The Age of Stupid

Shell pays a PR company to paint them well.

This is a group of social media hacks making money and selling their wares. If you don't believe look at the reviews. Most good reviews have many likes and come from fake accounts.

This is a piece of junk. Like Zeitgeist, The Age of Stupid is a big work of montage to serve a religion in the hope of getting paid for preaching. It caters to a sectarian movement. Like the Christian or Muslim sects, the eco crowd I know prefers putting others through slavery and hunger, never themselves.

So save your time and money and get a book from somebody who knows there is a climate change and not from some social media informed believes.

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

The subject of climate change is often covered but rarely brought to the big screen. This ambitious low budget project is well worth viewing because it will make you think just that little more about how we're draining resources on earth.

It's a neat idea. The late and much missed Pete Postlethwaite is an archivist who spends the entire film touching a computer screen showing us reasons why the planet ended up in such a desolate state in 2055.

Interlaced with six separate documentary stories covering various aspects of climate change are snippets of news recordings, social commentary and animation hybrid. It all works rather well, your interest is kept high and the stories all work the grey matter into overdrive. All held together by Postlethwaite who in reality has very little to do but does it rather well nonetheless.

Most certainly worth a watch and just may well tempt you to try reduce your carbon emission. A good effort all round.

The film contrasts a bleak future that we are heading towards with the current way people carry on as usual. The archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) looks after the best of the planets museum exhibits, and looks back from the year 2055 at how we got there. He observes a group in Bedfordshire stopping a potential wind farm from getting through planning, an entrepreneur in India starting a low cost airline, a woman surviving in Nigeria torn by Shell's oil extraction, children exiled from Iraq and a man retired from the oil industry living in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. The scenarios show how complicated it can be to make a difference, but that its something we need, and must, do.

On the surface, Franny Armstrong's 'The Age of Stupid' may seem like just another 'save the planet' type documentary that follows Al Gore's now overrated 'An Inconvenient Truth' but it does make some relevant points particularly on how this effects the developing countries and the common citizen of developed countries (in this day of consumerism when too much is changing too fast). Armstrong takes a look at how some cultures are affected using individual examples. For example, there's the aspiring doctor Layefa Malemi who lives in a poverty stricken region where even clean water is a scarcity and then there's the businessman Jeh Wadia who's working hard to launch his airline company to provide the 'ordinary citizen' with the option to commute through flight. I wonder how affordable the price is made for the ordinary working population. In addition, through an Iraqi family Armstrong also looks at how war, in addition to causing human loss can cause severe environmental damage that may lead to chronic difficulties. At the same time the writer also attempts to show us the other perspective as is the case of Indian businessman Jeh Wadia who appears to start a new airline company to facilitate travelling for the working class citizen (even though the point is made that planes cause severe pollution). On the technical front, it's well shot and edited. The special effects are quite decent and with the legendary Pete Posthlewaite little can go wrong.

Every single economy, developed, developing, underdeveloped, Marxist, socialist, social welfare, mixed or full market depends on growth. Increasing population either through reproduction or immigration is the most destructive thing for the planet. That does mean more carbon, more plastic, more pollutants in general, more pavement, more disease transmission -- you name it.

The single best solution for global warming and stress on the planet in general is well understood: Higher level so education for poor women -- specially in the underdeveloped world. the more educated a woman is the longer she differs first pregnancy and the less kids she has.

This film does not address the core issues at all but is a whining, self righteous preaching to the choir so people spend a few pounds, euros or dollars to see it feel like they did something -- when they did NOTHING. The theater I saw this at in the UK was AIR CONDITIONED