November 13–20, 1997

movie shorts|new stuff

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

(recommended)

The unlikely connections between a lion tamer, a robot scientist, an expert on African mole-rats and a topiary gardener are the subject of the latest movie by Thin Blue Line director Errol Morris, who once again runs rampant over the boundaries of documentary filmmaking. Fast, Cheap is a form of subjective history which explores the affective links between seemingly unrelated figures in an attempt to create what Morris calls "an everyman story." Most obviously, all four men are involved in a project to understand and eventually control natural forces, a struggle made to seem both absurd and noble. But it's the unexpected, glancing connections between the men that make the strongest impression, and the sudden turn toward elegy at film's end which lingers in the mind. Like other Morris films, Fast, Cheap flirts with self-consciousness to the extent that its subjects sometimes seem to get lost in the shuffle, and cinematographer Robert Richardson's phantasmagorical style—familar from Natural Born Killers and U Turn—is, as always, fascinating verging on intolerable. Its occasional smugness aside, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control is like nothing else ever made, and is probably the purest expression of Errol Morris' quirky, rhapsodic art.

-Sam Adams

(Roxy)