Sizzle: not even bad?

Well, I never thought I'd watch a film with the title, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The "star" of the Sizzle is Randy Oslon, a contributor to Shifting Baselines here at ScienceBlogs^TM. In fact, Randy is a major contemporary interpreter of the term shifting baselines. I assume that most readers of ScienceBlogs^TM are more familiar with Randy's oeuvre than I am, I haven't watched Flock of Dodos, and in general I tend to not be familiar with mass-market documentary films. I haven't watched either Al Gore or Michael Moore's documentaries, and Expelled was an experiment on my part in plugging into the multimedia propaganda industries which seem to be determining the Zeitgeist at any given time. I suspect that I'll keep on passing on documentaries; Expelled was mendacious. As for Randy's newest work, I have to admit it left me kind of disoriented more than informed or entertained.

The mix of a serious topic with documentary intent interlaced with comedic set-ups didn't really satisfy my appetite for either. I checked out some of the articles about this film and it seems Randy was aiming for a broad audience. I can't believe any climate scientists would be very satisfied with the depth of scientific exposition, but I'm also not sure that the delivery was straightforward and focused enough to yield marginal returns for a broader audience which is only cursorily familiar with the science. To some extent I'm more in the latter camp as I don't follow the politics and science of Global Warming with any depth; I know the general logic behind anthropogenic warming and the sketches of mitigating policies. But I defer to the experts on the details of both. My own personal politics are on the far Right edge of what you might find on ScienceBlogs^TM, so I am more willing to listen to the arguments of individuals such as Jim Manzi at National Review than most around these parts. Nevertheless, in all honesty there's a difference between will and implementation, and I've just not spent the marginal time boning up on this topic or the set of various responses proposed to feel very confident about any distinctive personal opinions I might have.

What someone like me needs is a thicker slice of the issues at hand, not a scattered attempt at reinforcing general insights and the expected ideological cut-outs. To appreciate some of the ironical, nuanced and meta aspects of the broader issue which Randy seems to want to shed light on I needed more detailed analysis and elucidation than I found in Sizzle. Perhaps I lack a sense of humor, I certainly didn't laugh much, but then I'm no studied appreciator of the art of film. I also admit that a deeper exploration of the substantive scientific issues to the extent that I would have preferred might have made the film unmarketable, but I don't think that the presentation schema that Randy selected is tight and fluid enough to hit home the few general points with enough force to compensate for the trade-off entailed by the space given to the wacky hijinks and silly situations.