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copyright ©1999-2002
DigsMagazine.com.
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Plot synopsis
Documentary filmmaker Errol
Morris interviews four eccentric men about the odd passions that rule
their otherwise ordinary lives. Dave Hoover is a lion tamer in one of
those old-fashioned traveling circuses that one has a tendency to think
no longer exists in this modern day and age. Inspired at an early age by
famous animal tamer and film star Clyde Beatty, in whose namesake troupe
he performs, the now semi-retired Hoover spent decades perfecting his
skills, waving chairs and brandishing whips with a flourish, all in an
effort to control his wild animal co-performers. George Mendonça, like
Hoover, has made a life’s work of bending nature to his will –
although in his case, it’s through topiary gardening, that
little-practiced art of turning shrubbery into sculpture. Under his
attentive, patient, Zen-like care, a garden of tall trees and fat hedges
becomes a magical fantasy zoo of amazing animals -- elephants and bears,
giraffes and camels, creatures exotic and wondrous. Ray Mendez, too,
finds inspiration and wonder in the animal world: a naked mole-rat
zoologist, he spends his days and nights obsessing over what must surely
be the most bizarre mammal known to man. These hairless, sweatless,
nearly-blind little critters spend their lives digging elaborate tunnels
in the underground of the African savanna, living under a complex
cooperative social structure that’s more like that of ants, bees and
similarly social insects than their closer mammalian kin. Mendez studies
them with glee and reverence, marveling over their oddities, eager to
understand what makes them tick. Robot scientist Rodney Brooks,
meanwhile, designs machines that somehow, miraculously, scuttle about
like insects, moving here, there and everywhere according to their own
"volition," without specific directions from any human that
is.
Review
Hear a movie described as a documentary and
you’re likely to imagine something serious, informative, objective,
factual – something a little cold when it comes to emotion, a lot dry
when it comes to personality, perhaps. Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap
& Out of Control may be 100% based on fact, but it’s also
deeply personal, undeniably expressive, highly stylized and thoroughly
subjective – a documentary that’s as much about the filmmaker’s
own quirky world view and distinctly unique voice as it is about the
four people whose lives comprise the subject of the film. You don’t
necessarily come away from this movie feeling like you really know these
four individuals, or understand their work; instead, Morris’s film has
a more philosophical than an educational bent to it. In taking a peek
into the lives of these four men— connected only by the fact that each
has devoted his life to pursuing/examining the relationship between
human and non-human animals— and choosing to intercut straight-on
talking head interviews with beautiful old black-and-white film footage
and gorgeously-filmed color sequences of his subjects in action, Morris’s
film is a gloriously complex cinematic poem that raises more questions
than it answers. Why does man feel the need to control nature? Are
humans much different than other animals? What makes an animal happy?
(What makes a human animal happy?) And what does the future hold for
mankind? Morris’ magical film is so much more than just a string of
interviews with four weird guys – it’s a meditation on humanity. In
the end, its subjects aren’t so much the mole-rat guy, the topiary
guy, the robot guy, and the lion-tamer guy, but you and I— and what
our place is in the universe. —reviewed by
Y. Sun
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