Coming to a cinema near you.....

With naught but a humble weblog to my name, it appears that I'm well behind the curve when it comes to talking about fracking. This year, if you want to talk about fracking, you have to do a movie.

Even Matt Damon is getting involved, with 'The Promised Land', which is a fictional story about businessmen and drilling rights in Pennslyvania. I must be careful here to not mess with Matt Damon, who in general I agree with about most things. (Aside - quality NSFW video here). But I don't have much hope that that shale gas, fracking and the people involved in the business, will come out of this well. The 'plucky-little-guy-versus-big-nasty-corporation' storyline is just too good for Hollywood to pass up.

Truth be told, I think the 'little-guy-versus-nasty-coporation' meme is so powerful in our culture that we pretty much immediately distrust anything we here from any establishment body or corporation, with little assessment of the evidence. I'm not saying that's right or wrong - there's plenty of bad stuff that's happened to warrant such mistrust - but I do wonder whether this mistrust has always been there, and whether by consistently being 'good', corporations can ever be trusted again.

Anyway, as well as the Matt Damon film, we can also look forward to Gasland II, the sequel to the much discussed Gasland movie by Josh Fox. Gasland was shredded by a few organisations, let's see what happens with the sequel.

Finally, and most interestingly, there's Fracknation. Fracknation is a crowdsourced film, meaning that the money to make it was raised from many small, individual donations. A total of 3,300 people donated an average of $60 to fund the film. The purpose of fracknation was to rebut Gasland, and show the views of the majority of people in fracking areas who support the industry for the economic boost (much like Dimock Proud). Going back to the 'little-guy-v-nasty-corporation' meme, it's interesting that these are the little guys speaking (and putting money into a film). Clearly, it's a bit more complicated than that.

I'll leave you with another video (while I go start filming my movie......)