A Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash [DVD]

Amazon.com While the previous eco-doc Who Killed the Electric Car? spent some time on the world's oil crisis, A Crude Awakening (formerly OilCrash) builds an entire film around the subject. Swiss journalist Basil Gelpke and Irish filmmaker Ray McCormack have constructed their narrative in a conventional manner, alternating between talking heads, archival footage, and modern-day material, but the addition of several pieces by Phillip Glass is an artful touch (and evokes his work on 1988's The Thin Blue Line). Throughout, a diverse array of experts from the U.S., Azerbaijan, Venezuela, and other countries explain how the 20th century became addicted to "the blood of the dinosaurs," and why contemporary society needs to change course. As attorney/activist Matthew David Savinar puts it, "Oil is our God." As Stanford professor Terry Lynn Karl adds, "More and more oil is going to come from less and less stable places...places that actually challenge the taking of oil in the first place." One of the more chilling revelations concerns the discrepancy between the reserves oil-producing nations claim they possess and the actual amount. These padded estimates allow them to drill with impunity, leading to an abundance of wealth in the short term and cataclysmic consequences once they've depleted their supply of this non-renewable resource. A Crude Awakening isn't exactly a day-brightener, but Gelpke and McCormack are comprehensive and impartial in their inquiry, which makes for an informative examination of a vitally important subject. Extras include extended interviews with four participants and bonus chapter Petrostates. --Kathleen C. Fennessy Product Description An unforgettable and shocking wake-up call, A CRUDE AWAKENING offers the rock-solid argument that the era of cheap oil is in the past. Relentless and clear-eyed, this intensively-researched film drills deep into the uncomfortable realities of a world that is both addicted to fossil fuels and blissfully unaware of the looming "peak oil" crisis. Drawing on an international cast of maverick energy experts and thinkers, directors Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack debunk the conventional wisdom that oil production will continue to climb, and instead stare bleakly at a planet facing economic meltdown and conflict over its most valuable resource. Featuring a haunting score by Phillip Glass and a fascinating array of rare archival footage, the film explores oil's rocky relationship with human progress in locales ranging from ancient Baku, Azerbaijan to dusty oilpatch town McCamey, Texas. Amidst a dark and disturbing vision of our future, A CRUDE AWAKENING hints at a humbler way of life built around sustainability and alternative energy, providing a visually stunning, boldly prophetic testament which provokes not just thought but action. Review The best movie I saw at SXSW this year was "OilCrash," a terrific work of investigative journalism-as-film that will scare the living cr*p out of you. Sure, you've read a little about the "peak oil" hypothesis, you disapprove in some theoretical way of the planet's massive (and rapidly worsening) fossil-fuel addiction, you're in favor of alternative energy sources and all that. You may even have the sense that things will get fairly bumpy as we try to develop cheaper solar power or new hydrogen technologies or whatever. Am I right so far? Well, Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack's film paints a vastly grimmer picture than that, and here's the thing. Their sources are not eco-freaks from Vermont or Berkeley in Peruvian clothing, but scientists, financial insiders and retired oil executives, many of them bedrock conservatives. Their message: The era of oil is nearly at an end, and the social and economic consequences are barely imaginable. "I've been doing TV news for a long time," Gelpke, a Swiss television journalist, told me after the premiere. "I'm not easily impressed. But as soon as I started researching this I could tell it was the most important story I had ever come across." Does his electrifying film, which combines a history of the oil industry's boom and bust with well-informed (if dire) speculation about what lies ahead, paint too bleak a picture? Is it really possible that gasoline will cost $75 a gallon in two decades, and that air travel will become a luxury available only to the super-rich? "It's a call to arms," says McCormack, Gelpke's Irish-born directing partner. "In order to have an impact you have to simplify and dramatize, and I'm prepared to defend that. It's only a depressing story if you're afraid to change." "We hope we're wrong," adds Gelpke. "Listen, I've got kids and I love cars. I'd like to keep traveling places. Like almost everybody in the film says, I hope we're wrong. But I don't think we're wrong." Whether or not you buy the doomsday scenario of "OilCrash," it's one of the most important films of the year. A distribution deal should soon be announced. --Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com In case pri
ASIN: B000PY52IG
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