WHAT MAKES A DOC A DOC?

Now that I finally got to sit down to screen Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, I find the film's title is quite ironic. Here's a film that won both the Academy Award and Producers Guild of America award for Best Documentary of 2006. But was this truly a documentary?

There were several other docs up for 'best' of 2006, and my personal favorite - Who Killed the Electric Car - was among them. Truth presents very powerful - and scary - insights into the global warming issues facing our planet. However, it also spends most of its time presenting staged lectures given by the former 'next President of the United States'. Once in a while, some old news is sprinkled in - his 6 year old son getting hit by a car, losing the 2000 election - but mostly it is a taped live event not much different than watching a debate on TV. Does this constitute a documentary? Not really. And I don't think I'm alone in this opinion.

Let's look at Who Killed the Electric Car. Here's a classic documentary that follows a few key characters in their quest to find out why the major auto makers were literally killing state-of-the-art electric cars that were proving to be a viable technology in California. The film follows the characters and sprinkles in some footage of government hearings to underscore or prove points. It's a really good piece of journalism that took the filmmakers to many different places to capture charaters doing many different things and then weaving it all together to make a comprehensive narrative. Technically, this film blows An Inconvenient Truth out of the water.

These films both address environmental issues, and the 'electric car' issue might prove more critical to solving the 'inconvenient truth' because of the potential effects of killing a viable, emmisions-free technology.

I guess the fact that Al Gore was involved goes a long way to explaining things. But I have a question for Mr. Gore -

What kind of car were you driving on the way to your lectures?