CHASING ICE: The movie

On the weekend, we saw a trailer for the movie "Chasing Ice" at Cinematheque.  It will be showing at Cinematheque on March 20 and 21 at 7 p.m..  It looks very good.  Rotten Tomatoes gives the documentary a 95%.  We plan to see it, and are open to seeing it on either evening.  Submitted by Kathleen V and Gareth N.

SYNOPSIS

In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.

Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.

As the debate polarizes America and the intensity of natural disasters ramps up globally, Balog finds himself at the end of his tether. Battling untested technology in subzero conditions, he comes face to face with his own mortality. It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Chasing Ice depicts a photographer trying to deliver evidence and hope to our carbon-powered planet.

Find the movie website at  Chasing Ice, The Movie 

Here's an excerpt from an NPR review:

Chasing Ice acknowledges the political resistance to climate-change data with montages of comments from news-channel talk shows. This is one of the conventional aspects of Orlowski's stylistically unadventurous movies. There's also an overbearing, derivative score that culminates with an end-credit song performed, unnecessarily, by Scarlett Johansson and Joshua Bell.

What sustains the film are neither words nor music but spectacular images of places few people have ever seen. They're in a region Balog calls "insanely, ridiculously beautiful," a phrase that Orlowski's images fully justify. The movie also includes some of Balog's still photographs, placed in context to show how the photographer works.

The documentary's climax, however, was shot during an event that Balog didn't see with his own eyes. It's a landscape-altering "calving" during which a melting glacier suddenly cracks, shimmies and collapses, as if being swallowed from inside. As Orlowski and two patient EIS team members watch, the likely future of the polar regions transpires in real time.

In Hollywood these days, such epic transformations are rendered with computers and called "morphing." Offering a lesson both to filmmakers and climate-change deniers, Chasing Ice demonstrates how much more powerful it is to capture the real thing.