Customer Reviews

Fast Cheap & Out of Control [VHS]

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It confuses me how a documentary can stroll in and bump La Dolce Vita, Barton Fink and Delicatessen down 1 notch on my top 10 list.

In the first third of the film I reckoned the film to be just a gorgeous montage. A topiary gardener, a robot engineer, a mole-rat expert and a lion tamer... each doing their own bizarre thing. Visually great and certainly interesting. But at the midpoint the movie became alive for me. The passion the characters have for their respective activity forces the viewer to become a fifth character, a ghost eccentric facing the screen. Morris not only validates your passion, but makes you repent for not being more intense. Each day you've spent not doing what you love seems very wasted. And the remainder of your life becomes a resource that you ought not to squander.

"Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" subtly and generously leads anyone in the audience equipped with a gut, a heart and a brain to wake up and feel alive. This film melds what makes David Salle a great painter with what makes Gerald Stern great poet. Morris will certainly become known as a master.

First off, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and find it bizarre that it merits an Amazon editorial review of such shabby professionalism. Who is Luanne Brown? Why is she reviewing a movie that she clearly doesn't comprehend (or didn't even watch), and how can she maintain a job in a field that requires a level of writing above hmmm... junior-high school book report? Not only is this review a total hack job, she also concocts some weird assumptions in her review that have no basis in the film that I watched, entitled 'Fast, Cheap & Out of Control' by Errol Morris.

Does George Mendonca really follow his passion in topiary gardening 'because he can'? Is Dave Hoover really filled with 'hand-trembling fear' dealing with the animals to which he's dedicated his life's work? She manages to follow such ridiculous notions by dismissing Rodney Brooks as a 'real wacko', hardly deserving given the fact that he is a robotics expert at MIT and Luanne is... Who again?

Why would I bother wasting my time with this? Well Amazon is unfortunately where a lot of people will check for information about products before making a purchase, and in this respect, I believe an editorial review should be balanced and at least somewhat deserved. Unfortunately, Luanne's review comes across as a film student crying foul because someone's breaking the rules learned in editing class. Sorry, it is not 'out-of-control', Errol Morris happens to be completely 'in control' and more than a 'voyeurestic peek', this is a captivating work of art that merits repeated viewings. Yes, it's weird and obscure, but that's the point --- why the 'rich and famous' would be interesting is anyone's guess.

On a final note, I found Caleb Sampson's original soundtrack a fine piece of work and a perfect compliment to the images Morris presents us. It is not 'blaring', or even out of place. If you want blaring out of place soundtracks, check George Fenton's work with the BBC. Please, Amazon, if you're going to post editorial reviews, please do it responsibly.

I purchased this video expecting from the description to watch "weirdos" in hopeless, inconsequentual pursuits, only to find a film that makes a strong statement on "life."

The juxtaposition of the rat moles going about their core, instinctive routines and the scientest attempting to find reason in them; the lion tamer, attempting to control the core, instinctive behaviors of his "actors,"; the topiary gardener, attempting to shape "life" from the instinctive and natural growth of his shrubs; and the robot engineer, attempting to recreate "instinctive" reflexes --life -- in his creations.

The overwhelming question the viewer at the end of this film must ask is not "aren't they a bunch of weirdos," but is "why do I behave the way I do?"

All the segments show humans controlling and analyzing life and behavior in their own way. Put it all together, and one must wonder if there's not someone controlling their actions. Or, if it's possible for man to understand the complex intricacies of what "life" really is.

Don't buy this film if you want to see a freak show. These people are not freaks. They are all people attempting to grasp a little control and understanding of this thing we call life.

This film delves into the relationships between humanity and nature (which is the real fast, cheap, and out of control entity of the title, the source of the phrase notwithstanding). The four men interviewed by Morris interact with nature in four archetypal ways. The animal trainer deals with his charges much as people with each other, using empathy and concepts such as emotion, intelligence, and volition. The topiary gardener battles against nature-as-decay-and-chaos, waging an eternal war against wildness to fashion familiar images in an uncooperative medium. The mole-rat specialist is drawn to nature by a sense of wonder and curiosity that is deepened by his every discovery. Finally, the roboticist is inspired to the sincerest form of flattery; he borrows from the imagination of nature to solve his technical problems.

The interleaving of the four interviews and the use of musical and visual effects to stress thematic unity is not a cheap device to appeal to the MTV generation, as has been claimed. On the contrary, it is essential to the communication of the film's thesis. These four ways of relating to nature (which might be called animistic, antagonistic, descriptive, and imitative) are often portrayed as stages in the progress of mankind, ordered in various ways according to one's ideology. Morris presents them as eternal and complementary aspects of humanity's relationship with (and place in) the physical universe. The lives of these four men illustrate that even in the present day, each philosophical approach has both shortcomings and a unique and irreplaceable utility.

The interplay between a philosophical battle for supremacy and a utilitarian doctrine of complementarity is a familiar pattern. For years, scientists have struggled with the idea that biology is "really" chemistry and chemistry is "really" physics, an idea that succeeds and fails in fascinating ways. Morris generalizes this concept beautifully to the larger question of the relationship between humanity and the physical world.

Documentarian Errol Morris points his lens at four men who are attempting to exert control over and wrest meaning from the raw stuff of nature through highly idiosyncratic means. They include a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, an expert on the naked mole rat (the only mammal that has the same social organization as insects), and a roboticist. They each discuss the intricacies of their individual callings; the parallels and recurring themes that emerge result in a rather touching meditation on man's drive to impose control on his environment.

It is also worth noting that each of these men is clearly happy, at least when working. In this way, they show us how to be truly alive--find your passion, let it consume you, and don't worry whether the reviewer for Amazon.com thinks you are a weirdo./

Rarely, if ever, have I seen a film so affecting as this one. The complex relationship between who we are and the work that we do is explored in conversations with four men whose seemingly unrelated professions all deal with other "life forms" (robots, plants, circus animals, mole rats). The filmmaker's use of stock footage, the incredible score by the late Caleb Sampson, and the affable weirdness of the film's four subjects result in an absolute gem of a film that is at times absolutely hilarious and at other times profoundly moving. I'm glad that the price of the video has finally dropped to a reasonable level.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is an engagingly intertwined documentary of how a topiary gardener, lion tamer, mole rat biologist and robot scientist attempt to interact with and understand the natural world around them. Errol Morris weaves the different stories together, both narratively and visually, in a manner that at first seems chaotic. Ultimately, however, the film makes broad and deep connections between these very different endeavors.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is often reviewed -- and marketed -- as an examination of eccentrics. While Morris does play up personality quirks, particularly of the two scientists, it is not the central theme of the movie. Perhaps it is the passion that these four men hold for their life work that comes across as so unusual to people

This quirky, off-beat and ultimately poignant documentary explores the obsessive lives of four men and the complex relationship between passion and futility. In the end, it's an elegy-- not just for Errol Morris's parents (to whom the film is dedicated), but for humanity whose destruction almost seems rooted in the very nature of our dreams and aspirations. Heavy stuff-- and it's all dressed up quite inobviously amidst what is on the surface very funny, even ridiculous. This is Morris at his subtlest-- GREAT film and GREAT filmmaker-- buy now!

Well, not really. This is, however, a field study of men passionate about some self-taught, arcane body of knowledge. It really does come across like those nature shows where the camera has intruded into the lives of wild animals. (Yes, the subjects are all men. Why no women might be an interesting conversation, but irrelevant here.)

One of the subjects is in fact a fan of an exotic "mole rat", a social mammal with a distinctly non-mammalian society. He studies that animal almost the way the movie studies him. Other analogies emerge - the roboticist wants to create societies of robots much more like the mole rats' than like human societies. The gardener is another creator, sculpting menageries from living plants. The lion tamer is likewise intent on understanding and shaping the living beings with which he interacts. He, like the mole rat researcher, tries to understand the mind that lives in a very non-human brain.

The editing of this movie is patchy and quirky, but that is part of its charm. There's no action here, no plot, just four real characters. They are characters much larger than life. They are passionate about what they do, and their joy in their chosen fields is unmistakable. Maybe that is the movie's point - to prove that such joy exists and to give it a human face, four times over.

Telling the story of four unconventional people and professions, Fast, Cheap, and out of control is, at first glance, as odd as its subjects. However, half-way through the documentary it becomes clear that the focus of the film is much deeper than it first appears to be. Weaving through four very diverse characters, the eccentricities of each individual along with the stunning visual images succeed in lowering the intellectual guards of the audience. When the film finally slowed its pace and gave me time to think, I found myself wondering what it was that connected these people despite their overwhelming oddities. The answer was amazingly simple, hidden in the complexities of the individuals. Life.

For me, Fast, cheap, and out of control served as a reminder. It is basic human instinct to distance ourselves from everything that seems strange or out of the ordinary. This documentary is brilliant in that it bridges the gaps between seemingly "odd" people, showing their professions to be a mere reflection of life-patterns and human nature. By the end of the film, the distance had lessened until I realized that I'm just as eccentric as they are, and they're just as "normal" as me. Everything an individual does, or is involved with, simply comes down to basic ideas of the human spirit, such as nature, emotions, and death.

The documentary also explores the cheesy, age-old question, "What is the meaning of life?". God knows we've all seen this is countless numbers of cartoon strips, and pondered it ourselves in moments of hopelessness and then discarded it as over-thought and cliched. I had never put much thought into the question, finding it to be mostly independent to the individual.Fast, cheap, and out of control not only shows each character's meaning in life (i.e. mole rats, robots, gardening, etc.) but also the greater life meaning that drives them to be what they are: Independent, yet part of one.