According to Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg's engaging short documentary about America's obsession with lawns, we spend more than $40 billion a year in lawn care, dump 30,000 tons of pesticide on our lawns annually, and use 200 gallons of water a day per U.S. citizen. Lawns cover approximately 50 million square acres in the U.S., with 5,000 acres being converted into lawns daily. The film combines hard-hitting statistics and breezy interviews of, among others, Virginia Scott Jenkins (The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession), as well as a “lawn of the month” judge, a city code enforcement officer (who goes after homeowners with unkempt lawns), a TruLawn rep who downplays the danger of pesticides (“what's safe today?”), and a man who loves to ride his John Deere lawnmower and would never hire an outside maintenance company (which is like, he says indelicately, “sloppy seconds,” since you don't know what kind of diseases those unclean commercial mower blades carry). The camera also goes behind-the-scenes to witness grass sods being cultivated for suburban use, and the making of artificial lawn products (in one shot, an interviewee praises his new fake lawn while—in the background—his dog cocks a leg and pees, as if to second his owner's approval). An entertaining slice of Americana with an environmental edge (particularly in its comments about the potential looming water shortage), Gimme Green is recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)
Gimme Green
(2007) 28 min. DVD: $99.95: public libraries; $250: colleges & universities. The Cinema Guild. PPR. ISBN: 0-7815-1167-4. Volume 23, Issue 5
Gimme Green
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