An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Franny Armstrong.
Cast: Pete Postlethwaite
Description: Climate change documentary, which hopes to shame audiences into changing their lifestyles to save planet Earth from disaster. Set in a bleak and desolate 2055, an archivist examines decades-old footage from 2007, which reveals all of the signs of impending catastrophe, though few people take note. Featuring contributions from Jeh Wadia, a businessman determined to start a low-cost Indian airline, wind farm developer Piers Guy, French mountain guide Fernand Pareau and oil man Alvin DuVernay, the film laments the lack of a co-ordinated, global response to fears about climate change and suggests possible courses of action to minimise the damage at this eleventh hour.
Country: UK. 2008. 92mins
Franny Armstrong’s docudrama, a well-made warning about our world’s greed and stupidity independently financed by more than 200 small investors, opens with Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living apparently alone in the ecologically devastated world of 2055. He is sitting at his still-working computer in the Arctic looking at his own assemblage of archive footage. Why, he asks, didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?
Postlethwaite recently had a stab at Lear and appears a little like Shakespeare’s tragic king as he wags his figure at us disconsolately. Sometimes it feels like he’s lecturing us, as if we were a lot of naughty children. But the documentary footage is persuasive enough to suggest that we probably deserve it.
It includes a palaeontogolist who, after helping Shell find more and more oil, saved more than 100 people from Hurricane Katrina; an entrepreneur who successfully starts a low-cost airline in India; a poverty-stricken Nigerian who fishes in the oil-infested waters of a corrupt society; a wind farm developer who fails in his fight against nimby Cornish protesters; and an 82-year-old French mountain guide who has witnessed his beloved Alpine glaciers melt by 150 metres.
All this provides incontrovertible evidence that the old man trawling through his archive has a right to be depressed. But when all is said and done we get the feeling that we’ve seen it all before. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth also lectured us but, by virtue of being the first such film, had more shock value.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I disagree. Al Gore's film WAS a lecture – albeit but one that had been turned into an informative piece of cinema.
Age of Stupid's use of real, interwoven human stories makes the game of five bullet climate russian roulette we’re currently playing both urgent and relevant for audiences who expect more than a Powerpoint presentation with their popcorn.
Go see it but don’t expect to leave the same person who went in. Powerful stuff.
- Greg Chivers, SE27
Morning:
13°c
