User Reviews

Allow me to alleviate your initial trepidation. "GasLand" is not another documentary about the oil industry. You're on the right track, but first-time feature director Josh Fox has his sights set not on the gas you pump into your car, but the so called "natural gas" extracted from beneath your feet through the process of hydraulic fracturing known colloquially as "fracking."

Issue films, like "Food, Inc." or "An Inconvenient Truth" are notoriously dry, and Fox takes a welcome page from the Michael Moore book of documentary film-making, without the hard leftist political grandstanding. Rather, he adopts the format of painting himself a protagonist of sorts, though more justifiably than Moore. "GasLand" begins with an intimate history of the Fox family and their home, which lies just off of an artery to the Delaware River.

Positioned above the Marcellus Shale, a subterranean formation that stretches from New York through Pennsylvania to Virginia, and as far west as Ohio, the Fox home receives a lease offer for their land, a constituent slice of what energy companies have dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas," and so Fox embarks for some first hand reconnaissance on the communities already tapped by hydraulic fracturing, and his findings are nothing short of alarming.

The chemicals used in the fracking process seep into the soil and water supply, leaving many families with bizarre aberrations like flammable tap water. Uh oh. And as Fox makes his way across the country, into dozens of areas crippled by decade-past drilling efforts, he collects bottles of yellow-brown water like postcards in some macabre travel diary.

If there is a problem with "GasLand," it's that as a story, it becomes a little redundant as we watch family after family set fire to their sinks, but perhaps all the more resonant for it. From a film-making standpoint, the effect is marginalized, but in making something so shocking feel almost normal, Fox underscores the breadth of the issue. This is happening everywhere, and with such clear evidence of the immediate health hazards, the question is, why?

Fox's intimate approach and genuine stake in the issue is "GasLand's" greatest asset. He never has to rely on talking heads or PowerPoint presentations, and even at nearly two hours, the film is positively gripping. His story comes full circle as he returns home, faced with the "speculative" fracking of the Delaware watershed, which provides water to rural towns, suburbs, and cities. The implication is truly disquieting, and Fox can only ask that the public make themselves aware of the issue and take a stand before it's too late.

His film is an excellent place to start, and manages to entertain while outlining the severity of the problem, and to do so without an over-reliance on the pitfalls of so many of its contemporaries. "GasLand" is just about everything you could hope for from a documentary of its type, and its Sundance special jury prize is testament to its impact.

The film has yet to see general release, but a distribution deal is reportedly immanent. Interested parties can join the mailing list and watch a potent 15 clip at www.gaslandthemovie.com.

Ignore that initial trepidation. "GasLand" isn't another documentary about the oil industry, but it's just as important, if not more so.

This movie was very informative. I live above the Marcellus Shale in NYS and drilling hasn't started yet but there's a lot of support for it, primarily because our rural areas are financially strapped and lots of cash is being promised by the drilling companies. I think this movie should be required viewing before anyone signs a gas lease. If our groundwater and the environment becomes contaminated, it has the potential to not only harm those living in the region but the entire watershed, which involves millions of people in NYC, Philadelphia, NJ and DC. New York and Pennsylvania better get it right or there will be massive amounts of people facing potentially life threatening illnesses.

I liked the way Mr. Fox laid out the film. He used interviews, visits to drilling sites and he didn't grandstand to get the viewer's attention. I get the impression that this is his first film and he's to be commended for such a comprehensive and informative documentary. He's performed a great service to the region; I just hope it's viewed by many. Those who see it need to become proactive and write their elected representatives to assure that safeguards are required and that they are enforced - or the drilling should not be done.

Thank you Mr. Fox.

I learned a lot watching this movie. I guess I thought gas just came out of the ground without much effort -- kind of like farts! But no. Lots of chemicals involved, lots of semi trucks and a true raping of the land with horrific byproducts for the nearby residents to breathe, drink and live (and die) with. Makes me want to get off natural gas altogether. Or at least drastically limit my use.

This was a informative, well done documentary. Not nearly as much overt sarcasm as Michael Moore, lots of information (on the screen, in print people!) and a bit of irony and humor to sweeten the swallowing of such disturbing information. This was an important piece of film. Everyone in America who uses natural gas to heat their home, hot water heater, range or grill should see this.

This film is a much needed warning about the unsafe conditions around hydraulic fracturing. Anyone who doesn't see that clearly is obviously making money on hydraulic fracturing! Can we learn nothing from the current poisoning of the ocean due to unsafe practices in oil drilling? These companies only concern is profit- at all cost. As this film demonstrates and the current events show- poisoning the world around them is an acceptable risk for maximum profit. If not, why would they continue to campaign for the hydraulic fracturing (or Fracking) of the Marcellus Shale? (and the rest of the United States...)

Fracking is especially dangerous for New York City because the city gets its water from the Adirondacks. Currently, fracking is not allowed in the NYC watershed part of the Marcellus Shale which stretches from upstate NY to Tennessee. In addition to the problems with toxic chemicals injected into the ground with fracking, the Marcellus Shale is radioactive so that waste from fracking contains low levels of radioactivity.

I would love to see those reviewers trying to debunk this film drink the water coming from the faucets of so many homes shown in the film. Water that is flammable straight from the sink! Authorities defending fracking as harmless refuse to drink the water offered them in the film and so would those narrow minded negative reviewers. (Or should I say profiteering propagandists... what's your day rate for writing these reviews?)

Wind and sunlight is free and can be harnessed to produce the energy we need to keep the world moving without poisoning our water and air. Let's suck it up and make a change! It will take money and time and mean less profit for some but there is a bigger picture to consider.

Call Albany and ask them to not poison New York's drinking water by supporting the Englebright/Adabo bill. The number is 518-455-2800.

Give the operator your zip code and she'll transfer you to your senator's office

Tell them you'd like him or her to advocate for the Englebright/Adabo bill. The deadline is June 25th or close to it!

Politicians constantly use the word terrorism as a license to do whatever they want. I believe those politicians who support this behavior are actually accomplices to some of the most outrageous terrorist activity against the American people! If the Taliban were poisoning our water would we not do something about it? But when a corporation poisons the water government heads look the other way? for the almighty dollar? WAKE UP! STAND UP! DO SOMETHING!

This is perhaps one of the most shocking and disturbing films I've seen and the fact that it's all real is even more terrifying. The film follows Josh Fox who has been offered a vast amount of money by those who wish to drill on his land for natural gas. Concerned about the after effect he goes in search of some details.

What he finds is so utterly disturbing and sad and that being huge amounts of people whose health and welfare have been effected by natural gas drilling in their back yard. The industry is enormous and the amount of gas sites are in the hundreds of thousands some are even on 'public land'. People across much of the central USA have them in their back yards, tanks, drills, containers and various other pieces of industry, small to some comparison but still a blot on the landscape. But aesthetics are far from the worse of concerns.

The drilling for gas creates water contamination with a huge cocktail of chemicals seeping into drinking wells, streams and lakes. What was for years safe, whole areas are so full of chemical concoctions that in some instances if you hold a lit flame to a water source it erupts into flames. People have become sick due to the high quantities of dangerous and hazardous chemicals, pets and farm animals lose their hair and yet the companies involved do tests and say the water is safe to drink.

Watching these people is distressing, living on the land, with generations of history they are now powerless to do anything as the companies refuse to acknowledge the issue. They would also unlikely to sell up as no-one would buy a property with a great big well in the back yard, let alone if they knew the issues that come with it. That the US government, thanks to Dick Cheney, signed a law that made the companies exempt from the Clean Water Bill among others is shocking, had it been otherwise, this may not be happening.

There is some powerful stuff in this: the list of trucks it takes to actually make a natural gas well or the list of long complex chemical compounds used and found. There is the third generations farmer who is at a loss of what to do seeing the land around him change in the worse way possible. It is relentless, with person after person speaking about the effects, illness's, chemical clouds, explosions in the middles of the night and more that they now suffer. Independent tests show that water samples are so full of chemicals or that air samples are so dangerously over the recommended levels it's hard to imagine the ongoing consequences.

The film does at last show a glimmer of hope that being a small selection of activists and politicians making a stand and trying to stop what has happened in many parts of the US happening in those untouched. Near the end we see a congressional hearing in which some of the big companies spokespeople are brought down in a few simple questions, their denial that there is a risk, blatant lies which are not received well.

There is mention that despite the US setting there is relevance to Australia, indeed world wide. You can only hope that more people will see this film. My only gripe is the camera work, which at times is so bad, it's like a 5yr old was operating the camera. Otherwise this is powerful, shocking and moving stuff.

More of my review at my site iheartfilms.weebly.com

I've watched many documentaries and I've appreciated almost all of them. They are usually wake up calls to the public. They inform people, like myself, of harms or dangers we were not aware of. A good documentarian will be that thorn in the side of governments, corporations, or otherwise as they dig and dig to uncover the hidden truth.

Josh Fox wanted to do that here. He wanted to uncover the truth about hydraulic fracturing aka fracking for natural gas. Fracking is a process of drilling and using a high pressure chemical water mixture to release natural gas from where it's deposited in the Earth's crust. The energy companies claim that fracking has no negative impact upon water sources, about a few dozen people that Josh spoke to will say differently. He showed brown water, yellow water, and water that was flammable--yes! Flammable. All of the water came from the wells or drinking sources for regular folks.

The material of "Gasland" was excellent. The narration of the documentary was not. Josh's low, barely audible, monotone voice didn't exactly make one's ears perk up in attention. Perhaps he should've borrowed from the Michael Moore style of lively comedic sarcasm to keep the audience awake. It's clear that Josh was a novice at this documentary thing, so I'll give him a pass.

All reviews on this movie comes in at 8-10 except for the previous 2 which must be from a congressman & a gas company exec. Visit http://www.energyindepth.org/2010/06/debunking-gasland if you would like to waste your time on supposed studies to debunk common sense or otherwise do what the documentary suggests in the first place, "Research" make up your own mind. Thousands of gas wells all around the country, Each created by fracturing the ground(in every sense of the word)thereby releasing the gas into absolutely everything? sounds good to me were can i sign up. People with education & common sense(which seems to have been killed off by greedy politicians or bankers whatever you choose to call them)need to stand together & act. A thousand voices won't help even 10 000 is not enough, but it is a start & when people start coming together in their hundreds & thousands thats when change will come but only then.

Greetings again from the darkness. This is Josh Fox's Oscar nominated documentary on the effects of natural gas drilling known as fracking. The film deserves your attention because it is a frightening look at how huge companies and the government can work in conjunction on projects that clearly put citizens at risk. I realize that last sentence sounds like Chicken Little yelling "conspiracy", but the details of the film will give you pause.

Can you light your tap water on fire? If so, chances are good that you are within range of natural gas drilling. Our government somehow agreed to allow this practice to remain exempt from the clean air and clean water laws. If brown water comes out of your faucet, then you already know what I am talking about.

Mr. Fox is from Pennsylvannia and that's where the story begins. He is concerned about his neighbors, the environment and our drinking supply. Clearly an enormous amount of chemicals are used in this drilling process. Clearly these chemicals seep into the wetlands and water supply of neighboring areas. Clearly too many people are looking the other way. The only thing not clear? The water near these drilling sites.

No mystery why this is allowed. The almighty dollar. It is cheaper for these companies to "pay off" the backwoods citizens than it is to not drill. Not sure how you decide the payoff when your kids are being poisoned and the damage to the water sources continues.

The film itself is a bit amateurish and sometimes the camera work is downright awful. But the point here is not to make a beautiful film. It is to educate ... to awaken people on just what is at stake with these dangerous procedures and lack of regulation and safety requirements.

The most painful piece was when the EPA executive was interviewed and he said that his agency must be directed by the government to check into allegations made by citizens. They have no authority to move on their own. If this is true, it's just one more instance of a bass-ackwards policy that needs to be reviewed. I encourage everyone to see this. If they aren't drilling in your area currently, it won't be long now.

Throughout this documentary I kept thinking about the endless whining Republicans engage in when they're asked to protect the environment, as if money is vastly more important than anything that's ever existed on the Earth.

These pollution scenarios can be laid at the feet of the Bushes, Cheneys, Limbaughs, Becks, Hannitys, Palins, Blankenships and other greediots who treat nature like a dumping ground, often citing "God's plan" as an excuse. How do people get so sick in the head that they think money is more important than life itself? These are the same parasites who keep claiming that global warming is a hoax, or the ozone hole was never a problem. Will we ever get that garbage out of the human gene pool?

The message in this film is a powerful one, and goes well beyond the specific issue of "fracking" to cover any enterprise that disturbs nature on a large scale. The sheer footprint of drilling operations on the physical landscape is another depressing angle, almost as bad as the water and air pollution. You can easily see these rigs and access roads in satellite photos. The rapidity of their deployment is changing the map daily. Thanks, Bush & Cheney for your "wise use" loopholes that may never be fully closed.

The human flood seems destined to grow until it consumes every possible acre that can satiate gluttony (temporarily). Wind turbines are no exception, even though they wear a "green" mantle. Future plans for endless construction will turn non-industrialized acreage into an old curiosity. That's "progress" by the standard growthist definition. Leave no "productive" land untouched. I can see national parks being ringed by the sights and odors of drilling rigs, leaving no real place to escape to. It's already encroaching on the Tetons.

The only weakness of this documentary was the shaky, often poorly focused camera work, though it worked to exaggerate the grim mood and some of it seemed intentional. Pro cameraman or not, Mr. Fox had guts in making this piece and is to be highly commended.

Still, I was left with the sick feeling that legislation will never fully decontaminate these activities because so many people are basically evil.

'GASLAND': Three and a Half Stars (Out of Five)

One of the five films nominated for best documentary at the upcoming Academy Awards, this film focuses on homes effected by natural gas drilling around the United States. After director Josh Fox received a letter from a major energy company offering a large amount of money ($100,000) to lease his land, in order to drill for gas on it, Fox decided to investigate the matter and began filming a documentary about it. He serves as director, writer, narrator and cinematographer on the film. It's only his second movie (following another documentary from 2008 titled 'MEMORIAL DAY') and it's garnered outstanding critical appraise and awards kudos.

The film focuses on a hydraulic drilling method recently developed to dig up gas from the ground called "fracking". The film primarily focuses on how this process effects the water around it and people, land and animals exposed to it. Fox travels around the country to places like Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Texas. He meets people at their homes and interviews them on how their lives have been effected by the drilling. Many have health problems, their animals are sick and in one of the most notorious scenes from the movie a man is able to light his water on fire directly from the faucet using a cigarette lighter.

The film is shocking and disturbing but it also contains some beautiful cinematography of nature at it's best in contrast. I've read several rebuttals to claims the film makes but I've also read rebuttals to those rebuttals and it kind of just comes down to who seems like a more trustworthy source of information: big business looking only out for their own best interests or common home owners and other citizens looking out for the environment and people's safety. The film is for the most part very informative and interesting. It gets a little slow paced at times and the way the information is delivered isn't usually in the most entertaining or engaging way possible but it is educational none the less. Fox is an admirable filmmaker and has some charisma but he's got a lot to learn about making an entertaining and engrossing film. Even so the movie gets it's message across and it's an important one.

Watch our review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYO6EVQKyVs

This documentary shows how corporate greed, without any concern for anything other than making a profit, is destroying one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world: the United States.

As another reviewer said, it's not about gas as in gasoline, but about how oil and gas companies are polluting the environment through a process called hydraulic fracturing, used in the extraction of natural gas.

The film is filled with unmistakable and undeniable evidence that this process is in fact forever altering not only the landscape in several states, but also their wild life as well as the health of regular individuals permanently. The images and testimonies shown will blow you away and you'll come out with a very different awareness level on what it means to be "enviromentally conscious".

I found it really gut-wrenching and I guarantee you you won't be able to get through to the end of it without wanting to go and do something about it.

We've seen in a number of different films how powerful industries will do anything to protect their interests and keep people quiet about their lies and methods for keeping the general public deceived about what they really do. What's really striking here is that is happening for real, in congress, and not in a movie.

The other aspect I found really positive is that the filmmaker tried hard to remain as objective as possible, which is more than I can say about any Michael Moore documentary.Everyone is given a chance to tell their part of the story and the audience is left to decide what to make of everything being said and shown.

I highly recommend it. You'll need a strong constitution to get through it; it's not for the faint of heart. But it'll be a very rewarding experience and hopefully one that will make you cringe every time you see a gas drill across your front yard.

This intellectually, emotionally engaging - and draining documentary is as valid an valuable as A CRUDE AWAKENING, which in itself is as (all the above) solid as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH... and perhaps literally Earth shattering.... Dense with startling truths from ordinary folk and their sad discoveries of the bad hot water in which they now seem to reside, the finger of guilt is again firmly pointed at the Darth Vader of the Bush Administration: DICK CHEYNEY and his Halliburton Evil Empire. GASLAND is an environmental document of disgust and horror and it needs a strong constitution to get thru it... as probably as strong as those living it. Well worth seeing and discussing in the light of the tar pit America and her politics and business pillage find itself all in, GASLAND is a keen film for High School and University students to challenge the business of reality. It is also a well edited reaction to the mindset that asks why America cannot be self sufficient and finds the country plundering every square inch of wilderness in a fossil fuel finding frenzy... one that might allow it to kiss the Middle East oil habit goodbye... but an answer that sees the country burn it's future to cheaply buy the gas to get the SUV to MacDonalds. GASLAND is a good documentary. Startling and full of ordinary facts that allow credibility to simply present itself and make you so glad you do not live there. I live in Australia. Thank God.

"Gasland" is loaded with misinformation about a decades-old, proved-safe technique that has been used over a million times in the USA (with virtually no adverse environmental effects).

Gasland is pure propaganda. For a comprehensive exposure of this fact, watch the documentary "FrackNation" by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney.

To qualify as a "documentary" a film should at least attempt to honestly present its subject. "Gasland" does exactly the opposite. It's blatantly dishonest.

"Gasland" is a crock - a crockumentary.

I worked on the Marcellus Shale and can honestly say that the documentary is incredibly accurate. It's too bad that he doesn't cover the incidents such as the truck drivers who died from errant sparks from flashlights looking into their tankers, or the frac tank that blew and killed a man in Armstrong County PA, or the "water treatment" facility that burned to the ground when drip gas (about 1%-3%) of the production water pulled from the pits ignited the storage tanks in New Castle PA around Sept of 08 or 09 that committed insurance fraud to get the plant rebuilt, or the plant that exploded in Youngstown several months later for the same reason. I just hope Gasland 2 covers the CMU report about the increased levels of brine from 34 municipalities NOT set up to treat the production water discharging directly into the Ohio River watershed that leads all the way to the Gulf, and when treated with chlorination, the chemicals turn into carcinogenic bromides. And the "Bio's" methanes which are freed up and sent to the surface from the drilling and fracking process and not necessarily from water well drilling. Funny how a well can produce fresh water for decades until the land is fractured, and all of the sudden its the water well's fault. I have a relative who is a lawyer for the industry and admits 3-4% of the concrete lined wells fail. It just takes one! You know, like BP Horizon was just ONE!

Gasland effectively conveys how serious the threat to the environment is from fracking without confusing the viewer with complex statistics. The facts and figures it does contain are presented in ways that allow the viewer to fully digest what the implications are while also capturing the audience's attention as the facts associated with environmental risks of fracking would astonish any viewer. The visual aid that a documentary brings is also helpful in encouraging the audience to have a specific point of view. It allows the viewer to witness firsthand the environmental effects that fracking is having, such as water contamination, land destruction, alteration of the geological formations and aesthetically displeasing drilling pads. Visual evidence is extremely powerful at convincing the viewer of what is fact, Josh Fox uses this to his advantage by providing recordings, from numerous households, of tap water being lit on fire after a fracking drilling pad caused a contamination in the water source. The style that the documentary is made in (a road trip diary) lets the viewer become immersed in the story, as though they are travelling with Fox on this adventure through South America. It allows them to experience the interest, shock and devastation that Fox goes through in this documentary, connecting the audience to the issue of fracking on an emotional level. The interview aspect of the documentary portrays the personal experience of those affected by fracking and of those associated with the process, which builds confidence in the viewer that the information they are gaining is genuine.

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.

Provided with much details on the fracking of the oil industry and much opinions on the subject, GasLand succeeded of trying to inform the audience yet entertain them at the same time.

Although laws have been passed to get rid of this issue, hydraulic drilling is still a concern for people in the certain states. This documentary sets in Pennsylvania, a state in which a lot of people are drinking dirty water because of this crisis. Josh Fox directs and narrates the film with a devastating voice and real emotions. The audience were shocked by the reality and entertained by the burning water. GasLand is the better documentaries of the year.

OscarBuzz: Best Documentary (good chance of making it to the top 5)

Recently I saw GasLand, a documentary directed by Pennsylvanian born Josh Fox, who also stars in and narrates the film, as it follows his cross country trek through neighborhoods and small towns of America, which, after greedy gas and oil companies have drilled near their land, have had their water tanks and wells mixed in with natural gas that poisons them (Some can even light their kitchen sinks on fire), and those who have been prolonged to the contaminated water for extended periods of time have suffered devastating bodily harm.

I liked this movie, but it still has faults. One of the slight issues I had with the film is that it got pretty repetitious at points, and the film is also very dense in exploration. Not exactly a huge problem, but anyone who isn't giving the film their strict concentration from the word "Go" may find it hard to keep up. On an aesthetic level, it also looks amateurish. Still, it's an admirable piece of education, and a great first step into documentaries for Fox.

What he lacks in professional documentation, he makes up for with his footage, and his priorities. He gets his facts straight and neatened, and occasionally provides a tickling joke or two. And the film's final ten minutes is an inventively shot and edited sequence, and one of the sole standouts as well. The film's audio is also fine tuned, specifically coming equipped with a toe tapping banjo and fiddle score.

And while amateurish, I have to commend Fox for sticking to his guts. Not everyone can make a great first documentary, but he provides something thought provoking, and a film that's completely sure of itself, both in tone and in presentation.

**1/2 out of ****

It is happening all across America -- rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property.

We see natural gas leaking into water wells, turning it colors and making people sick. The film shows a horse, cat and person with hair missing from drinking the water. By far the most visual part is when various residents are able to light their tap water on fire. Burning water? Seems impossible, yet there it is.

What to make of this? The strongest critics say it is a fraud, but there is more than enough evidence to show this is an accurate film. And yet, we cannot just stop producing gas and other forms of energy -- it would cripple the nation. What do we do? It seems that we need to find a safer way...

Viewed at the Festival du Film, Cannes 2010

There are times when a documentary can be more dramatic and gripping than many a feature film and Josh Fox's Gasland is one such documentary. Offered $100,000 to let a natural gas company do some exploratory drilling on his land, Fox sets out to investigate just what's involved and opens an ecologically nightmarish Pandora's box.

Basically, the gas companies use a process called hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") to crack open the underlying rock strata and release the natural gas. This involves pumping in a chemical cocktail of great toxicity and where nature has a way...

Fox and his sometimes wobbly camera then travels around the country, meeting people whose lives and health have been irreparably damaged. He might play the effect one or two times more than is needed since we've got the point by then, but being able to set light to your drinking water is not a benefit! And the mud brown chemical concoction coming out of the tap is not something you would wish to drink anyway.

Unlike Michael Moore, whose preaching has become a turn off, Fox is laid back, non- dramatic, letting people tell their stories. The calm, matter of fact narrations add even greater drama to the story. These are ordinary people whose lives have been destroyed.

With the natural gas industry in full hue and cry after greater profits, the lawyers riding their coattails sorting out the settlements, compensation and gagging clauses, Fox is a lonely voice but his quiet resolution makes him even more worth listening to.

To those reviewers who really do seem to be paid flacks for the gas industry, I am not a socialist, do not hug trees, do not dislike capitalism, I am a guy who loves watching films and being moved by them. If you can watch Gasland and can come out still thinking life is wonderful and nobody has anything to be worried about here, then you need to look to your conscience, because we all should be very concerned indeed.

Gasland is another shocking documentary that exposes corporate greed in America at the expense of the health , lifestyle and well-being of the common hard working citizen.

These families are at severe risk because of energy firms who are drilling for gas on their land , yet , as you would expect from these evil companies , they deny the harm they are doing. The scenes are amazing. Because of the gas Fracking ( a term for underground gas exploration) these people have water coming out of their taps so contaminated they can set fire to it! The water is all different colours , it smells of fuel and worst of all it makes people very sick.

While this film is shocking , it lacks the balls required to expose these people. The documentary maker does not take on the bosses as hard as he should and he's voice is extremely dull.

I felt this movie wasn't finished and i would have liked to have seen a " Michael Moore" style expose instead of the weak way Josh Fox went about things.

Gasland is informative and it makes you angry but as a film , it's a bit monotone.

Another bullsh*t payed for by Russian Gasprom in order to kill the competition lol

Who will benefit (cui prodest) - and that is the question.

In a major scope, not just our internal stupid wars on oil

And the beneficiary is Russian gas giant.

Which actually payed for the production of this "documentary"

It is sad to see that people are so ready to consume any nonsense.

Without even attempting to research the issue. There has been an answer to this propaganda.

The movie is called Thruthland

If you want to consider yourself objective and informed - watch it.