Flow: For Love of Water

Your tap water might be making you sick. But your bottled water might be making you sicker, while also enabling the environmental rape of the American heartland and unconscionable extortion in the Third World. Yes, water is the new oil, and there is such a thing as the water-industrial complex, and of course it consists of greedy multinational corporate predators. Irena Salina’s free-spilling documentary, courtesy of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch’s movie-production concern, is about as precisely aimed as an unattended fire hose, and as structured as the resulting puddle. But there’s something to be said for the sheer force of full saturation. Flow’s benumbing humanist-alarmist muckraking ploys include historically hazy nostalgia for a bygone era before agriculture became big business and dams destroyed ecosystems and water rights got privatized, without accounting for the ensuing problematic population growth. How completely depressing to have to think it a mercy that chemical-polluted drinking water might be lowering human sperm counts.