Lifestyle: Barren Wastelands At The End Of The World [PIC]
According to Ark II, the live-action CBS Saturday morning kids’ show that premiered on September 11, 1976, mankind is in for a rude awakening. Thanks to pollution, lack of conservation, and out-and-out greed, Earth will be a barren wasteland by the year 2476, forcing large swaths of people to become scavengers, dirt farmers, and, in extreme cases, exploitative warlords.
The trick, of course, is to make the world premieres as memorable as all those other international festival faves. And at the halfway point, this year’s edition has a trio of Canadian native sons holding that maple leaf high.
Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility ? It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?
The very same geophysical features that make the Earth so life-giving and preserving also, however, make it dangerous. In any single year since 1990 perhaps 20,000 were killed and tens of millions affected by raging floodwaters, and in 1998 major river floods in China and Bangladesh led to misery for literally hundreds of millions of their inhabitants.
Quebec-born Jason Reitman follows up his 2005 TIFF hit “Thank You for Smoking” with “Juno,” a sparklingly spunky romantic comedy about a precocious high school junior (Ellen Page) whose unwanted pregnancy leads her to contact Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, a barren couple desperate to adopt. Whimsical title designs and a painfully precious folk-rock score stress the film’s naked attempt to ape the quirky appeal of “Napolean Dynamite” and “Rushmore,” shamefully marring what is otherwise a cheeky and surprisingly touching story filled with a roster of delightful performances.
