David Cronenberg, eat your heart out. Richard Curtis, the writer who brought us romantic comedies like Notting Hill and Love Actually, just upped the ante for exploding human beings with a new short film made for the 10:10 environmental campaign called No Pressure. In a nutshell: those refusing to go green, including school children, football players and Gillian Anderson, are blown up by environmentalists. Yep. The movie (which really is hilarious) has been pulled from the 10:10 website and plans to distribute it in cinemas have been canceled. Check out the film and the rest of the story after the jump.
Public outrage predictably stemmed from all of the exploding people, especially the school children (who everybody especially hates to see blow up). 10:10 pulled the video after key backers including the charity ActionAid said they were "appalled" by the film. 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid filmmaker Franny Armstrong doesn't seem so sorry though.
"Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody's existence on this planet? Clearly we don't really think they should be blown up, that's just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?"
"We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure - a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change," she adds."
Alright, but even Rolland "destroy everything" Emmerich spared us the sight of dying school children in his pro-green parables (though that big wave in The Day After Tomorrow must have wiped at least some out). And in terms of message delivery, I'm not sure that showing environmentalists blowing up skeptics is the best way to galvanize support from opponents of the cause.
Still, Curtis is just taking slapstick to its natural extreme a la Monty Python, and in that context, this short is pretty hilarious. Obviously it's NSFW, but with all the, ahem, pressure on companies to "go green" these days, just tell your boss it's an environmental PSA and I'm sure it will be fine.