FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Sony Pictures Classics/Fourth Floor Prods. Director: Errol Morris Writer: Errol Morris Cast: Dave Hoover, George Mendonca, Ray Mendez, Rodney Brooks This has got to be one of the oddest movies ever made. Daring, yes. Risk-taking, absolutely. Reductive, no way. You'd have little trouble dashing off a synopsis, if that's all you want. But usually we want to know the big question: What is the movie about? In an audience of 99 people you'll probably get 100 opinions, most of which would be, "I don't know." Let's try, though. "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" is a documentary in that people are being interviewed and film clips issue forth to give visual definition to what they are saying. These interviews are photographed in no ordinary way. Errol Morris, who is responsible for such dynamic works as "The Thin Blue Line," "A Brief History of Time," and yet another which is ostensibly about a pet cemetery, "Gates of Heaven," has his subjects look straight at us, i.e. right at the lens of the camera. That's not unusual. What is novel is that while they are looking right at us they are simultaneously making eye contact with the lenser via an invention of the director called, improbably, an Interrotron, which projects an image on a teleprompter. But we digress. Let's take a stab at what the film is about. It is foremost an examination of a 20th century pocket of Romanticism, a time which has is swiftly passing us by, an era in which people did not think of going to work from 9 to 5 or of making big bucks, but of fashioning careers out of their innermost dreams. Morris considers the callings of four idiosyncratic people who could have easily been chosen for the TV program "What's My Line" if that series still existed. The quartet are unknown to one another, they do not meet at any time during the course of the filming, and their lives are not juxtaposed. One, the bravest of the lot, is Dave Hoover, a lion tamer who worships Clyde Beatty, the legendary domesticator of the king of beasts who died not (romantically) in the cage but of cancer. The second and most staid member of the group is George Mendonca, not your everyday gardener, but a muse who visualized the sculpting of plants into the shape of humongous animals. The third, Rodney Brooks, seems the most wild-eyed, an MIT scientist who designs robots which crawl around the room like insects from the movie "Mimic" and which, unlike most automatons, are given no instructions by their creator. Fourth, Ray Mendez, is yet another animal lover who is "into" mole-rats, bald, blind creatures, almost cute, that can eat through concrete. Two of the human constituents of the picture look backward to the 19th Century, when human beings explores the jungles rather than sitting at computer terminals. The other pair look forward to a time in which human beings may actually become obsolete, the world taken over by robots and bald, blind creatures, almost cute, that can eat through concrete. Through the expert camerawork of the legendary Robert Richardson--known as the lenser for Oliver Stone's films--and amid the Philip Glass-like soundtrack of Caleb Sampson, each of the four rhapsodizes about his life's work while director Morris intercuts with some corny old World War II jungle-serial movies. It's take a bit of time in this short film to see any connection whatever among the four outside of their interest in animals. Rodney Brooks can elicit a few laughs, looking like the mad scientist who allows his insect-like robots to zip about the room and contemplates sending them to Mars--an anarchic collage of metal, fast, cheap and out of control, running around helter-skelter like puppies who have just completed their shots and are enjoying their first romp outdoors. At first we see the connection between Brooks and Ray Mendez, the latter declaring that in the future, if robots do not take over the world then his mole-rats will. Soon we regard the affinity between Hoover, who brings civilization to lions and big cats, and George Mendonca, who tames wild branches by carving them into gigantic giraffes and the like. "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," screened at the 1997 New York Film Festival, was chosen for distribution by Sony on a scouting mission to the recent festival at Sundance in Utah. Even if you don't know what to make of this cerebral party, you'll be impressed by the range of camera equipment used, which includes 35 mm, 16mm and 8mm films, video, black-and-white, color, sped-up motion and flashy editing. Morris is obviously not doing a simple set of interviews with the usual background visuals, but whimsically sighing at the loss of an era. You're not likely to see other men like these four, totally dedicated to living their dream even as they know their work has no permanence. The animal gardens, which took 15 years to build, could be destroyed in a day by a hurricane or in a while longer by insects. Lion taming is fast losing its appeal. The production of robots for their own sake is simply pure research, and pure research seems to be on the way out, while the investigation of the life of the mole-rat is just not going to win huge grants from the national endowments. Summing up, you've just read 893 words which attempt to pinpoint the subject of this unique film, but truth to tell, there is none--or, rather, as the deconstructionists might say, its subject is whatever you in the audience think it is. Not Rated. Running Time: 80 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
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