On Wednesday afternoon, I saw the Al Gore environmental lecture/documentry/movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

It was very well done, and presented a compelling argument. Ironically, being Wesgarth Cinema, most of the audience was pretty much convinced anyway (Northcote is a funky suburb). What the movie did for me, was not so much teach me anything new, but serve as nice summation of the situation.

On a more cynical note, the film seemed to be a product placement excercise for Apple. There were hundreds of shots of Gore’s very sexy powerbook (the laptop, not the politician) and of him using Keynote (Apple’s competitor to MS Powerpoint).

Still, despite this slightly sour taste of marketing, Gore demonstrated how to give an excellent presentation. He was not boring, and injected elements of humour and even a few touching personal anecdotes (which I found suprising, but he got away with it without sounding like a wanker). It is my belief that Powerpoint is generally used terribly, and most people do not know how to give a proper presentation. Those people, I urge to take example from Gore: engage the audience and only display major points and useful aids, with a minumum of fuss (ie: no irritating sounds, over-the-top slide transitions, etc). Gore’s moderate tone lends to his rational argument, unfortunately something which many passionate individuals (in any arena) forget.

The film was quite long — over 2 and a half hours. Despite that, It kept me absorbed (but not my immature brother, though). I would recommend this film to anyone, and urge that pundits watch it as well.

See climatecrisis.net for more details.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Humanity & Society, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.