The eyes of these men sparkle with passion.
FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL
An Illusion review by Joan Ellis
“Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” actually asks us to think.
It invites us to ponder the reasons why humans have never been able to
adapt to the planet in the way animals have, to consider a future that requires
suspension of universal assumptions about life itself.
If that isn’t achievement enough for a movie that runs 1 hour, 22
minutes, then just enjoy the passion four men have found in their work.
This is Errol Morris’s moving documentary about a lion tamer, a
topiary gardener, a mole-rat expert, and a robot scientist. Morris intercuts the interviews not only with each other, but
with archival footage of early movies that featured the preposterous things men
dreamed about long ago: robots,
wild animals, and humans. He uses
this canvas to study control: who
has it, how it is won.
Lion tamer Dave Hoover explains that a trainer has three seconds to read
the animal when he comes into the cage. To
control a lion, the tamer must outthink him.
By brandishing a chair with four legs, he can force the lion to try to
think beyond his single-track focus. In
his confusion, the lion forgets his initial mission of attacking the trainer.
“If he understands you,” Hoover says, “he’s not scared of you; if
he’s not scared of you, he wins control. It’s
all bluff.”
Elderly George tends the topiary garden he has created over decades.
Sculpting from memory with his hand shears, George
controls his bushes—“the only way you can do the detail right.
It’s cut and wait, cut and wait.” The intensity of his love for his
art is marred only by knowing they will return to nature when he dies.
Ray Mendez comes alive at the mention of mole-rats.
Fascinated by their adaptability, he builds a wall of tunnels and burrows
and invites us to study them. They
are mammals that adapt to nature as other mammals can’t. No
one controls these animals, even in captivity.
Joyfully, Mendez says of the repulsive creatures, “It’s the
intellectual side of mole-rats that’s so interesting.”
Scientist Rodney Brooks is consumed by the future of blending human and animal behavior in robots. We can understand life, he says, by building something that is life-like and patterned on the adaptability of animal behavior. Outlining a future with robots embedded in everything we use, Brooks’s excitement boils. He is talking about socializing robots for a time when the boundary between humans and robots will become blurred, a time when robots will live in the world in the same way animals do. “This,” Brooks says, “may be our legacy to the future.”
Director Errol Morris has chosen four men who have the skills and drive to explore the nature of reality. He photographs their work beautifully without intruding on their visions. The eyes of these men sparkle with passion, a moving reward for moviegoers starved for substance. Morris’s movie is metaphysical poetry.
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