1997 - FAST CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL, meet four very interesting people

This is film maker Errol Morris at his peak with this incredibility fascinating film about four men and the unusual occupations they have.  Superficially they have nothing in common but the film is so well edited and paced, this documentary begins to interconnect their lives as you watch it.

Dave Hooper is an animal trainer who works with what they call big cats i.e. lions.  He apparently got the bug as a young man and has spent his life performing in a circus with these frankly scary and dangerous wild animals.  His stories of dealing with these lions in the ring are hair raising.

 

George Mendonca is a topiary gardener who is responsible for a large park in Rhode Island called the Green Animals Topiary Garden which has around eighty sculptured trees.  Mendonca kind of stumbled into the job when he married the daughter of the previous gardener.  This is a guy who has devoted his life to making plants and trees look like animals.  He works on these trees with a zen like devotion to trimming them.

Ray Mendez is a man who has devoted his life to studying a creature called the naked mole rat, mammals who live in underground tunnels and have a highly developed social system.  They are apparently resistant to cancer and can live almost without oxygen.  Mendez has built a complex of tunnels in his basement to observe them and he believes they are at times observing him.

 

Rodney Brooks is an MIT scientist who builds robots and studies how they interact with people and the environment.  He observes how they react to moving around as it relates to hand and eye coordination, sound, and vision which he feels also can explain how the human brain functions.

The fact that Errol Morris can take this stuff and make a really compelling film about four such different individuals is really a tribute to his skill as an interviewer.  The film was photographed by Robert Richardson who later in his career was associated with Quentin Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese.  Fast Cheap & Out of Control is one of the best films I've seen this year. 

The film was edited by  Karen Schmeer and Shondra Merrill, the running time is 82 minutes.