Last Call at the Oasis

Documentarian Jessica Yu sounds a globe-spanning eco-alarm in Last Call at the Oasis, which looks at the impending depletion of fresh drinking water due to a combination of wasteful industries, shortsighted planning, and a human population of seven billion. Yu delivers the expected warnings about climate change and droughts drying up rivers (Las Vegas is not a good long-range habitation bet), but the bulk of the revelations are about existing aquifers and water tables going bad thanks to massive factory-farm runoff, natural-gas drilling, pesticides, and pharmaceutical waste—much of it nasty molecules that mere water-filtration cannot remove. Water supplies once thought to be practically inexhaustible are now toxic (Midland, TX, once home to George W. Bush, is a fount of corporate-industrial cancer—and, yes, there is a Halliburton connection). Authors interviewed onscreen include Peter Gleick, Robert Glennon, Paul Rozin, and Alex Prud'homme, whose book The Ripple Effect inspired this film. Famously dramatized and camera-friendly clean-water activist Erin Brockovich also appears, as well as actor Jack Black, who provides comic relief on how humor and proper marketing might sell consumers on bottled water recycled from purified toilet waste. DVD extras include an interview with Brockovich, and more tomfoolery by Black. An ambitious and urgent exposé, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)