What the #$*! Do We Know? (2004) (AKA
What the Bleep Do We Know)
It's hard to imagine any film, book
or TV program with more ridiculous, new-age, mumbo-jumbo,
psychobabble bullshit than the aptly entitled "What
the #$*! Do We Know?" It's obvious that the purveyors
of garbage that unleashed this tripe on the film-going
public know absolutely #$*!ing nothing about filmmaking,
storytelling and entertaining an audience. The fact
that poor, deaf Marlee Matlin (once best known as
an Academy Award winning actress!) had to stoop to
doing this ridiculous new age trash to get a job shows
just how disrespectful the industry is of thespians
with physical challenges.
There are three things going on
in this film with a title so inane as to be ludicrous.
First there's a plethora of talking head-cases who
try to explain God and quantum physics. If the viewer
takes these know-nothing-at-all's discourse on "the
meaning of life" as valuable or, God-or-whoever help
us, enlightened, their head will begin to spin. While
there is a couple of interesting ideas going on here,
the vast majority of what these people are saying
is so stupid it can only be perceived as something
more by those who have neither the time nor the inclination
to look deeper into their own inherent thoughts on
the subject.
One of the most silly ideas put
forth here is that we, as human beings, cannot recognize
all the possibilities in the world because we haven't
seen them and therefore are in no mental position
to accept them. The anecdote used to demonstrate this
idea is one where the natives who lived in North America
in 1492 could not see Columbus' clipper ships on the
horizon of the ocean when he arrived because they
had never heard of such ships and had never seen them
before, so they were incapable of comprehending such
things and therefore could not see them. This is the
most inane idea I have heard since the presidential
debates. If you find one iota of believability in
this legend, then you deserve to waste eight bucks
on this piece of dung masquerading as a movie.
The rest of the film is filled with
some sort of ridiculous story involving Matlin as
a photographer who lives with a goofy female roommate,
struggles with romantic entanglements and goes to
a wedding. She also has time to have a weird conversation
with a young African-American boy who will surely
be getting a NBA contract very soon, even at 10-years-
old, because he has figured out, apparently with his
understanding of quantum physics, how to be in more
than two places at once with more than two basketballs.
All of the stuff with Matlin is
supposed to be helping us understand all the garbage
the nonsense-talking heads are spewing but most of
it is usually just insipid, poorly filmed, poorly
enacted, D-level storytelling. If you stripped away
the talking head interviews and tried to get this
story with Matlin in a film festival, it is hard to
imagine it ever getting shown. It's just bad. And
boring. The wedding scene goes on forever and has
absolutely nothing to do with what the film is really
trying to say. It's frustrating enough to make a devout
monk turn to atheism.
Worse yet is the third element of
the film, the special effects animation, which is
also used to accent the film. During the talking heads
moments, the special effects act as a sort of a transitory
device to move us through the neurons of thought on
quantum physics and God and such discourse and this
is somewhat acceptable. But during Matlin's moments,
these CGI effects provide gelatinous goop characters,
apparently relatives of the Pillsbury Doughboy and
the Michelin Man (evoking memories of "Ghostbusters"),
who are supposed to illustrate something about human
physiology (or something, it all gets kinda lost in
the lackluster translation).
The worst of these moments has a
Goop-guy emulating the late Robert Palmer (who must
be spinning in his grave) and goo- lip-singing "Addicted
to Love" while spoofing Palmer's music video (replete
with sexy goo-girls in slinky black dresses playing
guitars). It is so pointless one almost slits their
wrists during the scene. Not to discover if there
is or isn't a God but rather to simply end the inanity.
"What the #$*! Do We Know" has got
to be one of the worst films of all time. How this
trash ever found its way to American arthouses is
anyone's guess. The "film," if you can call it that,
has run for several weeks here in Austin proving just
how susceptible to inept marketing even the most intelligent
people can be when the word "Fuck" is removed from
the title of a film and replace with the cartoon euphemism
for "explicative deleted."
Note:
Also with Barry Newman.
With lots of new agey music by Patrick
O'hearn and other artists in the genre.
At one time the film was to be called
"Sacred Science."
Viewed at the Arbor in Austin in
November, 2004
