Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)

This documentary from Errol Morris is about four people and their jobs. They all share some common interest and I think Morris intended this to be "mankind's control over nature", though to me the connection was much simpler--all four had neat jobs and all four had an intense passion for what they did. Rarely have I seen people who love their work as much as these four men and because of this I found that there was a very likable sort of nobility about them. Some of the jobs seemed more exciting than others, but all four seemed intensely satisfied with their own particular job. There jobs were lion tamer, robotics professor, naked mole rat curator and master gardener/topiary expert.As for the style of the film, some of the negative criticisms others level against this film I just didn't agree with, though one I certainly did. The connecting archival film clips sometimes worked well and fit what was being said and done, though some just looked cheap and out of place--particularly the movie serial clips. However, despite this possible unfortunate choice, I loved the music, way of interconnecting the stories and overall format.Interesting and well worth a look if you like quirky documentaries. I liked this far more than Morris' first film, GATES OF HEAVEN (which was very stark and aimless compared to this one) and not as amazing as MR. DEATH--one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

Four men are interviewed separately. One man studies hairless mole rats. One man is a topiary gardener. One man is a retired lion tamer. One is a robotics designer. Each has a passion (or an obsession) with their chosen subject but have seemingly little in common. With the collection of their interviews, Errol Morris explores the themes of growth, development and evolution of species.My plot summary suggests that I "got" what Morris was trying to do but really this is my guess. If that was his intension though then he has fallen short of it because rather than coming together to form a documentary, the film feels like it is all over the place with no real direction or control over the subject matter. Each of the men are reasonably interesting by themselves and the topics are unusual enough to hold the interest. However the way Morris uses them is poor and the film is cluttered with archive movie footage and a terrible musical score. I'm not totally sure how he was trying to get to where he wanted to be, maybe at one point he just decided to revel in the "weirdness" of his subjects and give up on pulling it all together.The men are mostly interesting even if their subjects aren't particularly. The gardener was probably the only one that I actively found pretty dull, the others had a bit of character and passion that endeared them to me. Maybe if Morris had tried to do more with the men themselves he could have done something interesting, but by going for the bigger theme he loses his way and ultimately his film shows it consistently throughout.Overall then a disappointing film from start to finish. Die-hard fans of Morris might find enough of his style and interest to carry them through but for me I found it to be a real mess of a documentary that doesn't seem to have any design or structure about and left me wondering what I was watching and why I was bothering.

Hiding within this movie are four fairly interesting mini-documentaries about four men, each with a vision - perhaps even an obsession - about one particular facet of life. The common thread uniting them is that each of the four is fascinated by the ways in which animals, men, plants, and even machines evolve, learn, and grow. A recurring theme is training or control.Unfortunately, these four interesting stories are chopped up and interwoven in ways that often seem arbitrary and pointless. Plus, about 25% of the movie is made up of clips from other, mostly bad, movies... and the soundtrack music is often intrusive and annoying. So I'm mystified why a number of critics thought this was the best documentary of 1997. Maybe there were just a lot of bad documentaries that year! Worth watching if you have nothing else to do, but nowhere near great.

This makes the third Errol Morris movie I've seen, and I'm increasingly not liking his style. He seems to find very interesting and varied characters, great personalities to create documentaries for, and then with tongue-in-cheek editing make fun of everything they are about. It's never really a direct caricaturation of them and Morris seems most of the time to be saying, "But no, no, these people are really fascinating, really!", but there's always these subtle little canted angles and not-so-subtle editing techniques that show that Morris seems to be mocking them behind their back.This movie tracks four people who break the traditional boundaries of organic separation... a man who studies African hairless molerats to find that they are amazingly ant-like, a lion tamer, a man who keeps a garden full of animal-shaped shrubbery, and a robot designer. The general theme of the film seems to revolve around the question of what designates animal, human, and life features? So the title of Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control doesn't really seem to mean anything in terms of the movie... right? Except of course Morris seems just a little disturbed by these individuals' passions (he might call them "obsessions") making synthetic designs on life. I share not that fear and honestly don't appreciate some of the connections Morris makes in the film.But I stress his subtlety. With no voice-over narration and leaving the words entirely to the interviewees, it's not as if Morris ever pounds that anxiety onto the spectators' collective head. Instead he mixes circus footage and ant footage together often at times when they're taken out of the context of the circus and the ants, showing a sort of collective absurdity behind what all of these people are talking about. I don't find them absurd, I find them all very neat and interesting individuals.Unless, of course, he didn't intend such juxtapositions, which means he's just a bad craftsman instead of a silent subverter. Considering none of this films I've seen so far have particularly impressed me, I don't really care to find out what he's trying to do.--PolarisDiB