Gashole

Or What the oil companies don't want you to know

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VARIETY GASHOLE (Documentary on HULU)
By Rob Nelson

As paying at the pump gets pricier by the day, the well-timed "GasHole" fuels driving concerns about Big Oil greed, domestic dependence on foreign crude, the global economy, and, not least, the environment. Alternatively powered by public-domain footage as well as talking heads and voiceover narration, the shrewdly produced and principled docu has compelled Republican filmmakers Jeremy Wagener and Scott D. Roberts to take their self-distributed show on the road, ironically or not, with stops in U.S. cities skedded through summer's end. Pic's value stands to rise in direct proportion to gas costs, which show little sign of decreasing soon.

Film opens in historical mode with archival proclamations from Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, the last of whom, circa 1980, presciently identifies the "clear and present danger" of U.S. addiction to Mideast pipelines. There will be blood, pic asserts, whenever there's oil, drawing evidence not just from the current war in Iraq but also from the mysterious demises of early veggie-oil fan Rudolf Diesel and vapor-engine pioneer Tom Ogle, who got 100 miles to the gallon in the Lone Star state before turning up dead of an unlikely drug overdose. (Current oil executives unsurprisingly declined to speak on camera about these or any other matters.)

Conspiracy theorizing, though, is kept to a relative minimum as contempo interviewees -- from economic historian Les Manns to "biodiesel fuel consumer" and "Dawson's Creek" alum Joshua Jackson -- help sketch the century-old rapacity of Standard Oil and the increasingly incestuous relations between auto and oil industries. Coming across as a George Clooney-in-training, Jackson smartly acknowledges Big Oil's basic moneymaking agenda while accusing price-gouging corporations of exploiting working people and doing undue damage to both environment and economy.