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July Movie Review

© Karen Yang

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
Directed by Errol Morris
VHS, 90 min.
1997
ASIN: 0800182596

What do naked mole rats, topiary, circus cats and robotics have in common? I'm still not sure, but they're all the subjects of this very strange documentary. Fast, Cheap and Out of Control takes the form of four interviews, which the director interweaves with scenes from old movies and shots of these four men at work. The interviews feature Dave Hoover, a wild animal trainer with Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus; George Mendonca, a gardener from Green Animals Topiary Gardens in Rhode Island; Rodney Brooks, a robot scientist at MIT and Ray Mendez, a mole-rat specialist who built the mole-rat colony exhibit at the Philadelphia Zoo.

The segments with the naked mole rats seem to be shorter than the others are, but maybe it's just because I'm prejudiced and wanted to see more of them. Ray Mendez was very interesting, and I did learn a great deal about these cute little guys from his interview. A few mole rat facts: 1)Mole rats live in very organized colonies like termites or ants, with a queen rat surrounded by worker rats. Everything they do is done for the survival of the colony - the life of the individual is expendable if it will save the rest of the group. 2) They are also very social creatures who sing and chirp to communicate. 3) Naked mole rats can chew through just about anything, including concrete, which makes it difficult to build homes that they'll stay in. Mendez completely won me over when he said, "As many people will move because they live in a rat or mouse or vermin infested home, for me it's a whole other issue. I actually moved with my vermin to make sure that they would always be with me wherever I go." What a guy!

While the mole rats were enjoyable and cute, I found the rest of the movie a bit tedious. I did like the robotics segments, and they seemed to mesh with the mole rat bits somewhat more than the rest. Rodney Brooks was very good at explaining robot movement and how he was trying to get robots to co-operate to achieve goals - like insects or mole rats. The topiary artist was rather dull, although the gardens were beautiful. And I really didn't enjoy the lion tamer at all, but then I hate circuses, and the concept of "taming" those gorgeous wild cats is appalling to me. I'm sure the director was trying to say something deep and important through this movie, but I just couldn't quite grasp what it was. His choice of camera shots was strange, and I found his repeatedly showing a circus scene or a scene from an old movie while one of the other men was talking very distracting. Perhaps he was trying to draw parallels between these men's lives and how each was trying in his own way to tame or make sense of the natural world, but quite frankly the message was pretty much lost on me. I was left wondering what exactly was fast, cheap and out of control other than the director's sense of timing.