Television Review: Josh Fox’s ‘Gasland Part II’ Is to Be Shown on HBO

Muckraking documentaries don’t often spawn sequels, but a lot has happened in the world of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, since Josh Fox released “Gasland” in 2010.

The message of Mr. Fox’s “Gasland Part II” is that while the battles over the investigation and regulation of fracking wax and wane â€" with the anti-regulatory forces currently on top â€" thousands of additional wells that use this controversial natural-gas drilling technique are being sunk.

“Gasland Part II,” which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and is being shown on Monday by HBO, paints a convincing picture: homeowners at the mercy of the oil and gas industry wait while government agencies make tentative moves toward regulation that eventually come to nothing or are reversed.

  And this was before the Environmental Protection Agency last month walked away from its promise to investigate water contamination in Pavillion, Wyo., which is shown in the film as one of the most significant victories for aggrieved homeowners.

Mr. Fox works in the first-person style of colorful mudslingers like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, but his tone is more sad and mordant, his blank face a melancholy emblem of the hopelessness of the situation. He is constantly present in the film, taking on a kind of minstrel’s or bard’s role that’s emphasized by shots of him strumming a banjo in the woods near his Pennsylvania home. At one point he celebrates his own doggedness by beginning to run the closing credits before announcing that no, the story isn’t over yet.

The original “Gasland” grew out of a company’s effort to pay Mr. Fox for exploration rights to his land, which lies above the Marcellus Shale formation and its huge reserves of natural gas. “Part II” briefly recapitulates his personal history and revisits communities that were featured in “Gasland” â€" where shots of methane-laced water being set on fire are still de rigueur â€" and traces the legal and political fights of the intervening years, citing studies and statistics attesting to the health dangers of fracking.

Putting all of this material into an economical yet coherent package would be a challenge for any documentarian, and organization is not the specialty of Mr. Fox, who directed, wrote and edited “Gasland Part II.” The film runs to two hours and its anecdotal, hopscotch style starts to wear.

And, as with “Gasland,” there are questions, large and small, that can nag at you. Would it have been a bad idea to include at least one interview with a homeowner who professes to support drilling? Did the dog with the missing leg somehow lose the limb because of fracking, as a dramatic cut would have us believe?

Most of Mr. Fox’s material isn’t open to question, however. Recordings of a gas industry conference at which public relations managers are told to study the Army’s counterinsurgency manual â€" because “we are dealing with an insurgency” when it comes to protesters and angry homeowners â€" are both hilarious and horrifying. Mr. Fox’s account of the Pennsylvania government’s hiring of a private company to monitor fracking protesters, an episode not widely covered outside the state, is particularly valuable.

It’s hard to take issue with Mr. Fox’s resigned conclusion that economic and political forces will soon spread fracking around the world, no matter how harmful critics say it may be to the environment and our health.

To provide a glimpse of the hardball tactics he’s talking about, Mr. Fox runs a Google search for his own name and puts the result on screen. There, directly above his Wikipedia entry, we can see who has bought “JoshFox” as a search phrase: a gas-industry trade group offering the “Truth About Gasland.”

Gasland Part II

HBO, Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Directed by Josh Fox; Mr. Fox, Trish Adlesic and Deborah Wallace, producers; Matthew Sanchez, co-producer; Mr. Fox and Mr. Sanchez, cinematographers; Mr. Fox, editor. For HBO; Sheila Nevins, executive producer; Nancy Abraham, senior producer.

BBC Shelves Its 3-D TV Programming Plans

The BBC has become the latest broadcaster to put down its 3-D glasses.

The British public broadcaster confirmed on Friday that it had suspended its 3-D programming plans, citing a lack of viewer interest in the technology that brings three-dimensional images to TV.

The move came about a month after ESPN, the best-known provider of 3-D programming in the United States, announced that it was going to shut down its 3-D cable channel. It, too, cited “limited consumer adoption” of the technology. While many households own 3-D TV sets, few ever use them â€" along with the special glasses â€" to watch eye-popping shows.

Kim Shillinglaw, the head of the BBC’s 3-D efforts, characterized the broadcaster’s use of the technology as a “limited trial” and an experiment. While the programming will go on hiatus, “the BBC will take many of the skills developed as part of the trial forward and continue to monitor 3-D developments, including glasses-free 3-D, as well as other technological advances in all areas of media,” she said in a statement.

Bits: Rediscovering Radio Through Apps

Growing up, the radio provided the soundtrack for doing my hair in the morning and the ride to school. It kept me company during late nights while I finished my homework and entertained during long summer road trips with my family.

Fast forward a few years. I got a CD player for my car and cycled through a series of portable music devices, from hand-me-down Walkmans to MiniDisc players, iPod Nanos and finally, an iPhone with Spotify. And it was great. My music life got more efficient. I could listen to exactly what I wanted, anytime, without having to suffer through annoying D.J. interludes and commercials.

But earlier this year, work sent me to Los Angeles. Sitting in my rental car in traffic, I turned on Hot 97 and made my way across the city, singing along to the Top 40 hits and laughing at the cheesy banter of the radio jockeys. During dinner, I bonded with a friend who had listened to the same segments on the same station that morning. It was a throwback to my teen years, hauling friends around in my Volvo station wagon. It was fun and communal in a way that streaming music hasn’t been in years.

Back in New York, I gushed to a friend about my radio revelations and he suggested I check out some of the newer radio applications. I’ve been hooked ever since.

These apps let you listen to nearly any radio station around the United States. I listen to local morning shows for their reality-show recaps, ticket giveaways and celebrity gossip; then later in the day, switch over to radio stations in California or Houston to check out what the D.J.s are throwing on in those cities to hype people up for the night out.

And as it turns out, TuneIn, the app I use the most, is actually quite popular. The company said it has more than 40 million monthly users and more than 1 billion hours listened in total through the service, which is free. In May, TuneIn raised $25 million from Institutional Venture Partners (the same firm that just funded Snapchat), Sequoia, Google and General Catalyst.
 
The appeal of the radio isn’t the music selection â€" I often hear the same annoying Drake or Taylor Swift song before I get something fresh. And the commercials are just as annoying and jarring as traditional radio.

It’s the human element that draws me in, knowing that someone is selecting songs for you. Remember Turntable? We didn’t love it because it was cutting edge or worked perfectly â€" we loved it because the online app mimics the communal experience of listening to music together during a concert or in someone’s basement.

That’s something that often feels missing from our digital interactions and lives. Maybe that’s why the visual vernacular of images, emoji, those cartoons text characters, and GIFs are all so popular. They’re more evocative of a mood or emotion and let you feel more of the person behind the interaction. It also might be one of the reasons podcasts still find dedicated listeners in an age where talk radio often feels so outdated.

And there’s something lovely about the way radio apps let you tune in to any station you want, instead of just whatever is within range. I like listening to KCRW and KMEL when I’m nostalgic for the Bay Area, where I lived for a few years. It’s in those moments that I’m transported back to a time or a place â€" a college house party or high school trips to the mall â€" and I’m reminded that a person, not a machine, picked it. It’s the same reason I love typos in my text messages, and often don’t mind when I misspell something on Twitter.

You can feel the humanness in those imperfections. They remind you that you aren’t alone, something that can be hard to remember when you spend so much time interacting with everyone and everything through a screen.

Little Interest in ‘Lone Ranger’ Is Blow for Disney

LOS ANGELES â€" The train wreck was supposed to stay on-screen.

Walt Disney Studios spent the July 4 holiday watching its expensive action western, “The Lone Ranger,” disintegrate in a box-office collision with a strong performance by the goofy little animated heroes of Universal Pictures’s “Despicable Me 2.”

By Friday morning, “Despicable Me 2” had taken in taken in $59.5 million at the North American box office since its Tuesday night opening, according to an early estimate by Hollywood.com, and appeared to be headed for five-day total of $115 or more. Its projected total is sure to more than double the five-day take for “The Lone Ranger,” which by some estimates is expected to take in less than $50 million for the holiday, after collecting just $19.5 million in domestic theaters since Tuesday night.

Disney’s film stars Johnny Depp, was directed by Gore Verbinski, who joined Jerry Bruckheimer as a producer to revive the studio’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” team, and cost about $225 million to make, according to a person briefed on the expenses who spoke on condition of anonymity because of studio policy. That high cost came in part because of the wreckage from the movie’s railroad action scenes.

But critics were harsh. The film scored 37 of a possible 100 on the Metacritic.com service, and A.O. Scott, reviewing for The New York Times called it “a frantic grab bag of plots and themes, a semester-long Westerns 101 college course crammed into two and a half hours and taught by a professor whose lecture notes were rearranged by a gust of wind on his way to class.”

The audience, meanwhile, turned away from a film that seeks its appeal in Mr. Depp’s wisecracking reinterpretation of Tonto, the Native American sidekick to the masked ranger, John Reid, played by Armie Hammer, who has loomed large in American pop culture since the broadcast of a radio drama in the 1930s.

A Disney spokesman on Friday declined to discuss the film’s performance.

Early Tuesday, the analyst Doug Creutz, with Cowen & Company in San Francisco, was quoted in a report from the Bloomberg News service, predicting that Disney would eventually write off $100 million on “The Lone Ranger.”

That would be about half the write-down it took on another large-scale film disaster, “John Carter,” which cost about $350 million to make and market, and collected only about $282 million at the worldwide box office after its release in March 2012. (Studios keep only part of the box office receipts, which are shared with exhibitors, but also collect money from home entertainment and other sales.) A year earlier, Disney had suffered a similar disaster with another expensive flop, “Mars Needs Moms.”

Alan F. Horn, a veteran Warner executive, became chairman of Walt Disney Studios last June, after “The Lone Ranger” was already being made.

Fierce competition from a crowded slate of blockbusters this summer leaves little room for “The Lone Ranger” to expand its appeal in coming weeks. On July 12, Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures will open “Pacific Rim,” a robot battle fantasy that was promoted this week in trailers attached to “The Lone Ranger,” while Sony Pictures Entertainment will release “Grown Ups 2,” a sequel to an earlier comedy hit, which featuring Adam Sandler, Kevin James and Chris Rock.

By midday Friday, Disney shares were largely unchanged.