'Tis the season

I mean pre-Oscar season, of course. There are suddenly more good movies out there than I can possibly find time to see.

But I decided to give it the ol' yuppie try by starting with An Inconvenient Truth, which I always meant to see but wound up reading about and discussing instead; and Babel, the kind of film I have to get in a certain mindset to appreciate. Movies are escapism, after all, and it's usually more relaxing to escape to the mind of Christopher Guest or yet another English romantic comedy than face our self-destructive world head-on, with surround sound.

Maybe it was the real winter weather California decided to have over the weekend, but my mood was right. Bring on the politics.

I'll spare you plot summaries and pithy reviews. The gist: They're both important films, well worth your time and money. Here are a few things they made me think about.

The stats of doom from An Inconvenient Truth have been publicized enough that they didn't shock me, but seeing them onscreen did drive them home. In case you haven't heard, we're decimating our environment. Insanely quickly. Oh yes we are. Time for serious policy changes and personal changes. Write a letter to your representative, check your tire pressure, recycle everything, buy some compact fluorescent bulbs, get elected to Congress. Now, please.

While you're at it, get Al Gore to teach you PowerPoint—I had no idea how awesome it could be in the right hands.

The lessons in Babel were more subtle. They went something like this: The smallest action can become vital and dangerous, both for what it causes and how it's interpreted. Never assume that justice is clear-cut or forthcoming. Our immigration laws are a gigantic mess that ruins the lives of good people daily. Don't take E and then go to a Tokyo nightclub, especially if your self-esteem is already shaky.

And I still can't decide whether I'd rather go blind or deaf, if I had to choose. Both losses seem inestimable—but nowhere near as desperate as a single life can be, if any one of a million circumstances makes it so.