. A photo-realistic animation of a dark ocean with a polar bear swimming toward a small ice floe. It tries to climb onto the ice, and it keeps breaking into smaller pieces. The shot holds on the polar bear paddling away, with no ice anywhere in sight.

Later, there's a projection-screen the size of the stage, maybe 100 feet wide and thirty feet tall. At one point he has a chart of CO₂ data, going back 100,000 years. As he walks and talks, and you can see the levels going off the chart above his head, he gets to 2005, and he climbs onto a pneumatic elevator sitting at the side of the stage. He says, "Now, if I manage to not kill myself in the process..." and gingerly pushes a button. He starts rising toward the top of the huge screen. As he rises and talks about CO₂ and the argument that it's always fluctuated, the curve on the chart shoots by him vertically toward the top of the screen. His point, that carbon levels are no longer sinusoidal, they're exponential, is somehow that much more forceful when you're looking at the data and down 50 feet at the stage and audience.

Thirdly: sea-levels rising. If half of greenland ice melts, and half of antarctic ice melts, seas will rise twenty feet. (Which, admittedly, isn't likely to happen soon, or suddenly). He spends five minutes animating twenty feet of water rising, in different regions across the world. This comes quite some time after he talked about more severe weather and bits about preventing another New Orleans disaster. The link is subtly made; even worse than cities being devastated by hurricanes, are entire sub-continents sinking under the ocean. And both are predictable, and preventable.

The science is well presented. I understand the gulf stream better now. And a few reasons why the Ross ice-shelf broke apart much faster than scientists predicted (it was liquid pools of melted ice, which didn't re-freeze but rather melted down to the bedrock). ...Then we see the same pools and running torrents of water in Greenland, as he says scientists are alarmed there too.

I didn't know that chinese cars are so much more efficient than north american cars. Apparently, California's recent push to improve their standards (defeated in legislature) would have pushed them to... just below China's current standards.

Gore does confuse correlation with causation, for carbon dioxide and temperature, but this is preceeded by saying the causation is very complex and this is an approximation.

He doesn't talk down to the viewer, except in a very self-mocking clip made for them by Matt Groening's crew.

Overall, very well packaged. Overall, it just about works- it's a crying shame Gore didn't look this good when he was running for President. (And maybe this is what the movie leaves me with; a rather seething anger with him for that).

There is a bit too much Al Gore family stuff, but it didn't feel unbalanced for it.

I would've been happier with more depth to the section about solutions, for countering arguments that individual actions won't make a difference. As an example, kourtneyshort noted it talks about recycling, but there needs to be emphasis on reducing and reusing before recycling. The "solutions" part of the picture is tough, but the film does a good job with at least getting the viewer engaaged.

Phew, I had more to say on this film than I expected. But: if you know people who might use some persuasion, tell them the film is entertaining as well as interesting. I think I will mention it to Dan's sister, whose husband is Grand Rapids, MI Republican. (who I wouldn't normally be emailing with, but she finally emailed to say they got home OK after they visited earlier this week).