 September
2006
This month's reviews/features:
An Inconvenient
Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car?
Are We Being Good Stewards?
What does Scripture tell us about environmental stewardship?
Genesis 2:13 says: The Lord God took the man and put him in the
Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. We can infer from
this that the Lord expects us to take good care of the world, but
what, exactly, does that mean? An Inconvenient Truth
and Who Killed the Electric Car? are two new
documentary films that evaluate our treatment of the environment.
They’re both interesting and provocative, especially if we can set
politics aside.
An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore’s plea for us to
take global warming seriously. You probably wouldn’t think that
watching excerpts of Gore’s worldwide slide show would make for an
interesting movie, but it does. The claims Gore makes are perhaps
familiar: the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere keeps going
up; 2005 was one of the hottest years ever; global warming causes
both drought and increasingly severe storms (e.g., Hurricane
Katrina); the polar icecaps may melt and flood coastal areas. What
does Gore think we should do? Among other things, we can commit to
personal recycling, consider buying a hybrid car, and pray. About
three-fourths of An Inconvenient Truth is right on
target. Unfortunately, Gore gets political at times; his film would
have been stronger without the political barbs.
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a fascinating
series of interviews with the former owners of the electric cars
produced by General Motors starting in 1996. The California
Legislature had passed an electric car mandate, and for a while
there were quite a few of these autos on California highways and in
other places. They were popular with their owners. Actually, the
word owners is a misnomer, for consumers could only lease the cars;
they couldn’t buy them. According to the film, this was all part of
GM’s plan to throw a bone to environmentalists without being serious
about improving the environment, as witnessed by the fact that GM
later withdrew all the cars from the market and destroyed them.
Good environmental stewardship is not a political issue—or at least
it shouldn’t be. These two films ask penetrating questions and
challenge us to look beneath the surface in judging how to care for
the world. They’re both well worth seeing, if only to get ourselves
to think carefully about the questions they pose.
Ratings:
An Inconvenient Truth, 3 ¼ stars
Who Killed the Electric Car? 3 stars
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Index of movie
reviews...
(2003 reviews through present)
Jay Maurer, a member of West Side Presbyterian Church, is
a long-term movie buff and former college teacher of The Film as
Literature. He has written movie reviews for The Good News
(West Side newsletter) since 2002.
If you have comments or questions
about the movie (or play) reviews, please contact Jay at
dramachap@msn.com.
Ratings are expressed in
increments of ¼ star.
A rating of 2 ½ stars or higher is meant to be a recommendation.
1 star: poor
2 stars: minimally satisfactory
3 stars: quite good
4 stars: superb
Criteria for determining the ratings:
- Reflection, either explicit or implicit, of Christian values,
including suitability of language and lack of gratuitous violence
- Quality of the acting
- Originality
- Unity of the entire picture
- Substance, or in the words of C.S. Lewis, weight
Other Christian movie review Web sites:
Plugged In Online
ChristianityTodayMovies.com
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