Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

An entertaining documentary by Errol Morris about four people - a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a mole rat expert, and a roboticist from the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab. While they appear to be different at first, the documentary shows how similar they ultimately are. They are all passionate about animals or animal-like objects, for one. The wild animal trainer and the mole rat expert obviously work with animals. The gardener creates animal sculptures. Rodney Brooks, the roboticist, builds robots that are modeled after animals and animal behavior. Mr. Brooks explains that seemingly intelligent behavior in robots is really just an illusion that emerges from the accumulation of simple, unintelligent actions of the different robotic components. Mr. Morris cleverly puts across the idea that this explanation also applies to animals and people by mixing up the narration with the visuals. While Mr. Brooks is explaining how robots behave, what we see on screen are wild animals, or while the mole rat expert is telling us how noisy mole rats are in their tunnels, what we see on screen is a noisy circus crowd. What Mr. Morris is quietly suggesting is that robots, animals, and people are built in the same way - from simple parts that when integrated in enough numbers come out appearing intelligent and complex. It is an interesting idea.

I remember well watching this documentary, when it was first released on VHS. The name of the film, alone, caught my attention. I knew little about the director, Errol Morris, other than that he is a very well-respected documentarian. What's more, the idea of blending the worlds of four distinctive men together into a juxtaposition of stream-of-consciousness imagery, interwoven with interview clips sounded fascinating!

Man, how do I begin to break down the "plot" for you? This film follows four distinctive people with four very distinctive professions (a robot scientist, who, incidentally wrote a paper entitled "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System," a naked mole rat scientist, topiary gardener and lion tamer). I must say, the way this story is told, through a trippy combination of black and white and grainy color film, made it more than a little surreal. Also, the professions we get further insight into are more than slightly macabre (particularly, the naked mole rat scientist). While some might call this film something of a "geeky tribute," I would call it more of a conceptual performance art piece--with one-of-a-kind subjects.

In the guise of a movie about four eccentrics with strange jobs, Errol Morris has made a very moving picture about the mark we leave on the world. Each of these four people have four very will have different legacies. It's about why we do what we do, how we came to be doing it and who -- if anyone -- will do it after us? Of course, Morris, by making the movie, is leaving a permanent record, not only of himself, but of these four.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a thoughtfully composed look at the work of four men and how their lives are poured into what they do. In the begining, the audience would be hard pressed to imagine how these men and what they do could have anything to do with one another. We start seeing the passion that directs them and the discipline that maintains them. Each man begins speaking, in specific terms, about his interests and how those interests relate to what he does professionally.

It didn't take long before the editing delicately overlapped imagery and narration. As this happened, the connections between seemingly unrelated words and images surfaced and began dominating my experience of this film. As the men examined their own respective roles in society, much of what they say of themselves can be said of us all. Their stories become one. The big story is the story of life on Earth right now.

I would also like to make special mention of the soundtrack. The music really straddles the line between playful and haunting. It seems to drive the film in a lot of ways and perfectly frames the subjects and their work.

The men that are the subject of this doccumentary are endearing characters that aren't selling us anything. They only want to share with us some aspect of the world that has captured them. I saw this film in the theater and was unprepared; I was moved. This piece is not for everyone. Maybe I'm just easily inspired, maybe this is solid gold. If I'm easily inspired then good for me, if this is solid gold then you really ought to watch it.

This would make a perfect companion doc to Grizzly Man, as every one of these men have a similar control/unintentional subject relationship to their particular obsessions - especially with the lion tamer who never forgets what he's dealing with and serves as an interesting contrast to the protagonist of Grizzly Man who allowed his delusions about his relationship to the bears to kill him.

The quirkiness of the subjects serves the director who loves to jump cut between them drawing parallels between lion taming, hedging trimming, robotics and mole rat study with surprising ease. All four men are experts on some of the strangest fields imaginable and all four exhibit some degree of control but at the end of the day, their obsessions control them and that's the way they want it.

This is an excellent movie for anyone obsessed with nature documentaries, but it's also a great movie for everyone (especially those that find the average nature doc rather tame and stage managed - i always hated those nature docs by Disney where the deer always gets away from the wolf)