At the Movies

After a corrupt Congressional electoral committee declared Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 presidential election, Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate and the actual winner of the election, left politics and, as Gore Vidal delicately put it, "retired to private life and to the pleasures of what old-time New Yorkers used to recall, wistfully, as one of the greatest collections of pornography in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan." One hundred and twenty-four years later, after watching the Republican appointed majority of the Supreme Court make Republican George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate and the actual winner of the election, also left politics. But unlike Tilden– and despite the great advances in porn in the past century– Al Gore did not retire to private life. He's remained active, fighting several good fights, most notably one against global warming.

Gore's movie on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth– the surprise hit of both Cannes and Sundance, which is now pulling in a per screen average that makes X-Men III's box office take look anemic– opens today in OC. It's showing in Irvine (University), Laguna Niguel (Rancho Niguel), and Newport Beach (Island).