Jeffrey Overstreet - Looking Closer

What the #$*! Do We Know? aims to blow your mind: a worthy goal, and one that should surely be in some way the goal of any film: to expand our vision, our sense of the world, our possibilities – as C. S. Lewis says, to help us see with other eyes and so “enlarge our being.” The jumping-off place here is the admittedly mind-blowing world of cutting-edge science: mostly subatomic physics and biochemistry at the mind-body frontier. But it’s not just an educational film: the filmmakers share a common sense that the way most of us have been looking at the world for a long time is no longer working, that human beings everywhere are seeking some kind of breakthrough to a new way of seeing. So far so good, and off we go – at light speed: zipping on CGI roller-coasters through micro and macro universes, all cut with self-consciously “contemplative” sequences like fast-motion traffic and slow-motion water drops, a nominal narrative, and talking head interviews.

The narrative stars Marlee Martin as a photographer with nagging personal issues who seeks understanding and inner peace. The fact the actress is deaf (recall her signature role 1986's Children of a Lesser God) makes the effort to understand and communicate somewhat more compelling, though we never forget this sporadic little drama is staged to illustrate the points made in the documentary portions. The interviews feature experts in a variety of fields – psychologists, physicists, theologians – all energetic and upbeat, and a bit urgent: the effect at times is of a feature-length infomercial.

What the Bleep Do We Know? (as the title is sometimes given, though I’ve actually also seen it rendered What the F***…), makes much of what is known as “Quantum Physics.” Before we consider whether the film makes too much of Quantum Physics, let’s pause and consider what that phrase means. Indeed, for all the attention here on Quantum Physics, the sheer number of times the words “Quantum Physics” are invoked like a magical formula, the film doesn’t do a very good job sketching the landscape wherein discussion of Quantum Physics might most profitably occur. Not like we’ll be able to do the concept much justice here. But the very short version is this: subatomic particles manifest bizarrely paradoxical and unpredictable behavior as compared to the world of larger bodies, the world explained by “Classical” or “Newtonian” physics.

Furthermore, and most-pertinent to this film’s commitment to paradigm-busting, there’s the undeniable fact that Classical Physics dominated – even came to characterize – the previous and increasingly passé era, or Modernity. Classical Physics created both a solid foundation for the Scientific Revolution, but also (as not a few have felt over the years) a deterministic cage for the human spirit. Over the past century, the news that reality is actually much stranger than Isaac Newton ever dreamed has been received like an emergency canister of oxygen among those who’ve felt trapped and suffocated by the deterministic laws of his so-called “clockwork” universe. But for those accustomed to a reality that “makes sense,” the whacked-out world of Quantum Physics is indeed a trip down the rabbit hole, which is where this film keeps telling us we’re going.

Now, going “post” modernity is a project I have a good deal of sympathy for, and I find myself as a rule more interested in what I think is right with New Age thinking than what others think is wrong with it. At the same time, I’m well aware that into that quantum rabbit hole have jumped all manner of folk – muscling past armies of awe-struck physicists and lay people like me: multitudes of philosophers, theologians, mystics and hucksters have been busy for some time trying to leverage the unknowns of the Quantum World to sell all manner of causes and products. Indeed, amid the relatively dry deserts of scientific inquiry has sprung up a veritable Vegas of New Age lounge acts, powering their metaphysical strip with the reflected glow of hard science.

(For some reason I find myself suddenly thinking of King Arthur’s question in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes…” “Of course, my liege…”)

When it comes to Quantum Physics, What the #$*! breezes past any careful context-framing and hits the ground running, grabbing key concepts and rattling off bizarre phenomena in a frantic race to make quantum leaps to particular metaphysical conclusions. The filmmakers keep lots of balls in the air and aspire to the impression that it’s all a matter of hard science. As I tried to keep my eye on the balls, I was reminded of Michael Moore and his Saudis. Hey, I’m one of those people who thinks something fishy IS going on with the Saudis. But I also think I might need a few more puzzle pieces before I care to make a guess as to what it is. Likewise, with Quantum Mechanics. Yes, the subatomic world is as weird as Wonderland, but to use that as quasi-scientific evidence that there is no god, that there is no good or evil, that we create reality with our consciousness – let’s just say the effort to sneak in metaphysical conclusions with physical facts was tripped up by some residual logic I’ve managed to bring with me into the new paradigm.

The talking heads in Bleep are unidentified until the close credits, and when we learn who they are we realize the spectrum of expertise runs from the more mainstream alternative medicine (if that’s not an oxymoron) to “Ramtha,” the 35,000 year old warrior-spirit channeled by one J. Z. Knight. Among the former group is Candace Pert, a neuroscientist at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, who makes some fascinating points about the connection between thinking and feeling that clearly have implications for both our mental and physical health – a sort of “reality creation” which seems a promising direction for those who seeking inner peace.

At least one of the film’s roster of more mainstream experts has, since the film’s release, let it be known his comments were taken out of context. According to a recent article in Salon.com Columbia University physics professor David Albert says he’s currently preparing a response to the film, which he says edited his interview to make it appear he was supporting views he does not.

Indeed, judging from Salon’s devastating expose, the figure at the center of the film’s creation is J. Z. Knight, quite possibly the New Age’s answer to Tammy Faye Baker, heads the “Ramtha School of Enlightenment,” one of the more gaudy and successful palaces on the New Age Vegas strip. A fount of books, tapes, and seminars, the Ramtha school preaches pretty much the message of this film – consciousness creates reality, we’re all of us gods, etc. Funding for the $5 million Bleep, reports Salon, came from co-director William Arntz, whose software program AutoSys made him a fortune in the mid-1990s. (Arntz has a history of strange New Agey connections, Salon adds, citing a 1999 Wired magazine article on the original funder of AutoSys, who claimed to have taught meditation in Atlantis and died under mysterious circumstances.)

Religious critics have already been savaging the film as a New Age Trojan Horse. Certainly, it does seem extremely interesting that a film that was devoted to urging viewers to create their own reality in their preferred image should suddenly flip-flop and become dogmatic about the objective reality of God. Or, more precisely, of asserting that God is nothing like he’s been presented by the Christian faith. No doubt, it’s pretty easy to be sympathetic to the ongoing project of disentangling the Christian faith from Modernity. But it also seems comically hypocritical that Ramtha should remark on how it was “the height of arrogance” to create God in one’s own image, even as she (or he? J. Z. Knight is a woman, but I forget Ramtha’s gender.) was doing just that.

Despite any hopes the film’s producers might have for provoking a Passion-like controversy, my guess is that What the Bleep will pass through the culture without leaving much of a ripple. Of course, the film does tell the story of how the first Native Americans to meet Columbus couldn’t at first see his ships on the horizon, because they had absolutely no pre-existing categories by which to process such a vista. (True, this anecdote is presented more as a fact than a myth in the film, but we’ll let that go.) It was only after the village shaman saw the ripples and announced that the ships were actually there, could the people finally see them. Obviously,Bleep wants to work the same way, pointing out realities so unprecedented that the rest of us haven’t yet been able to take them in. And it’s probably true that many people still haven’t yet been able to place the mind-boggling revelations about the subatomic world on their map of reality. This film may, in fact, be the first time a lot of viewers have ever heard of Quantum Physics.

But despite the peppy pressure to see what everybody else is missing, I think most viewers know enough to keep in mind that other story about seeing the invisible, the one with the naked emperor. Indeed, I doubt most audiences will swallow everything in this film whole, neither quantum fact nor New Age fancy. What some may end up doing is writing off the quantum facts, and that would be too bad. For the facts of quantum mechanics really are amazing. A good faith presentation of those facts – without any particular New Age agenda – would have succeeded in achieving at least one of the filmmakers’ goals: blowing the viewers minds. Even some speculations at the metaphysical edge by an open-minded physicist like Paul Davies wouldn’t have been out of place, as long as they were presented as questions and guesses rather than as answers.

But What the Bleep Do We Know only tries to break viewers out of one box so they can be put into another, an obvious maneuver that tends to short-circuit any would-be mind-blowing. Part Waking Life, part I Am Joe’s Neural Network, part Est Seminar, this often-entertaining film offers lots of great questions and some true facts, but all woven together with a fair amount of horse bleep.
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Mike Hertenstein gives this film 1 star out of 5 (for some cool animation).

by Jeffrey Overstreet

Sam Phillips - The Official Site

Twenty years after I started listening to her, my favorite singer/songwriter in the world has an official Web site.

Finally.Read more

by Jeffrey Overstreet

Hero (2002)

[This review was originally published at Christianity Today.]

The Grand Canyon. The Northern Lights. Van Gogh's sunflowers. We've all been stricken speechless by vivid displays of color. For me, there's the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the shimmering metallic blue of Pacific Ocean waves at twilight; the day I discovered first-hand that ladybugs sometimes hibernate on mountaintops, clustered together in masses, blood red against white snow (hard to believe, but true).

To that list of awe-inspiring and vividly colorful experiences, I'd have to add the first time I saw Zhang Yimou's Hero on the big screen.

It's strange to consult a thesaurus for words that mean "beautiful" while I'm writing a review of a martial arts epic. But that's what Hero does to its audience. The gravity-defying duels between swordsmen are some of the most spectacular you'll ever see. An all-star team of China's most talented screen actors delivers performances of astounding physical skill and delicate emotion. Adventures, debates, epic battles, and revenge quests weave together into a complex tapestry. And the soundtrack by Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is lush and stirring. But those colors …

Sometimes, we miss out on the best films merely because they're "foreign." Hero sat neglected on the shelf at Miramax for two years while gaining popularity in China and with fans of Hong Kong cinema who got hold of import DVDs. Those responsible for stalling it should be rounded up and fired. It won an Oscar nomination in 2003 while still unreleased in the States, but the Academy voters who didn't give it a fair shake should be ashamed of themselves. If you miss seeing Hero on the big screen, you have missed one of the peaks of cinematic spectacle.

Perhaps political bias stifled the film's exhibition. Hero is one of those rare works of art that serves both as an intimate character drama and as a national myth. While Zhang Yimou was not commissioned to make Hero by the Chinese government, the movie would have made such an investment worth every penny. It is surpassingly excellent in every technical category. But there have been murmurs of discontent in China over whether or not the director is paying homage to Chinese Imperialism. And indeed he does portray a tyrannical king as wise and conscientious. But he also offers devastating displays of destruction unleashed by that same conqueror. The conflicts occur between the "warring states" of China, circa 220 B.C. Aiming to become emperor, the King of the country of Qin, Chin Shi Huang Di (played with authority by Chen Dao Ming), crushes the cultures of six opposing regions to gain supremacy.

This portrayal of violence and brutality runs counter to a wholesale endorsement of imperialism. Hero is about the way that the spread of an empire can all too easily devalue and destroy the valuable distinctions defined by the language, personality, and artistry of differing cultures. In direct contrast to the film's colorful characters, the King's armies drain color from the screen. They're like minions of Tolkien's orcs—dark and cold—and the King oversees this like a contemplative spider at the center of a web, where he too is haunted by the cost of his campaign.

As the film opens, the king honors a warrior called Nameless, who has slain three famous assassins that threatened the throne during the conquest. The reward: a private meeting with the king. This hero, played perfectly by international martial arts legend Jet Li, grants the king's wish; he relates the stories of how he outwitted these legendary killers—Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Sky (Donnie Yen).

In the style of Rashomon, Nameless's stories are offered to us in multiple, contradictory flashbacks. Each story he relates raises the king's suspicion and requires a revision. Thus, Nameless and his targets are portrayed in a variety of relationships, sometimes meeting different fates. Each enthralling flashback is portrayed in a distinct array of colors.

In one, Nameless and Sky meet in a spectacular duel that's as much a match between their minds as it is between their blades. In another, Nameless helps Broken Sword and Flying Snow defend a calligraphy school from the oncoming forces of the king's warriors. This involves deflecting relentless torrents of arrows that are launched in a siege that resembles the ferocity of The Two Towers' Battle of Helm's Deep. Nameless opposes this siege in order to gain the killers' trust, to learn their weakness, and to defeat them using their own passions for one another. Zhang Ziyi, sporting the same youthful ego and impertinence that she portrayed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, plays a key role here as Broken Sword's servant, Moon. Two more astonishing clashes—one a breathtaking ballet in a storm of falling yellow leaves, the other a battle on the surface of a magnificent lake—are each worth the price of admission; it's unlikely you'll see anything so memorable all year.

But the most important clash is the one between the hero's narratives and the king's questioning. Nameless is clearly superior to those whose weapons he has claimed and set down before the king. But what has made him such an unparalleled warrior? And what will he ask of the king now that he has performed this feat as a volunteer?

To say more about the plot would be to spoil the story's most interesting twist. And besides, there is much to say in honor of the cast and crew.

Nameless is a perfect role for Jet Li. The part asks little of his acting talents (fortunately) and much from his athletic abilities. Similarly, Donnie Yen (Blade II, Shanghai Knights) turns Sky into a man who gets right down to business, letting his sword do the talking.

The juiciest roles go to Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who earned acclaim for playing as the leads of Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. Here, they embody one of the most tempestuous romances in the annals of film. United with a passion for excellence both in art and in combat, but divided by political ambitions, Broken Sword and Flying Snow swoon, argue, duel, dance, and smash each others' hearts to pieces. Their director intensifies their emotions with colorful backdrops—blood reds, emerald greens, the white of sun-bleached sands. Are there any American actors who are as multi-talented as Leung, Cheung, and Zhang Ziyi, able to move our hearts, tantalize our minds, and then kick our butts with acrobatic fight scenes? They don't just deserve Oscars—give them Olympic medals!

But the true masters of the show are Zhang Yimou and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle (The Quiet American, In the Mood for Love). They find rarely seen backdrops in China that rival the New Zealand landscapes of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

Zhang gets a lot of support from Oscar-winner Emi Wada's extraordinary costume design. Production designer Tingxiao Huo brings this ancient world to life, so that the armies riding through the gates of the cities seem to be charging right out of the history books. Itzhak Perlman's soulful violin stands out against the stormy backdrop of the Kodo Drummers's drums in Tan Dun's soundtrack. (The themes are too similar to his work for Crouching Tiger, but then again, they're perfectly suited to the material.)

Zhang has a long list of marvelous films, including Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, both of which earned him Oscar nominations, and the recent, romantic short story The Road Home. He calls To Live (1994) his most important movie, and it's true—that epic about family and hardship in Chinese history is his most accomplished work of storytelling. But Hero is his masterpiece of visual imagination.

While it is almost impossible to discuss Hero without comparing it to Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, that's only because American viewers are unfamiliar with a genre called wuxia—a decades-old tradition of Chinese martial arts films. If they must be compared, yes, both feature warriors with the supernatural abilities to run up walls and bound through the treetops; but Crouching Tiger is more melancholy and romantic, whereas the action and spectacle in Hero make Ang Lee's film look like a high school play.

Hero also burns with immediacy and relevance. As China struggles with the division between Beijing and Taiwan, Zhang Yimou poses a heartfelt challenge. He acknowledges the value of unification and peace. He knows that militant resistance of the empire's progress can lead only to more violence and loss. But he reminds the viewer that the peculiarity of unique, diverse cultures produces valuable, irreplaceable rewards … and people. It is as if the storyteller cannot find a satisfactory conclusion to his own epic.

Thus, American viewers may be unsettled by the conclusion, as there seems to be no room for democracy in Hero's paradigm. In a worldview that reveres the will of a conqueror over the will of a benevolent God, "peace" comes at a cost that will give no one true peace. That is why, in the end, Hero remains a conflicted, colorfully turbulent film. By the time the climactic challenge occurs, few will find themselves unmoved by the king's good intentions; but after his bloody campaigns, he is not the man who earns the title "hero."

Seen in this light, Hero's distinct, aerobatic duels come to represent the power of art to communicate ideas across borders and languages, from common people to kings, emperors, and presidents. The story's emphasis on the art of calligraphy is connected to its exhibitions of swordsmanship—in developing an artful style of writing, Broken Sword and Flying Snow prove that the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword. This metaphor, along with the film's explorations of conscience, fidelity, trust, and responsibility, make Hero ultimately an insightful and rewarding achievement.

2004 doesn't have a new Lord of the Rings film to fill the screen with bedazzlement and wonder. But it does have Hero. Do yourself the favor of catching it on the big screen. And leave yourself plenty of time to discuss it with your friends afterward. It may be two years old, but it's still the richest cinematic feast on American movie screens so far this year.

Note: Near the end of the film, a character delivers an important message in two words—"Our land." In the Chinese version, there are actually three words—"All under heaven." Zhang Yimou changed it out of concern that it would not translate properly. Frankly, I prefer "All under heaven."

by Jeffrey Overstreet

J. Robert Parks - Live From the Toronto International Film Festival

J. Robert Parks, who provides many reviews for Looking Closer when I'm not able to catch a film and write about it in time, is in Toronto for the film festival, and he has an ambitious screening list.Read more

by Jeffrey Overstreet