A huge, viral campaign is tweeting this way! Today's the day. The live screening of "Age of Stupid" has its global premiere beamed from New York City into selected theaters in order to engage people globally. Click picture above to get to the trailer.This is the new movie from the UK: Director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and producer John Battsek (One Day In September). Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? It was released in UK cinemas on 20 March 2009, and will be followed by other countries.
Those who are not stupid, and ready to change history, are going here.
The group supporting this "popular front" activism behind the movie is tcktcktck.org, coordinated by Oxfam with several other orgs, and is working alongside the "Yes Men Hoax" on the global wake-up call, which ironically has much truth to it. Timed for the Climate Week in NYC which represents a broader movement, it puts a radical spin on the global warming issue.
It's in the spirit of Edward Bellamy's utopian novel "Looking Backward" and the "Bellamy Clubs" that resulted in the Nationalist movement, as well as the science-fiction apocalyptic films and TV series (famously Rod Serling's Twilight Zone). This is a film that presents the intensely personal and immediate regrets of those few souls living alone in a devastated future.
It doesn't take that much imagination for those of us who remember that first Earth Day in 1970, when schoolkids and their parents sounded the alarm about pollution and overpopulation. Back then, we'd just begun seeing catalytic converters on new cars and were bundling up a lot more in winter. Water was so cheap and plentiful that pools exploded into suburbia. The roof farms were just beginning their encroachment into the hills and forests. Tremendous growth, cheap power and plenty of money resulted from the postwar expansion, especially in California. Malls became the new center of life, leaving city centers and churches in the dust.
Yet there were plenty of natural resources and vast swaths of wilderness: desert, savannah, forest, jungle and mountain ranges full of wildlife, oceans full of mysterious and dangerous life forms.
I really miss that.
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