Escape from Suburbia: Beyond the American Dream (2007)
After condemning America's oil dependency in his 2004 documentary The End of Suburbia, filmmaker Gregory Greene here addresses the solutions that will avert catastrophe, outlining the issues actively moving the energy crisis from theory to reality. Spurred to action by the realities of peak oil, Greene focuses his camera on individuals across the country brave enough to challenge and instigate their communities into serious change.
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Reviews
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
Saw this on Sundance and it wasn't bad but was a little more hippieish and disjointed than I expected. If you're looking for a primer on peak oil, I'd definitely recommend "Collapse" before seeing this. Then this is a worthy counterpart to follow the detailing of the problem by humanizing it and discussing some potential solutions. It's definitely the more hopeful, if less polished, of the two films. Perhaps my ambivalence toward this documentary is intensified by the fact that, as it seems to me, the problem of declining fossil fuels and humans' relative inability to adjust and adapt seem like intractable, unsolvable problems. And it's also probably unfair to expect a low-budget documentary to present definitive solutions to those problems rather than vignettes about how people are trying to cope and deal with this -- localizing food sources, conserving fuel, looking into alternative fuels and so on. Anyway, worth a look, especially if you're already convinced of the problem -- that we're arriving at (if not already past) levels of peak oil production and consumption, and that the world, its economies and our lives as we know it are going to change within our lifetimes.