February 6, 2011

GasLand - 2010

Director: Josh Fox


After receiving a letter from a natural gas company with an offer to lease his family's land in Pennsylvania for $100,000, Josh Fox set out to travel the country to learn firsthand about the effects in communities where drilling was already prevalent.


In the 1960s, a lady named Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book on the harmful effects of the pesticide DDT. I hope that enough of the right people to see this so that it can have the same effect for this particular sort of natural gas drilling (hydraulic fracturing), and the use of natural gas altogether if no safer solution is available. I'm all for alternative fuels, but not at the cost painted by this documentary. Now that I'm off my soapbox, this is a pretty good documentary. Fox is able to get his information across without boring the audience (though his narrating tends to drone now and again), and his personal sensibility seeps in from time to time in an almost poetic fashion. For a picture with an agenda, it's a pretty good one. B+

1 comment:

  1. I saw this one a little while back and agree with everything you've said. It was definitely interesting and despite it watching at times similar to what you would expect out of a brother-in-law with a handy cam and a lot of free time, it was pretty enjoyable. I took away something I probably would have never learned or known about otherwise without having seen the film, which is probably all a documentarian can ask for.

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