MOVIE NIGHT. Finally saw An Inconvenient Truth. It's a nice primer for the mainstream POV on climate change. It goes down smooth enough, and I am very impressed with Big Al's voiceover skills. But admirable as it is as a presentation, as a movie it's not much. Maybe my standards for the documentary form are too rarefied, but the ones I admire -- Nanook of the North, High School, Harlan County U.S.A., God's Angry Man, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, et alia -- have something in common with my favorite fiction films: they carry a wealth of meaning that can't be conveyed by talking points. In An Inconvenient Truth we learn a lot about environmental science and about Al Gore, but there's no room to wonder about either. Even the details of Gore's life, nicely rendered as they sometimes are, lead us only to expected conclusions, as any campaign bio or convention speech might. It's nice that they want to save the planet, but I don't think I'll be taking in An Inconvenient Truth or Dare or whatever they call the sequel.