Al Gore’s doc An Inconvenient Truth opens today in New York and Los Angeles, doing the Spielberg-style Wednesday opening. Which sort of makes sense, if you think of it as The Day After Tomorrow without Jake Gyllenhaal or any special effects and starring a famously monotone ex-vice president. I’m predicting $75 mil B.O. opening weekend.
But there’s at least one party determined to prevent this from being the summer blockbuster tentpole it deserves to be. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, or Exxon for short, has fashioned a TV spot to quell the fires of revolution Al Gore is stoking. Narrated by a persuasive female voice that is equal parts seductive and maternal, like a schoolteacher moonlighting for a phone sex company, the ad reassures us that all this global warming talk is just scare mongering. It employs such clever devices as a glacier collapsing while Hot For Teacher coos about scientific studies, and then, during “but other scientific studies found exactly the opposite!” the shot reverses and the glacier reforms. Kudos to the Competitive Exxon Institute for not utilizing a record scratch sound effect for emphasis.
The ad goes on to complain that “global warming alarmists” are targeting the fuels we use because of carbon dioxide. “Let’s force people to cut back, they say.” Shot of a man riding his bicycle in the snow. Nice touch. But here’s the best part:
But we depend on those fuels to grow our food. Move our children. Light up our lives.
What the hell is wrong with you environmentalists? Fuel MOVES OUR CHILDREN. Do you want our children to remain stationary?
The law states that every PSA must end with a shot of an innocent little schoolgirl. This one trots out a cute little lass blowing the seeds from a dandelion while the narration triumphantly concludes, “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” I’m sure that’s what every frog being placed in a sealed jar for classroom dissection is thinking during his last breath. Personally, I think instead of a girl with a dandelion, the master stroke would have been to end on a shot of Exxon CEO Lee Raymond in a Santa Clause suit with a cherubic lad sitting on his knee, looking straight into the camera and saying, “Al Gore, you’re a very bad boy…”
"Glaciers" (The Competetive Enterprise Institute)