Gambling, Gods and LSD

This film has received tonnes of hype in Canada, specifically Toronto, because the filmmaker Peter Mettler lives here and he's worked with Atom Egoyan. It won best documentary at the Genies or Geminis or whatever the hell you call the Canadian equivalent of the Academy Awards (side note: I guess Gary Sinise was a presenter at the award show this year, and the crowd apparently erupted when he took to the stage. That's how lame the Canadian Movie Award Show is). Also, the film has been written about in Macleans, The Toronto Star, The Globe, The National Post, and countless other rags. EVERY SINGLE REVIEW I HAVE READ HAS GLOWED WITH PRAISE FOR THIS FILM:

"One of the most remarkable features of this or any year"; "Mesmerizing.Hallucinogenic.a documentary that is more dreamlike than any drama"; "Like ingesting Christ in Communion or dropping that first hit of LSD, this movie may change the very essence of your being"; or this gem: "A film trip. A world film".

I offer these snippets of praise, simply because NONE OF THEM IS TRUE. Actually. Well, maybe the last one is, since it was filmed in various locations within the world. And we had to walk to the theatre, so I guess it was also a film trip. Like a field trip, but to a film.

The documentary is 3 hours, and I've read that it originally clocked in at 55 HOURS. To which the distributor, Alliance Atlantis, said "That's a tad too long". So he edits it down to 3 hours and by God, he could have easily chopped off another 90 minutes or so. I said to Kerri as we left the theatre, "Even Eliot had an editor when he wrote The Wasteland".

What Mettler did here was take a camera with him while he was on vacation in India, Switzerland, Las Vegas, Monument Valley and Toronto (?) and filmed different things he saw. So it's like a journey, a personal journey that weaves in the topics of gambling, gods.....and uhh, LSD. Have you ever filmed cool stuff when you were on vacation? Me too, so let's get together some time and we'll splice it all together willy-nilly like, and then shop the result around to see if there are any takers. K?

There are parts of this film that are pretty remarkable, many things I've never seen before on celluloid. I will never forget such scenes (the little boy getting his head shaved with a straight razor; the Christian God-In near the airport in Toronto; the interviews in Switzerland with the former junkies; the final shot of the child chasing the camera). I will also never forget the truly juvenile, substandard camerawork throughout much of the film. I can't tell you how many times the director had the handicam shots aiming at the ground or at such an angle as to make the viewer wonder if he actually knew the camera was on. You know all those boring home movies you've seen where the cameraperson forgets to turn the record button off? THERE WERE SEVERAL MOMENTS LIKE THAT IN THIS FILM, and it was funded by Telefilm Canada, among others. AAARGH! I wanna pull my hair out over this film. I swear. Edit your movie, Peter! I understand what you're trying to do, but it doesn't work very well, sadly.

Annoying point #2: the director himself narrated the documentary at various points, since I guess he thought there was going to be the need for some kind of verbal guidance. So he interjected with poignant little things like "I see a thought. But how do I show you what I cannot see?" Or something like "I soon realised that the film was making itself, and I was a subject in this blah blah..." good lord someone get me the hell out of here before I puke all over the guy in front of me who came alone and probably writes for the entertainment section of the UofT student newspaper. We don't need the narration, Peter. It cheapens the film and it is ultimately unnecessary to tell us your silly silly thoughts.

I could seriously go on and on, and maybe I will later. So maybe the documentary was successful, since it got me and my friends talking. For all the wrong reasons, mind you. The thing is, I cannot understand how so many educated people who have supposedly seen a lot of films and who should have some kind of film background could actually shower this film with such praise. I want to walk up to Brian Johnson of Macleans (who works in my office building, so this could actually happen) and say "Come on, you must know that the film wasn't actually that good. You must understand that it was difficult to sit through at points." I wish that people would just tell the truth, without having some other mandate.

When the film ended, nobody clapped. Nobody cheered. It was eerily silent. And not because it was "mesmerizing" or "hallucinogenic", but because - I think - everyone was baffled at how unbelievably mediocre and/or bad it was (truly!) after hearing about how unbelievably amazing it was.

I personally know four people who walked out before it ended.

This bilious garbage is like a high schooler's attempt to recreate "Koyaanisqatsi". Many of the same visual motifs are copied (poorly), right down to the cave drawings in the American southwest. From filming the drug addict buddy smoking a cigar in the dark by a Toronto river, to the endless cliché of filming in Las Vegas, this movie is an empty, ham-handed attempt at philosophical discourse on our culture, times, and humanity. Narrated in a monotone voice that is groping to sound worldly yet detached, enlightened yet skeptical, not cool yet cool, this film is the worst kind of self-indulgence. It strives to be profound at every turn, but it ultimately comes off as profound and sophisticated as a whoopie cushion.

This film apparently won an award as Best Documentary in 2003 in Canada. I cringe to think of the competition it beat out. Leave this windy mess on the video store shelf, and rent CUBE, TREED MURRAY, WAYDOWNTOWN, LAST NIGHT, or BARNONE. Gambling, Gods, and LSD is a vapid waste of time, film, and no doubt Canadian grant money. There are many other films that do a much better job of representing the wonderful cinema being made in Canada. This crap is not.

Peter Mettler's Gambling, Gods and LSD is a three-hour experimental trip across time and cultures who was a regular cinematographer in Atom Egoyan films. Sadly, this film is greatly underrated when compared to other films of its genre. It's a semi-essay film, a personal journey around the world in search of transcendence in all its facets.

It's a big film trip that brings together everything that makes Peter Mettler's films and it's portrayed in such a way i don't feel like I'm being sold anything or the story being too self-indulgent.

One memorable sequence I will mention is the Zurich needle park segment, also the sex shop episode in search of happiness and love followed by the interviews with born-again Christians and with Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD.

It is an unique movie experience that compels the viewers to think and general audience might find it weird but for the fans of Chris Marker, Herz Frank, Kenneth Anger, Frans Zwartjes, and Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi you will not be disappointed.

"Reality is far more mutable, capacious, and capricious than we generally allow ourselves to imagine' - Daniel Pinchbeck from "Breaking Open the Head"

In a society that appears determined to keep us alienated from our true self, knowledge of reality achieved through personal experience or visionary states seems to be a fit subject only for media giggles or academic smugness. In his experimental three-hour documentary that took ten years to complete, Gambling, Gods and LSD, Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler wants to change this. Part travelogue and part photographic essay, the film takes us on a "journey of discovery" to different parts of the globe observing the different ways in which people seek transcendence. During the course of the three hours, we are presented with a dazzling display of images and sounds of nature and humanity: alpine fog, boys playing cricket, running water, a crippled beggar looking at the camera, a moving train, a jet plane reaching skyward among others. Mettler interviews biochemists, heroin addicts, gamblers, born-again Christians, and 97-year old Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, each seeking to express the meaning of their life but ideas are not fully explored.

Beginning with an evangelical gathering of believers at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Church where worshippers writhe on the floor in beatific agony, the camera takes us to Las Vegas, Nevada, Arizona, Switzerland, and southern India. We see a hotel being demolished in Las Vegas as a young woman watches in a dreamlike state from her hotel room, a teenage girl strapped to a machine in an erotic pose as a sex-shop owner describes his Electro-erotic stimulator. Two Swiss heroin addicts talk about their highs and lows, a Hispanic card player shows us the cremated remains of his wife in a red scarf, we visit a dog race in Zurich Switzerland, and experience fire dancing on a beach in India. Described by the director as being about "transcendence, the denial of death, the illusion of safety and our relationship to nature", the camera moves quickly from one reality to the other. The images speak for themselves - some profound, some banal, others simply bizarre. "Ultimately", Mettler says, "the film is about the people who watch it."

Mr. Mettler is a visionary director and his work is audacious and often mesmerizing, but his film left me wanting more. Though drugs are one of the unifying themes of the film and LSD appears in the title, there is no discussion of what LSD is about or of the psychedelic revolution of the 60s that shattered our assumptions about reality and, for better or worse, defined an entire decade. Mettler dwells on the virtues of addictive drugs like heroin but shows us nothing about shamanism, native rites of passage, Buddhist chanting, healing ceremonies, or paranormal phenomena involving the use of sacred plants and substances occurring in nature, phenomena that have led other mind explorers to reach profound personal insights.

Gambling, Gods and LSD is a unique attempt to allow us to see transcendence in the kaleidoscope of human activity and I recommend that it be seen, yet much of it is simply sensational or striving for a "trippy" effect. There is definitely a movement taking place in the world that seeks to define reality outside of the rigid mechanistic structures spoon-fed to us since birth by academics and the media, but the film does not seem to be looking in the right places. Goethe has said, "We all walk in mysteries…under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical limitations". Even in our modern age, the nature of consciousness remains elusive and perhaps now requires us to look through a different pair of glasses.

After three hours the audience clapped for almost ten minutes. And although I am an expert at sitting through long film screenings, I rarely find myself thinking that I could have seen more. In the case of "Gambling, Gods and LSD" I could have floated through another hour at least. This is a film that makes you think; a visual essay on the interconnectedness of life on earth as we all search for answers, thrills and inner peace. Mettler spent almost ten years collecting the experiences of North Americans, Europeans and Asians and reorganizing them into a symbiotic work of almost religious attitude. And although the film is categorized a "documentary", "Gambling, Gods & LSD" is far from recalling the instructional movies of driving class or the nature films from grade four. With no narration and only the barest of precept, Mettler's piece recalls not only the visuals of "Baraka" or "Koyaanisqatsi" but structurally brings to mind the greatest work of Chris Marker or Agnes Varda's brilliant "The Gleaners and I". The sound work is also incredible. The importance of silence is rarely so well explored as in this film and the music is both overwhelming and introspective. Highly recommended for those who tire of the pedantic television-style documentary that has permeated our consciousness of late; "Gambling, Gods & LSD" is a film that leaves the audience to make their own story out of what they have just experienced.