Director: Ron Fricke
Documentary

- Reviewed by Tom

First of all, this movie has no plot, although there are some hidden meanings in it I think. The movie is basically a 90-minute feast for the eyes, ears and ass (see subwoofer comments below).

The movie is about nature, humanity, religion and... uh... some jobs that really suck. There seems to be an alternating theme that goes back and forth between nature, primitive and modern people.

The interesting thing is that just about all the people in the movie could easily fit into either the primitive or modern cultures since they seemed so similar. The primitive people were doing their thing - whatever it is they do - and they all had the same blank expressions on their faces. The modern cultures were going about their own daily activities - only the the whole thing was in time-lapse photography causing everything to look much more rushed. But when some of those rushing people stopped to look at the camera, they could have easily been mirrors of the primitive people, but wearing more clothes, no paint all over their faces, and the same blank expression. Fascinating!

For instance, there was one scene where a monk walked painfully slowly down a street in a city in Japan. He rang a bell between each slow footstep, while everyone else was rushed around him like he wasn't there. Kind of a mix of the old and new cultures in one. One of my favorite scenes was a speeded-up view of a large amount of people crossing a very busy street over and over again. As for the jobs that suck, one image was a factory in a less-developed country with a giant room of people making cigarettes. The next scene was a guy in a modern factory putting rubber bands around pulleys of what appeared to be the insides of  VCRs. The film was speeded up so in about a minute, you saw this poor guy assemble about 20 of these things!  I never did figure out what was going on with the factory with the baby chickens though.

Take the Earthlight DVD (90 minutes of music and Earth orbit images), Pink Floyd: The Wall (great music and strange plot) and mix in a little bit of Lisa Gerrard's style of music, and you have an idea of what the movie is like!

This would be a great movie to get on DVD since I think it would make a great demo disk for your 5.1 Surround Sound.  Also, I thought my subwoofer was going to burst into flames!  This DVD has the most powerful bass in a DVD that I have come across yet.  I had to turn the subwoofer way down and it was still thumping pretty hard. Time to upgrade my subwoofer! :-)

I'll add this DVD to my growing list of need-to-get-sometime movies for my collection.

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