Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Somehow the Morris mix just doesn't jell this time. I'm normally a huge fan of Mr. Morris's films, especially the truly great Gates of Heaven. But Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is ironically aptly titled. Instead of providing some quirky insight into the human condition, the film only manages to annoy. And our four subjects? Well, they grate on the nerves to be honest. It's hard to say what's missing, maybe a sense of humor, maybe some more directorial involvement. In any event, I wouldn't go out of my way to catch this flick.

My small survey of documentary types has brought me to this, and what a celebration!

This is complex, meaningful cinema that just happens to be a documentary. It is intelligent, complex, deliberate and deeply thought provoking. I think it communicates something that isn't quite right, but the thing is communicated in the most effective way — by folding the idea being explained into the form of the explanation, the film itself.

The core of this is the work of Rodney Brooks. He is a celebrated researcher in robotics and now the founder of the most promising company making these things. He is smart, articulate and the things he makes work as advertised. I've encountered him and his work professionally over the last 30 years. He makes machines that walk, and have some cognitive navigation skills. Walking is hard.

While there are many research centers working on robotics, there are only two universities working on the underlying theories. MIT is the least shallow of these. Add in the fact that Brooks has manufactured thousands of graduates in his style of thinking, and you may appreciate why he may be one of the most influential thinkers on the planet.

The theory here is that instead of thinking about a single brain, it makes sense to think in terms of a society of collaborating miniminds, agents. As a metaphor, bees, ants, termites are usual. And as usual, the metaphor in most quarters is taken too literally. Brooks does not quite do so, but this is the first compromise made by the filmmaker. Making agents systems that have the behavior you want is impossible without some structure in the society. A promising approach is to go deep and restructure logic. Instead, Brooks structures the agents into "subsumptive" layers. This mirrors special purpose roles of termites and molerats in colonies.

Okay, here is an idea, an interesting one, and one that is already embedded in the general intellectual economy. Around this, Morris builds a film. Nominally, there are four "geniuses." One is our robotics theorist. We have an obsessive expert in molerats, so we have our metaphor made whole. We have a lion tamer. Now he fits into the idea architecture by explaining how he repeatedly risks his life to figure out and superficially control inscrutable animals. And finally we have a guy who reverses the metaphor; he takes living things with their natural agent system that wants to behave one way, and he forces it to look like larger living things. The resemblance is superficial and fragile.

Two of these form the cinematic spine: the circus and the robots. Most of what we see apart from the four individuals themselves is a collage of circus footage and splices from old robot movies. We also have the synthesis of old "circus" movies with robotic influence.

Peppered in are the two other guys and their cinematic expression. With the molerats, we have — well film of molerats. With the topiarist, we have some artistically photographed scenes of him working in the garden. The score is important in Morris films; here the composer tries to build subsumptive music, taking themes from movies and other recognizable sources, assigning them to types of clips we see, and subsuming them into a klezmer- inspired circus score where we are the audience.

This really is a carefully structured piece of cinema, visually conveying ideas much deeper than one normally allows.

The problem is that like the four men we are shown, the approach is still discrete, reductionist. It assumes that great sweeps of life can be logical, explained. We go to the circus and topiary garden to see this narrative. An influential professor treats grad students like so many ants, incrementally evolving "the system." A fellow "explains" the colony, as if observations equals insights.

So here is the quandary with film and ideas. Film is about showing. The best ideas are about abstracting away distracting (and often false) appearances. A long form narrative film takes you places where you can invent your insights, with some guidance. A documentary feeds insights, but has to stick more with the "sight" than the "in."

Still, the structure here and the ambition! It isn't real, but it does not have to be to warm us.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Hiding within this movie are four fairly interesting mini-documentaries about four men, each with a vision - perhaps even an obsession - about one particular facet of life. The common thread uniting them is that each of the four is fascinated by the ways in which animals, men, plants, and even machines evolve, learn, and grow. A recurring theme is training or control.

Unfortunately, these four interesting stories are chopped up and interwoven in ways that often seem arbitrary and pointless. Plus, about 25% of the movie is made up of clips from other, mostly bad, movies... and the soundtrack music is often intrusive and annoying. So I'm mystified why a number of critics thought this was the best documentary of 1997. Maybe there were just a lot of bad documentaries that year!

Worth watching if you have nothing else to do, but nowhere near great.

I saw this film and loved it, though it was hard to gain the proper sense of perspective, as I know Dave (the lion tamer). However, it's interesting to note that Errol Morris is not nearly so controlling or manipulative as some viewers seem to think. He doesn't have to stretch the subject matter to try and make connections... he just lightly played the characters, and they all start to sound the same after a point. Anecdotal evidence? The obssessive robot scientist, after the making of the film, apparently decided the end of the world was coming, and holed up in his laboratory building his robot army (this is of course a rumor, from the lion tamer). In any event, he wouldn't come to any photo shoots after the release, so the other three men posed with a cardboard cutout of him... check the art and you might be able to tell.

Four men are interviewed separately. One man studies hairless mole rats. One man is a topiary gardener. One man is a retired lion tamer. One is a robotics designer. Each has a passion (or an obsession) with their chosen subject but have seemingly little in common. With the collection of their interviews, Errol Morris explores the themes of growth, development and evolution of species.

My plot summary suggests that I "got" what Morris was trying to do but really this is my guess. If that was his intension though then he has fallen short of it because rather than coming together to form a documentary, the film feels like it is all over the place with no real direction or control over the subject matter. Each of the men are reasonably interesting by themselves and the topics are unusual enough to hold the interest. However the way Morris uses them is poor and the film is cluttered with archive movie footage and a terrible musical score. I'm not totally sure how he was trying to get to where he wanted to be, maybe at one point he just decided to revel in the "weirdness" of his subjects and give up on pulling it all together.

The men are mostly interesting even if their subjects aren't particularly. The gardener was probably the only one that I actively found pretty dull, the others had a bit of character and passion that endeared them to me. Maybe if Morris had tried to do more with the men themselves he could have done something interesting, but by going for the bigger theme he loses his way and ultimately his film shows it consistently throughout.

Overall then a disappointing film from start to finish. Die-hard fans of Morris might find enough of his style and interest to carry them through but for me I found it to be a real mess of a documentary that doesn't seem to have any design or structure about and left me wondering what I was watching and why I was bothering.