‘Cool It’ looks to heat up Toronto, and America
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Glenn Beck, are you listening?
The Toronto International Film Festival will get its trademark jolt of politics when it premieres ‘Cool It,’ Ondi Timoner’s story of skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg that’s being positioned as the anti-’Inconvenient Truth.’
Now U.S. audiences can get a dose of it too. Roadside Attractions, which specializes in art-house favorites (it released indie crowd-pleaser ‘Winter’s Bone’ earlier this summer), has picked up domestic rights to the movie and will put it in theaters in the fall.
The doc is a profile of Lomborg, the Danish scientist who came to prominence 12 years ago with a book called ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist’ and who deepened his critique of conventional environmentalist wisdom -- and Al Gore -- with a book called ‘Cool It’ three years ago.
That makes him and the movie a provocative choice for Toronto and Roadside -- and perhaps one friendly to anti-Goreists on the right. ‘Global warming doc takes issue with ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ reads the headline on the announcement (though it’s worth noting that Lomborg recently did reverse some of his earlier positions and agreed that time and money should be devoted to cutting carbon emissions).
Sundance staple Timoner is the documentarian behind ‘We Live In Public,’ which looked at our evolving attitudes toward privacy through the maverick Internet personality Josh Harris; she’s someone who has the ability to hydrate the dryly topical by making films about specific personalities involved in a cause.
Despite the environmental themes in ‘Cool It,’ the movie is being described as more than a jeremiad or the dissection of a crisis. “Many docs we see are satisfied to introduce yet another problem to fret about,” Roadside co-chief Eric d’Arbeloff said in a statement. ‘ ‘Cool It’ is so exciting because it’s radically structured toward solutions.’ And some Toronto festival juice.
--Steven Zeitchik
http://twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT
