Director Gregory Greene and the crew of The End of Suburbia spend 78 minutes explaining, in documentary detail, how the economic crisis has slammed the lid on the American dream. In a shorter amount of time, you could drive to Power Road in Mesa, or other outlying areas such as Queen Creek or Avondale, and see the process unfolding before your eyes. It’s blight before its time: big-box skeletons, graffiti limbo, boulevards of broken retail dreams.
Many factors have contributed to the local rot, and they’d make for an intriguing movie in themselves, but the main culprit of Greene’s thought-provoking flick is the so-called “world oil peak” – the critical point when fossil-fuel demand outstrips supply. Greene posits that we’re nearly there, and explores what that might mean for all those shiny, happy people with the matching SUVs and kids living in ghost towns-to-be.
Sat., Nov. 21, 7 p.m., 2009
