Joe Berlinger's "Crude"E. "Doc" Smithbyline‚ Sep. 25‚ 2009Yesterday, San Francisco's Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force released their much anticipated report, a comprehensive and important tome that will hopefully serve as a primer, as well as a clarion call. Recently, films like Josh Tickell's wonderful "Fuel", "The Age of Stupid" and "An Inconvenient Truth" have also served as important reminders that we face real challenges in a world of diminishing resources. Another fantastic film is "Crude", now playing at the Landmark Lumiere. Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits on the planet. The inside story of the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking, exploring a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus |