And the winner is...? Sadly, not the paying public for Josh Fox’s ludicrous Gasland – whether or not the Oscar-voting Hollywood panel are taken in by it. Well-crafted and amusingly presented Gasland is, by turns, dramatic, eloquent, congenial and emotional. But then so is Sesame Street. Call me old-school, but I look for context, balance and, above all, hard facts in my documentaries. Gasland has neither of the first two, and precious little of the third.
Gasland treads the same fear-inducing path of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. It presents a simplistically stark contrast between the pristine wilderness (where our intrepid self-proclaimed hippie film-maker lives) and the dark mutilated moonscape (where ‘evil’ Big Gas is slowly poisoning natural water resources). As with Gore’s power-point ‘epic’ – later ripped apart in the factual stakes by a British high court judge – Gasland loses credibility from the start, as Debunking Gasland, a rebuttal report from Energy in Depth, on behalf of the nation’s gas and oil producers, revealed last summer.
