FUEL opens this weekend, free tickets
September 15th, 2009
I’ve been writing so much about Fuel that you’d think I was working on the film’s marketing team. The truth is, I’m just a huge fan. I’ve seen a lot of enviro-documentaries this year — Food, Inc., The Cove, Earth Days — and all are brilliant and world-changing in their own right. But none has the power to immediately impact what I believe is the most urgent environmental issue of our time, and that’s our dependence on fossil fuels.
Global warming. Peak oil. The war(s) in Iraq. We can shop at farmers markets and change light bulbs from here to tomorrow, but we don’t have the luxury of time to educate an entire global generation in the ways of sustainable living. We need a true technological breakthrough — an energy revolution — and this film has answers.
Fuel opens this Friday, and we’re giving away free sets of (2) theater tickets to the first two NYC/San Francisco/Berkeley readers to leave a comment here. And for those not quick enough to the draw the first time around, we’ve got some some other fun Fuel giveaways for the first two people to comment after seeing the film.
–Jennifer Grayson
Do this now: See Fuel this weekend (purchase tickets here), and spread the word to your friends and family. Not playing near you? Click here to help bring the film to a theater in your area.
Related post:
WATCH: FUEL filmmakers unveil the Algaeus
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September 15th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
The movie sounds interesting. Thanks for the blog post. Am I the first to leave a comment?
September 15th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
I am interested in this movie and might be able to get others to go. When is it showing in NYC?
October 2nd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I thought the film was pretty good. I learned a lot about bio fuels and thought he had an important message. However, there were many ways that I felt it could have been strengthened.
First, I thought he lacked a thesis. He talked about bio fuel, environmental degradation in Louisiana, Iraq, 9/11, etc. I felt he needed to more clearly state a central thesis such as: we are dependent on foreign oil and it is in our national interest to use alternate fuels, such as bio fuels; further, the petrochemical industry is polluting our environment and affecting climate change and human health. Then he could have used the invasion of Iraq to support his argument for how depending on oil is not in our self-interest. I felt that his treatment of 9/11 and Iraq was in some ways off message, and veered too much into the emotional side, away from supporting an argument. There was also the part about miscarriages in Louisiana, which again, I felt distracted from the main point and did not support a thesis. If he wanted to include the part about women having miscarriages, he should have provided scientific evidence of a correlation between the petrochemical industry and miscarriages. Instead, he used anecdotal evidence, which I found to be a distraction.
Second, at the end he used the “barrel of oil example” where he visually broke the barrel down into other things we could do to conserve energy. While I liked the idea of what he did, I felt that he tried to do too much, and in doing so he did some things less well than others. For example, he mentioned those trees that grow back in 3 years and the skyscraper garden, but just touched on them and moved on. In some ways, this breadth of his movie was good bc it’ll get information out there and get people thinking and asking questions. But on the other hand, I feel like the breadth took away from his ability to produce a central message.
My final criticism, and probably the most important one at that is that he did not provide any counterarguments to his proposals. He briefly talked about how the criticisms against bio fuels were unfounded, but he did not address any of the engineering and environmental tradeoffs. There is no such thing as a free lunch, so what are the trafeoffs? I guess my main criticism regarding this point is that he made it seem like there are so many easy fixes, such as using bio fuels instead of oil and building skyscraper sized gardens. If it’s really only the oil companies preventing this progress, I felt he should have more strongly stated that. If there are other hurdles in the way of progress, what are they? I felt that by not addressing opposing viewpoints, environmental and engineering tradeoffs, and by using Hollywood actors he opened himself up to criticisms.
All that being said, I really enjoyed the film, learned a lot, recommend it to friends and hope it has a big impact. I liked the content, but think it could have been organized differently to have a bigger impact.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:21 am
The movie is much needed and on point with energy being such a hot topic today. Energy, specifically energy production and transmission dictate how it will be used. The film makes a solid argument that too many people are consumed with the idea that it is the other way around; that function dictates transmission and production. While this is partly true, it is becoming increasingly more important for us to forge ahead and build infrastructure that supports more sustainable ways of producing, storing, and using energy.
While I agree with the general message of the film towards the end that there is no one solution, it would be even more powerful if the film as a whole were more concrete. While it was meaningful to someone like me who is already aware of the problem and the possible solutions, it is not necessarily effective for someone that these issues are new to see the several tangents in the film such as the directors past and the Iraq war. While these issues are related, they are too big to fold into a film like this. The film should either be broad and without specifics, or have specifics and not touch on as many subjects as it does. The film bites of too many large chunks and renders it less effective as a result. There is allot of really good material in the film. Perhaps breaking the film down into parts and creating separate films for each topic would be more effective.
As a whole I applaud the effort and message of the film.