What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
2004

(NOTE: I don't want people to think that I gave this film five stars so I gave it half a star to make it more obvious when really it deserves no stars. I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone unless you want to test your critical thinking skills, or maybe if you enjoy infomercials, because that's really what this film is: an infomercial for New Age bullshit. It pretends to be a documentary but really it's a propaganda film by a CULT!!!)

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? was recommended to me last year by Donna Segal, who thought I'd be interested to see the CG anatomical "fly-through" animations that peppered the film because I was working on a similar CG "fly-through" a bloodstream. Since I have a habit of hijacking conversations and frequently steering them towards science and/or philosophy, I suspect Donna was also curious about how I would react to the film's claims and implications.

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (aka What the BLEEP Do We Know aka WTFDWK) is an overlong infomercial for New Age nonsense posing as a documentary. It mixes pseudo-science with psycho-babble as it first asks the question "What the fuck do we know?", then answers with "not much." (Ultimately the film decides that someone or something, namely "god," does indeed know everything that we don't, but more on that later)

Though the filmmakers are trying to suggest that we, all of humanity, know very little about the "real" world, all they are really demonstrating is that they themselves are ignorant.

They blatantly misrepresent the known science of quantum mechanics by interviewing theoretical physicists, like Fred Alan Wolf and Amit Goswami, whose claims about the relationship between the universe and consciousness are extremely fringe and NOT at all accepted as fact by most physicists. CG-laden dramatizations of quantum principles, like wave-particle duality and Heisenberg uncertainty, mislead the audience into believing the contradiction that it is impossible to know anything and yet anything is possible.

One of the film's supposed "experts" claims that it is possible to "walk on water" if a person only believes it possible.

Another absurd claim the filmmakers make is that matter and the physical world can be affected by thoughts and emotions. The example given in the film is the work of Masaru Emoto, who alleges that water can be influenced by thoughts. Emoto's findings have long since been discredited by the scientific community for his refusal to repeat the experiments following proper scientific methods, specifically double blinding, but the filmmakers ignore the fact that Emoto's a quack and they go so far as to misrepresent his unscientific findings even further to make them seem more mystical.

The film shows a closeup picture of muddy dam water and then shows a magnified photo of the same water after it has been "blessed" by a monk. Miraculously, the formerly disgusting murk has transformed into a beautiful ice crystal (i.e. a snowflake). What the filmmakers fail to mention (quite intentionally) is that Emoto FROZE the fucking water!!! They also forget this freezing fact when showing pictures of bottled water with various labels on the side like "chi of love," "thank you" and "you make sick I will kill you." Again, as though through supernatural intervention, the water that was labeled with postive messages turned into snowflakes after being "left out overnight" and those labeled with negative words turned into jagged blobs.

And again, the filmmakers neglect to mention that the bottled water was frozen, and then photographed by people who knew what the labels on the water said and therefore the photographers knew which sort of ice crystals to look for.

But the biggest bunch of bullshit spewed by the filmmakers is the implication that if positive or negative thoughts could have such an effect on water, then naturally these thoughts can have a direct effect on humans, since afterall, as the film reminds us, that "90% of our bodies are water." No that's not a typo. The film actually makes the factual error that the human body is composed of 90% water, even though, in reality, the human body is only between 78% to 55% water, depending on age and sex.

If the filmmakers can't even get a simple widely-known fact like the human body's chemical composition right, then it's not that surprising to hear them make up history by claiming that Columbus' ships were invisible to Native Americans because the natives had no prior knowledge of large boats and so they were unable to see them until they were told that the ships existed by their "shaman." This nonsense is both historically unfounded and a gross misrepresentation of epistemology.

But why would the filmmakers misrepresent science and flat out lie to their audience?! Well as it turns out, they have a hidden agenda: the promotion of a New Age cult.

That's right, I said "cult."

I knew something was fishy when the film starts preaching about god near the end. After misrepresenting science during the first part of the film, the makers of What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? covertly shift gears and gradually try to convince the audience that scientists are arrogant to think that universe can be explained without god.

See, the "expert" featured most prominently in the film is a charismatic blonde woman (wearing way too much makeup) who dispenses great words of wisdom like "it only takes one sexual fantasy for a man to have a hard on." But it isn't until the end credits that we learn who this woman is and what sort of credentials qualifiy her to make any of her scientific and ultimately spiritual claims. As it turns out, the credits don't really tell us much, only that the woman is "Ramtha, Master Teacher - Ramtha School of Enlightenment, Channeled by JZ Knight."

I was curious just what the fuck "channeled by JZ Knight" meant, so after consulting wikipedia, I learned that the blonde talking head in the film belongs to alleged psychic JZ Knight, but the words coming out of her mouth are credited to Ramtha, 35,000 year-old spirit, "channeled" through Knight, who claims that Ramtha was a Lemurian warrior who fought against the Atlatians [as in "Atlantis" (as in "the lost city of")].

What a load of steaming bullshit!!!

Not surprisingly, the three directors of the film, William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente, are admitted students of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment and the concepts of the film, including the final part about spirituality, are all consistent with the "teachings" of this cult.

Now I don't know if any of the film's other so-called "experts" (a chiropractor, an anesthesiologist, and a graduate student among others) have any association with RSE and the film itself never specifically mentions Ramtha or RSE (except in the credits), so I guess the film cannot be labelled explicitly as a recruitment film, but it's definitely stealth propaganda disguised as a serious scientific documentary. Sadly, the film has won several awards in the documentary category. Maybe Scientologists should've tried the same strategy for their scifi epic Battlefield Earth...

Still, I need to thank Donna for recommending this film to me. It is definitely thought-provoking (and anger-provoking), and it further solidifies my resolution in the scientific method by exposing the utter nonsense that results in deviating from it.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
dir. Ngai Kai Lam
1991

(yes, that's right, I gave it HALF a star out of five!)

Remember these images?!

Craig Kilborn used these gory scenes as part of his "5 Questions" segment intro on the Daily Show back in the day before Jon Stewart replaced Kilby as host and made the show all funny and informative. He might've even used it on the Late Late Show too, but I prefer Conan so I only really watched it when there was a band or a comedian on that I liked, although I watch the Late Late Show a bit more now that Craig Ferguson is hosting cuz that guy is hilarious, but I'm getting sidetracked.

Anyway, after watching a gory video clip that was circulating around the internet under the false pretense that it was Bruce Lee clip, I discovered that the clip, as well as the 5 Questions clips, is from a Gore-Fu flick called Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

Riki-Oh is far and away one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and yet, for some reason, I couldn't stop watching it, even after I knew it was complete shit.

It's an 90 mins of blood, guts, mutilation and gore, gore, gore. Well actually, there's probably less than 5 minutes total of genuine gore. The rest of the film concerns a sappy revenge plot in a "franchised" prison. The drama is idiodic, the humor is retarded, the action is weak, and the gore is beyond cheesy. Even the music is crappy (check out this clip from the theme song). The film is all about shock, but most of the "shocking" stuff is downright laughable.

The climactic fist-fight between Riki-Oh and the warden-turned-rubbery-monster is so cheesy that it makes all the preceding plastic heads and limp dummies look realistic.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

I wish I'd read this detailed film summary at I-Mockery.com instead of wasting an hour and a half on this shit...

... oh alright, it's not THAT bad. If there's anything redeemable about the film, Riki-Oh is probably an ideal film to have on in the background at a party. No wait, I take that back. There's too much unnessecary muscle flexing, lame-ass flute playing, and mind-numbing filler dialog in the film to be interesting enough no matter how high your blood-acohol level gets. Maybe if just the gory parts were editted together with some other clips from other GORE-FU films, if such a genre really exists, it'd make the perfect party background video loop.

The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
dir. Mark Steensland
2001

Boring. I'm really surprised by how bored I was watching this documentary about someone as infinitely fascinating as Philip K. Dick.

The interviews with Dick's surviving friends are marginally interesting, but they could've used some heavy editing. I think the editing was what made the film so boring. The crappy animations that set up each segment were way too slow, repetitive, sloppy, ugly, and just plain unnecessary (they were time filler really). Then there was the totally irrelevant interview with the librarian who explained in meticulous detail the entire process one might go through if someone wanted to read Dick's original manuscripts. And then there was the webmaster of the (now-defunked) site PKD Slept Here, who rambled on and on about how Russian adoration of the poet Pushkin was his inspiration for his PDK commemorating website, without actually talking about his website at all. And then there was the webmaster of philipkdick.com (now philipkdickfans.com), who listed just about every damn thing about his website.

Aside from a few semi-intriguing Dick related anecdotes, the only thing in film that really sparked my interest was about how Dick, after a failed suicide attempted, remarked that he'd almost "pulled a Sterling," in reference to the poet George Sterling, who killed himself using the cyanide pill which he carried in his pocket because he believed that "A prison becomes a home when you have the key."

If I had a cyanide pill in my pocket while watching this documentary, I just might've used that "key" to free myself from the "prison" of amateurish filmmaking.

Luckily, the film didn't ruin my interest in PDK and his strange and wonderful fiction. I really do need to read more PDK.

Son of the Mask
dir. Lawrence Guterman

Since I kinda sorta "worked" on the film, I got to go to a "Cast & Crew" screening of Son of the Mask tonight with the rest of the Gang. I started my internship near the end of the film's production, so I didn't get a credit (though Régis did :b) but I got to meet the director, Lawrence Guterman, during one of my visits to the visual effects editor.

Having seen some stuff during production, I had horrible expectations for the movie, and I guess all in all it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought, but it's by no means a good film. I'm a fan of the Mask comic, and I loved the first Mask film, but this film was 10 years too late and loaded with misfired gross-out humor.

Alan Cumming and the animation sequences we did were the only redeeming things about the film. I expected more from the effects, expecially considering the advancements in CGI in the last 10 years. I guess it's a testament to just how groundbreaking the effects were in the first film cuz they were just as good as many of the FX in this sequel. The CG dog was pretty good (decent animation) but the CG baby was hideous.

The biggest problem was teh script. Too many jokes fell flat and the pseudo-dramatic scenes were so out of place. I realize the film is being marketed as a "family film" and while it tries so hard to present a theme of "family togetherness", it pales in comparison to a much funnier, more action-packed, more heart-felt masterpiece like The Incredibles.

Despite the film being underwhelming, I still had fun cuz it was FREE and it really could have been much much worse.

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