| Many of you may not get a chance to see this movie - it's a funky documentary art house piece, but it sure is interesting! Directed by Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time), and with music by Caleb Sampson, it's a pastiche of 4 short documentaries on these 4 extremely diverse guys, blended together to make an unusual statement about humanity and our relationship to nature and animals and each other. |
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| The thing I find saddening about documentary style filmmaking is the knowledge of all the material I will never get to see that had to be cut to keep focus or in a certain time frame. I also realize how much work went into getting the footage and editing it and I always worry that people don't appreciate the love, the labor, the incredible focus! |
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This project, in particular, could suffer from a cursory dismissal, just because the guys being interviewed are really unusual.
Many filmmakers would somehow get us to laugh at them and turn the work into a kind of mocking tribute - I mean, these fellas are freaks - but by the end, you just respect them and care about them and the whole mishmash has gone and made you think about your place in the world. |
| One guy, Dave Hoover, is a lion tamer. George Mondonca tends to a topiary, full time, all his life, for 40 years. Another man, Ray Mendez, is devoted to the study of these rare hairless mole rats. And Rodney Brooks is a robot scientist. |
Their interviews and voice overs are juxtaposed with images from the other stories' lives; the mole rat guy, talking about the termite-like culture of these mammals, might be talking about their mating habits
while we watch scenes from a Clyde Beatty movie. Or shots of the robots making tentative mistakes walking accompany the care that Mondonca takes with his animals in the topiary. |
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| 45 degree, 90 degree camera angles, mood-enhancing music, and great footage of everything fills your head. You never feel bored or assaulted. By the end (and there is no theme stated implicitly at all, and we only hear the voice of the interviewer once), you sit in the darkened moviehouse, considering man's urge to shape, study, reproduce, replicate, manipulate, revere, respect, emulate, and live with nature and animals. |
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These four men are all passionate about what they do, and their vocations fill their lives with meaning. I took almost no notes as I watched, afraid to miss anything, but I can't convey how interesting it all is. I only say matinee price because it is sort of an odd piece and not for everyone. But I think you should grab a huge tub of popcorn and just stare and eat at the amazing job Morris and his DP Robert Richardson and theproduction designer Ted Bafaloukos did. |
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