[Note: This review of "The Age of Stupid" appeared in the Nevada City Advocate newspaper as part of a set of reviews for the 8th Wild & Scenic Environmental Film Festival.]
We live in “The Age of Stupid.”This is such a great title for a film, see it without knowing anything about it.I’ll get back to this impressive movie after I tell you about a friend of mine who used to go to the race track a lot.
My friend explained that every time he bet on a race, his horse had a 50-50 chance of winning.Either the horse would win or it would lose.50-50.My friend was right in an it’s-only-money, human sort of way.
Fifteen hundred friends of mine explained to me (in Pew Research polls) that 77% of the people believed in 2006 that global warming is really happening. In 2009, only 57% of the people believe it.
Wait a minute….How did this article end up being about global warming?
After an unprecedented century of multiplying modern marvels, we are now living in the age of stupid.Whether the odds are 50-50 or 20 to 1, we’re at the race track, betting in an it’s-only-money, can’t-we-talk-about-something-else sort of way.
The film “The Age of Stupid” is cleverly packaged as a science fiction future.A man in the year 2055, rummaging through high tech archives, ruminates about the acts of denial and the facts of destruction that led him to his living under lonely seige above the risen oceans.The film entertains and engages, albeit heavily, and is well worth seeing.We opened a window on “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.It is well worth 90 minutes of creatively organized snippets to open a window on “The Age of Stupid.”
Regardless of the odds, one thing is 100% true about betting at the race track:the owners of the gambling house skim some of everybody’s money into their pockets before they give any money back to us and they don’t give it back to most of us.