milkriverblog has a new meme:

From a rather huge email list of blog own­ers that i’ve accu­mu­lat­ed, i have writ­ten a mass email chal­leng­ing every­one to post (at least) one movie title — a film they have seen, that they think is won­der­ful, that they would watch over and over, but which is so obscure that the aver­age per­son would not know it by name.

As soon as Tony tagged me, I knew what the movie was.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Con­trol by Errol Mor­ris.

Mor­ris is a mas­ter­ful inter­view­er, and this is prob­a­bly his opus. Splic­ing togeth­er four mar­velous and wide-rang­ing inter­views with a lion-tamer, a top­i­ary artist, a robot sci­en­tist and a biol­o­gist study­ing naked mole rats, Mor­ris cre­ates an arti­fi­cial dia­log about the state of the world, the nature of fame, the process of obso­les­cence, and the human con­di­tion with all its strange twists. The score by Philip Glass is per­fect, and prais­ing Philip Glass takes some­thing out of me.

No review on the inter­net can do jus­tice to Fast, Cheap & Out of Con­trol, and I encour­age – no, require – you to rent, or bet­ter yet buy, this astound­ing film. It’s smart with­out being brainy, it looks back in time with­out weepy nos­tal­gia, it looks for­ward in time with­out being preachy.

The strength of Mor­ris’s unnar­rat­ed films dri­ven entire­ly by the inter­vie­wee’s com­ments (and bril­liant edit­ing) is that it can­not be preachy. The peo­ple say what they have to say, and no mat­ter how he changes the order of their inter­views, their emo­tions and thoughts are only their own. 

Even The Fog of War illus­trat­ed that com­plex­i­ty. Robert McNa­ma­ra is a com­plex fig­ure. His deci­sions as Sec­re­tary of Defense were huge­ly con­tro­ver­sial, and it’s amaz­ing to come out of that lat­est Mor­ris movie which con­sists almost exclu­sive­ly of Glass’s score and McNa­ma­ra’s voice with a deep­er under­stand­ing of McNa­ma­ra’s per­son­al­i­ty and with­out know­ing what exact­ly Mor­ris thinks of it all.

F,C&OoC takes on issues that are at once less weighty but more sig­nif­i­cant, and weaves the fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry of each of his char­ac­ters into the sto­ry of the human race, sci­en­tif­ic progress and art.