My first movie wa GasLand, a rather depressing documentary about drilling for natural gas in the US. One of the key points is that the main reason things have reached such a state is that Dick Cheney, as Vice President, managed to get natural gas companies exempted from a variety of acts that would have regulated their environmental impact, and the EPA was directed to ignore them. The fact that some people now have water coming out of their taps that can be set on fire should come as no surprise to anyone. Nor should images of workers covered in toxic chemicals (which their work supervisors assume are fine), or carcinogenic fumes streaming off containers towards schools, or… good grief, just general environmental irresponsibility, caused by the companies knowing that people have to wait until something bad happens before they can sue, and then they have to prove that something bad happened, and most will eventually run out of money or fortitude, and those that don’t can be hit with non-disclosure agreements as part of a settlement if they look like they’re too close to winning; and by the time that any of this even starts to make it’s way through the courts, the people making these decisions inside the company will have already gotten their bonuses for increased profits from their irresponsibility… argh.
I’m actually surprised that there’s a profit in these wells… and perhaps, if the people running them were made to pay for them properly, there wouldn’t be. The film goes into some detail about how much water is used in each well, how much needs to be processed once it’s used, how it’s stored in pits (some of which are unlined) and is sprayed in the air to help evaporation (which also helps evaporate the hundreds of toxic chemicals, but hey, they’re exempt from the Clean Air Act). It also talks about how many truckloads are needed to set up a well, how they’re scattered, untended, throughout public land near Yellowstone Park, and show a congressman who openly admits to being funded by the petroleum industry going into bat for them during a hearing.
This reminded me, in part, of NZ’s recent mining sideshow, although that was at the beginning of this process, rather than an end result such as this film examined. They share the presumption that resources must be used immediately, even though they’re going to become more valuable the longer they sit there, and might never be worth what is destroyed to get them; and the confused thinking that profits are profits, and if there are millions to be made it doesn’t matter who makes them, since money trickles down… except that it doesn’t. The difference in the NZ story is that here they have to make a show of scaling back, so they asked for the moon and then say, okay, we’re listening, we’ll only do the stuff we were going to do anyway, but now you think we’re compromising, and that we listen to you instead of blatantly manipulate you.
One of the problems is that the side that wants to make money already has a bunch of money to spend on making their interests sound like your interests, whereas the people who are passionate enough to care make us uncomfortable, since who knows what a passionate person might do? And anyway, some of them also hold ideas that are obviously bananas, probably go around healing their ferns with macramé crystals, and if one of the gets one thing wrong, there’s obviously something off about anything any of them believe – it stands to reason, or at least to comfortable prejudice.
It’s easy to think that we wouldn’t stand for a Cheney-level of chicanery with our environmental laws; but it’s not as if we don’t have our fair share of toxic sites ourselves, and awkward questions about who should be cleaning them up…
Bah. Anyway, the documentary was pretty good, although you could tell that they didn’t have much of a budget, since there wasn’t the polished graphics, helicopter shots and expensive soundtrack of, say, Inside Job. But the problem that they looked at is a problem that may spread, and I think that it’s really good that it was made, so that communities that this sort of drilling might affect can use it to educate and alert people about what might happen, regardless of the dollars that the drilling companies might dangle.
* * *
I had a nice break (as you can tell from how much I wrote), and then it was off to The Runaways, the mildly fictionalized rock biopic of the aforementioned band. It was bursting with energy – though with the amount of drugs they were shown consuming, I did wonder how they were able to stand up, let alone perform. Their manager was wonderful, prowling around like a hungry velociraptor, dropping pearls of rock wisdom and blatantly ripping off anyone who would stand still long enough for him to get his claws in. The film did a good job in showing the different attitudes that the two leads had towards the music, and if it wasn’t entirely factual, it at least felt true – though you felt by the end that it was a crying shame that Joan Jett never attained the success of, say, Debbie Harry.
(One thing that I regret was that we never got much of an idea of the other three members of the band, since I spotted some actors that I’ve enjoyed watching before; but you’ve only got a certain amount of time, which means you can only fit in so much story. Also, I read somewhere that one of them had was a replacement character, since there were potential legal issues about depicting the real one.)
I enjoyed the film, and I’m thinking about looking around for some of the original music.
* * *
24 Carat was an enjoyable crime film, with the action centred around the capable car-jacking daughter of a fence with big dreams and bad luck, and a debt-collecting former boxer with a son and trouble from his bosses wife. Together, They Fight Crime! No, wait…
It had tension, and plenty of places where I wasn’t sure which way things would go. Essentially, it was about trust and betrayal — who you trusted, and whether you deserved trust given to you. I enjoyed it.
* * *
My last film was also in the Paramount Bergman theatre, which gets quite stuffy if there’s a full house. The oppressive atmosphere was appropriate for Ajami, a gritty Middle Eastern street-level movie which starts with a boy being killed by two men riding by on a motorcycle. It turns out that they thought he was the nephew of a cafe owner, who killed someone from their clan when they came in shooting an AK47 trying to extort protection money. There is a lot of this in the movie, quite cleverly done – they will show something happening, usually violent, and then show the reason that it happened, jumping back and forth in time as necessary. And when the story gets back to the event you’ve already seen, seeing it from a different angle sometimes shows something different about the event.
In some cases, you can tell the actors are non-professional, but the culture is alien enough that this generally doesn’t matter; in fact, it adds to the documentary feeling. I didn’t spot that one of the families involved was Christian until it was stated outright quite late in the film, but it’s possible I missed something.
The fact that family is intrinsic here, and that bad luck or bad judgement on the part of one member of the family can result in tragedy for any or all other family members is a strong message. Another is that you act according to the information you have, filtered by your prejudices and assumptions, and amplified by the emotion you feel, so in an atmosphere of racial hatred, revenge, fear, and a culture of not backing down, tragedies won’t just occur, they’ll tend to multiply.
(Also, the problem with having a system where feuds can be settled with blood money means that there’s a perverse incentive to provoke and escalate, if you’re a large enough family in a strong position, but that’s a minor point.)
Anyway, despite some flaws, I enjoyed it. Possibly not enough to seek it out again, though.
2 Comments