Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

AboveDeepBuggy Some things I liked some I did not.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Censored By-sopa This is just a scare tactic for our less minded drones in MURICA and its working, Josh Fox if your reading this you're stupid read between the lines man ,.!.. ..!., I wonder who is paying you to promote ban Fracking in MURICA, "Russia" comes to mind, I wish I could give it -100 rating but I can't only 1 Bummer!! HEY Josh Fox Do you know you're killing off our farmers by banning fracking, how do you sleep at night knowing gas company that make shell gas can save farmers by leasing their land to them.If you want the other side of the story go watch FrackNation (2013) Documentary, nothing is wrong with fracking at all, WE NEED SHELL GAS IN MURICA know the facts before you agree to Josh Fox and his BULLS$%#! We need Gas Company supporting our FARMERS some are on the brink of closing down!!!This probably isn't going to get post if it does GOOD ON YA IMDb TY!

Dennis Littrell This is a Michael Moore kind of documentary, that is, before he became rich and famous. There's all the down home kind of people being featured and they're fighting, in this case, Big Gas, which means ExxonMobil, Halliburton and various and sundry others. I really don't know enough about the situation to pass judgment on the central accusation of the film, namely that hydraulic fracturing causes long-lasting environmental damage and the poisoning of water supplies. The fact that film maker Josh Fox shows several homes with water that can be set afire at the kitchen sink tap is however a bit disconcerting to say the least.The problem seems to be that the methods used for fracturing employ a number of chemicals that are carcinogenic and, most significantly, there is no way to control the spread of those chemicals to areas around the wells including into the atmosphere. It's clear to me that there is not one executive at ExxonMobil or Halliburton that would want any hydraulic fracturing done anywhere near his home. Not in my backyard or across the street or even several football fields away is the how just about everybody feels about this technique for getting oil and gas economically out rock/shale formations.But there is a lot of money to be made and there is the argument that using such techniques can alleviate our dependence on foreign oil. The amount of natural gas and oil that can be fractured out of the rocks in the United States is enormous with some estimates claiming the supply is over a hundred years at current energy consumption levels. But Josh Fox's point is, at what cost? What personal and environment cost? What this film pinpoints is another example of how the economic interests of a few large corporations trump the lives of countless number of people and how the real environmental and human costs of production are dumped onto the public, especially the public that is our children and our grandchildren to come. The sad fact is that energy is relatively cheap today because the real cost of that energy is being given to coming generations to pay in a kind of Ponzi scheme. Since ExxonMobil, Halliburton, et al., have a shareholder horizon of the next quarter's earnings numbers, it is impossible for them and their execs to give a flying you-know-what about tomorrow's children or the world they will face. The future can take care of itself is the position that they are embracing. Meanwhile they personally are not polluted directly or inconvenienced or made cancerous since they live far, far away from the effects of hydraulic fracturing, and presumably with all the money they are making they can provide for their children and grandchildren to continue to live where they are (relatively) safe from the pollutants that are being expelled.But I have to say that this is not a great documentary. Its budget is obviously quite a bit short of what some other film makers can afford, yet Josh Fox makes his point very well and does a great public service in calling to our attention the dangers associated with hydraulic fracturing. I notice that there is a lot of advertising on television paid for by e.g., ExxonMobil that is trying to make this kind of natural gas and oil production as sweet as Tupelo honey with smiley faces and fields of flowers and greenery in the background. It's nice to see a counter to that, even if the film's budget is probably a fraction of the cost of one ExxonMobil commercial.It is gratifying to note that the positive reviews for this movie greatly outnumber the negative ones. It's clear that the industry's attack team has taken a pass on this one, hoping, I guess that it will go away from lack of interest. Take a look and see why this issue is not likely to go away; in fact I predict another more powerful film to come, which WILL be viciously attacked. Stay tuned.--Dennis Littrell, author of the movie review book, "Cut to the Chaise Lounge of I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!"

sianabrookes1101 I gave this documentary a 5, it really should have had a lot more but sadly the entire documentary was completely ruined by the idiot that held the camera and edited the documentary in such a fashion that made extremely annoying to watch.Almost every shot was ruined by some arty farty attempt to make it look cool by shooting out of focus, colorized, distorted effects. It got to the point that had I not been so interested in the facts of the film, I would have switched it off.It is a fascinating subject that I am sure will come and haunt us in the next few years, especially now that I see Europeans starting to take this dodgy gas extraction method on board. It is extremely frightening to see how the USA has allowed this to go unregulated. Do watch it if you can bare the terrible camera work! A word of advice to those that produced it - Take out your pathetic attempts at trying to be trendy, get rid of your stupid pointless camera effects, just go back and make the video in plain clear footage, it doesn't need to look like an '80's MTV video, it poses some serious questions, make the video watchable!

Spiked! spike-online.com It's a 'game changer'. After years when America's reserves of fossil fuels have been dwindling, an enormous new source of energy has become available: shale gas. Enough exploitable natural gas - 1,000 trillion cubic feet - has been found under states like Pennsylvania to supply US needs for 45 years. In Europe, there are 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. No drilling in deep water, no nasty oil spewing out, and substantially lower carbon emissions than you get from burning coal. Isn't this good news all round?Apparently not. And there has been no higher-profile effort to present the good news about shale gas as a disaster than the documentary Gasland. The film starts at director Josh Fox's home in rural Pennsylvania. A gas company has offered him nearly $100,000 to drill for shale gas on his 19-acre property. That's a nice little payday for basically doing nothing. Should he take the cash?First, a quick explanation of what's different about shale gas. The existence of stores of methane thousands of feet underground locked inside rock has been known about for a long time. What hasn't existed until recent years is the means to exploit these reserves. A pipe is drilled into these gas-containing rocks, then charges are exploded along its length to open up the rock. Then, a mixture of water, sand and a small percentage of chemicals is forced into the rock to open up fissures and free the stored gas. The process is called hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking'.Yet what should be an interesting opportunity to explore some longstanding questions - like what balance we strike between the interests of a relatively small number of rural residents and those of wider society - is missed. It becomes a black-and-white tale of little people against malevolent corporations. By starting from his own situation, Fox might think he is providing human interest, but it felt more like he was saying: 'I've got this rural idyll, how dare you screw it up.' With his smug manner, I was less inclined to sympathise with Fox than fantasise about punching him.The possible problems associated with fracking represent a serious enough story without Fox reaching for hyperbole and scaremongering, but he does that anyway. By throwing up a few liberal dog-whistle ideas - like 'chemicals' and 'Dick Cheney' - Fox tries to turn problems with a new technology that need to be sorted out into a wider suggestion that 'fracking' is fundamentally unsafe. And hey, if you don't care about Fox's water, he throws in the idea that shale-gas drilling could ultimately poison the watershed that supplies New York and New Jersey's water. Scary enough for you now?It would be naive to ignore the fact that energy companies have a trillion-dollar reason to downplay problems related to shale gas. But in many respects, that's as much a consequence of Americans' bad habit of solving every problem by litigation, and a wider culture of risk aversion where anything new is treated with suspicion. In principle, fracking is a safe way of producing energy. Where companies screw up, they should learn the lessons, clean up the problem and compensate those affected.What's missing from Gasland is the equally pertinent observation that environmentalists are desperately trying to find a reason to scare people away from a cheap new source of energy that isn't renewable or zero-carbon. If shale gas takes off, as it seems to be doing, the pressure from scares about 'peak oil' and the dangers of deepwater drilling for energy won't have the same purchase in the public's mind.As one analyst wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year: 'I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionise the industry—and change the world—in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.'For Britain, this debate is now playing out closer to home. In 2010, test drilling started in north-west England on shale gas deposits there. With supplies from the North Sea declining and dependence on gas from overseas growing, a new domestic source of gas would be welcome. Yet there have been calls by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, in a report funded by the Co-operative, to halt work on exploiting these reserves. (The Co-operative is also backing Gasland in the UK.)This seems mad, even in environmental terms. When UK carbon emissions fell in the 1990s, it wasn't because of concern about the climate, but because of the so-called 'dash to gas' as a wave of gas-fuelled power stations were built to replace coal-fired plants. Because gas contains a higher proportion of hydrogen to carbon, burning gas is regarded as 'cleaner' in climate-change terms. Encouraging gas usage would seem like a good way, therefore, of reducing carbon emissions while still getting affordable, reliable energy - something wind, solar and other renewable energy sources are failing to provide right now.Gasland has been nominated for the Oscar for best documentary, much to the gas industry's dismay. Rather like a previous winner of that award, Al Gore's global warming diatribe An Inconvenient Truth, Gasland cranks up alarmism at the expense of a balanced discussion of an important issue.