MOVIE NIGHT
     8:00PM-10:00PM | Tuesday, October 19

"SIZZLE: A Global Warming Comedy"

"Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy" is a feature film (85 minutes) that (unfortunately) keeps getting more relevant with time. It premiered in 2008 at the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Woods Hole Film Festival. But the science community rebuffed the movie because of it's inclusion of several climate skeptics. Nature magazine called it unfunny and an army of science bloggers slashed away, yet Variety Magazine (the most important voice of Hollywood) reviewed the movie as, "an exceedingly clever vehicle for making science engaging."

This changed last year with ClimateGate. Since then, a new willingness has emerged among the cience/environmental crowd to concede that the anti-climate science movement is aggressive, well funded, and gaining significant ground. The strategy of ignoring skeptics in hopes they will go away has vanished. And with the new willingness to engage in the conflict has come a renewed interest in "Sizzle."

The movie is a unique hybrid of mockumentary, documentary and reality built around the story of a well-intended by hapless scientist-turned-filmmaker who is forced to team up with a couple of Hollywood flakes to make his documentary about global warming. Along the way he must contend with producers who want to interview Tom Cruise (not a scientist, but a Scientologist -- "most people don't know the difference"), a cameraman who is a skeptic and likes to argue with the scientists they are trying to interview, and a humiliating polar bear nightmare for the filmmaker. But eventually it's a movie that makes up for all the silliness with a somber visit to the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to witness the human side of a climate disaster.

This year "Sizzle" has screened or will screen at NASA Goddard Flight Center, M.I.T., University of Arizona, University of Colorado, Yale University, and Cornell University. The on-going relevance of the movie is now being underscored by The New Suit Theater Group in Chicago who are adapting "Sizzle" as a play that will open in February, 2011.

Join us for a viewing of this entertaining movie, followed by a post-screening panel discussion featuring the filmmaker, Dr. Randy Olson along with several climate scientists.