Chasing Ice (2012)

CHASING ICE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jeff Orlowski
If you've ever thought watching ice melt was boring, this movie could make you think again. If you've ever thought waiting for ice to melt was boring, well, it is, and this movie covers that, too. It's a documentary about an obsessed National Geographic photographer named James Balog, who spent several years in the early part of this century making time-lapse studies of receding glaciers, mostly in Greenland and Alaska. The footage he got is as alarming as it is spectacular. Balog's a bit of a prima donna. It's hard to tell which he loves more: being behind the lens or in front of it. But the graphic visual evidence he provides for the impact of global warming makes the reality of climate change hard to deny. The deniers would still deny that, I suppose, and some of them turn up briefly in the film, but as time goes on and the documentation piles up, their rhetoric sounds increasingly hollow. About the only reasonable conclusion you can draw is that they're crazy, stupid, or full of shit. And they're not crazy or stupid.