(:)(:)(:) for DiCaprio's The Eleventh Hour

Three Snouts Up for Leonardo DiCaprio's The Eleventh Hour previewed at the Crest Theater last night.

Anyone whose top goal in life is learning more about the environmental destruction that humans have wrought on planet earth should see this film.

However, the Crest Theater snack bar missed an opportunity by not stocking up on cyanide capsules before showing it. The first 2/3rds of the film is relentless with expert after expert delivering the bad news: what we've done to deplete energy reserves, deforestation, over-fishing, threatening eco-systems, global climate change, air and water pollution. [On the plus side, my friend Tim Carmichael looked handsome and sounded wonderful talking about the consequences of dirty air.]

I learned some things from that section though. What it boiled down to is this: the entire "environmental" movement is misnamed. It isn't so much the environment that we're threatening as the human race. The heat, flooding, hurricanes, and the like won't destroy the earth, it'll destroy mankind. To save her other children, Mother Earth is basically saying "basta, I'll end this little experiment called the human race." Shrugging her shoulders, she'll move on, leaving our bones behind to deteriorate in the deserts we brought on.

The final third was wonderful: filled with the good news about cutting edge technologies, the hope that a massive, unorganized but magically parallel global environmental movement is bringing and the possibilities of coming together to save the human race.

I do wish the ratios had been reversed though. I know so little about all the wonderful things that people are doing to save the planet. I could have spent all movie learning about it.

All I can think is that something must have been off about how the choices the documentarians made. An Inconvenient Truth is also depressing and relentless, with Al Gore's droning voice and a slide show, yet I was riveted to my seat and glad to have seen it.

My guess is that the central problem for activists is that average Americans have no idea what the consumer culture they've opted for is doing to the survival of the species (or they know, and don't care). The goal of the bad news bears part is obviously to wake us up and move us to action.

But how many regular people are going to sit through such a thing just because Leonardo DiCaprio's name is above the picture? Leonardo DiCaprio is to be applauded for having made and financed this effort, but watching him squint in the haze of various L.A. locations to awkwardly read the cue cards for this film added nothing to my understanding or enjoyment (and I like him as an actor and a face).