Yes it’s true, former Vice President Al Gore was at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. Don’t believe me? The red carpet picture below is proof.
He’s at Cannes for a good reason. Read the following article if you’re interested.
Al Gore Takes Global Warming to Cannes
By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer Mon May 22, 5:33 PM ET
CANNES, France –
Michael Moore has been the American on a mission at the Cannes Film Festival the last few years. This time it’s Al Gore, with the documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
The former U.S. vice president climbed Cannes’ famous red carpet in black tie over the weekend for a screening of the film about his efforts to educate people about global warming. Gore usually takes his message to more modest locales, such as school auditoriums and hotel conference rooms.
“As for my personal reactions to all the cameras, the red carpet and all that, I’m old enough now to put this in a different perspective,” Gore told The Associated Press on Monday. “I am able to enjoy it without allowing it to get out of proportion.”
Directed by Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth chronicles Gore’s main preoccupation since losing the 2000 presidential election: touring the world to give factual, funny, and very disturbing slide show lectures about climate change.
“It’s something that feels like a mission,” Gore said in an interview on a hotel rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean.
Gore says he enjoyed Moore’s films, including Fahrenheit 9/11, the documentary critical of
President Bush that won Cannes’ top prize two years ago — although he can “fully understand why they drive others to distraction if they have different political views.”
But unlike Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth has no political agenda, says Gore, who reconfirmed he has no plans to run for president in 2008. He believes global warming is a moral, nonpartisan issue, and he says many Republicans have embraced the film, which debuts in U.S. theaters on Wednesday.
“Underlying it all is a mission to move the United States and the world past a tipping point, and to change the minds of enough people so that they demand that politicians in all political parties take action to stop this crisis,” said Gore, who has studied the problem since he was a college student in the 1960s.
The Bush administration, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol on control of greenhouse gas emissions, prefers letting industry take voluntary steps. The United States accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases.
The movie seems a tough sell, with its stream of facts, photos of melting glaciers and graphs linking the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide to temperatures.
Though there are a few amusing animated segments — Gore rescues a cartoon frog from a pot of boiling water at one point — most of it takes place in conference rooms.
In reviewing the film, the AP’s David Germain wrote: “To be sure, Gore is preaching a sermon, and he does take the occasional jab at business interests, the Bush administration and naysayers who remain noncommittal about whether global warming is real or simply a result of natural cycles. So he’s not entirely an apolitical saint doing what’s right by humanity. Yet even skeptics who go in scornfully figuring Gore is serving his own self-interests may come away wondering: What’s in it for him? “
Guggenheim says he was skeptical when the project was presented to him.
“I was like, you can’t make a movie about a slide show, and I’m not so sure having a politician telling us is the best way to hear about it,” Guggenheim said. “Then they brought me to the slide show and it just blew my mind. … I just wanted to give people that experience, give them a front row seat.”
——————
I’ll have to see it myself to know how political An Inconvenient Truth may or may not be.
Still interested:
New York Times feature: ‘An Inconvenient Truth’: Al Gore’s Fight Against Global Warming
@Cinefille 
I saw some preview pictures with penguins walking in the desert. Maybe he can tell us more about Manbearpig in this film! (If you haven’t seen the South Park episode with Al Gore, then you won’t get it).
I like Al Gore, but I can’t imagine him being funny about anything, much less global warming … I think I’ll skip this one, especially since it won’t be in theaters anywhere even near my little corner of the world