Whether it is the environment, energy or the economy, we're in a Big Mess. Driven by the fear of his daughter ending up living on a raft with the last polar bear, filmmaker and activist, Jon Cooksey, decides to investigate what the hell is happening to our planet. This ecocomedy gives a fresh overview of the facts that make most of us want to run and hide...
If you put a frog into boiling water it will kick and scream, but if you heat it slowly it will die before it notices... Are WE that frog? We have been WARNED of our own impending doom due to global warming, but "is there anyone alive who isn't sick of global warming?" Jon sets out, through parody and pastiche, to create a deadly serious argument... laying out a set of personal solutions that will make your life better, and hopefully help civilisation too.
Eye-popping graphics ram home inconvenient truths: a moving earth complete with flickering flames meets and merges with a gold chain wearing oil drip, representing overshoot. This monstrous entity rampages around its cartoon home, growing the ever-grasping arms of over consumption. This deformed beast meets the war on nature and begins to wreak devastation. After all there is "nothing quite as destructive as a baby boomer with a visa card".
As the tragicomedy progresses, past the disco dancing reindeer and through the plastic plankton choking off the world's oceans, the film reveals statistic after statistic all pointing to inevitable destruction. When even Disney World can't acquire all the water it needs the cry goes up "if Mickey isn't safe, none of us are!" Squinting mercilessly from a mock-up of Coolidge's "Poker Dogs" Jon asks why anyone should care if one fifth of the people on the planet live on less than $2 a day... and then proceeds to illustrate why third world problems just won't stay put there anymore.
But who cares if oil prices are soaring, pollution is growing and sea levels rising, he asks in an exaggeratedly sanguine manner. "As soon as the artic finishes melting we can get the oil out from under that too, right?" Wrong. Dressed as the human incarnation of the devil, for indeed that is the role mankind appears to have cast itself in respect to the planet, he admits "these solutions are going to make global warming worse."
The films one utterly serious moment hits you like a freight train: when Jon recounts his father's death from alcoholism. He never had the change of heart that could save him. But we can... Drive right on past Exxon and plump for chicken rather than beef; use birth control, "the most effective carbon offset you can buy." Above all "find some way to change on the inside." 2008
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Or watch clips on YouTube - www.youtube.com/user/howtoboilafrog
