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Reviews
Killing Zoe (1993)
Ouch! It's amateur night.
What an atrocity. I am not one to demand total verisimilitude from a movie, but the plot and screenplay of "Killing Zoe" are so artless that I found myself wincing through the entire (mercifully short) ninety minutes of the film.
Readers of these reviews will by now have figured out the plot: Zoe, a call girl who falls in love with American safecracker Zed, is also an employee at the bank that Zed will help rob in a high-stakes Bastille Day heist.
The film strains one's credibility from the get-go. Zed and Zoe's night of magic is highly prosaic, and Zoe's claims to have experienced the orgasm of a lifetime would seem to reflect the screenwriter's lingering teenage fantasies more than any actual on-screen chemistry. Zed's complete indifference when his friend Eric throws Zoe out of the hotel room hardly sets the stage for their later strong attachment.
In act two, Eric's band of bohemians--drug-addled losers leading a marginal life of petty crime--prepare for their big heist with a night on the town. Here Roger Avary's main goal seems to be to prove that he knows something about drugs. A secondary thread involves convincing us (by endless repetition) that Eric is really, REALLY glad to see his old friend Zed again. Really glad. Eric's devil-may-care, over-the-top flamboyance and affection for Zed isn't even remotely believable--check out, for example, his phony bemusement at discovering a dead cat in his apartment building. Development of the characters who will accompany us through the rest of the film is an afterthought.
The heist is a disaster--understandable, since the plan is laughable and the criminals are complete amateurs. This is where Avary continues to pay tribute to his idol Quentin Tarantino by showing that he can be more violent than violent. In reality, though, he's just more boring than boring. To build up the excitement, there is an extra security guard hidden inside the main safe. This was boring in video games, and it's boring now.
Zoe is taken hostage during the heist but despite our expectation that she'll play a pivotal role, she just sits pretty. Or more precisely, Avary fails to do anything with her. In literally the last five minutes she springs to life, breaks the hostage situation and saves the grateful, but still dazed Zed from suffering any consequences of his crime. Why she doesn't mind his involvement in the crime--or why she gives a damn about him at all--is impossible to tell. After all, she's had no chance to see that he's any more decent than the rest of the gang.
Throughout, the dialogue is stilted and phony. Much of it is in French. As a native speaker, I can certify that it doesn't ring even remotely true. Eric's sugary-sweet discourse, rapidly alternating with tough-guy boasting, is meant to be at turns charming and scary, but is instead just grating. Meanwhile his scaredy-cat accomplices are more Scooby-Doo than Thomas Crown. When Eric is gunned down in a ludicrous example of excessive force, we can all breathe a sigh of relief: like the bank hostages, we will soon be freed from this miserable ordeal.
What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)
Woolly and nearly worthless
"What the #$*! Do We Know!?" combines interviews with New-Age "scientists" with a mildly interesting dramatized storyline, all with the aim of showing the role of quantum consciousness in human life. From a basic but extremely incomplete exposition of quantum principles, the film continues on to deliver a clichéd self-help message: it's all in your head, you can change your life if you have the willpower. The end product is garbled, misleading and ultimately fairly dangerous.
It would be irresponsible to review, or even to mention, this movie without stating up front that it was produced by individuals associated with the "Ramtha School of Consciousness", widely accepted to be a cult. Ramtha is said to be a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by J.Z. Knight, who features prominently in the movie. The movie is essentially a manifesto for this cult's nutty beliefs. All of the "scientists" interviewed in the movie are connected with this cult in some way, with the exception of the unfortunate David Albert, who claims his recorded statements were taken out of context and manipulated to support the filmmaker's points.
The film's basic premise is that quantum-mechanical behavior dominates the universe and bears directly on our lives; in particular, quantum uncertainty makes available to us a wide variety of courses of action (including walking on water and curing mental illness). We need only develop sufficient willpower to direct our lives in the direction we want, rather than falling into a rut as we normally do. Almost every point the film makes in the area of quantum mechanics could be disputed; rather than getting into a blow-by-blow discussion, I will make only a few points.
First, quantum mechanics is almost impossible to translate into human language; anyone who has studied physics knows that the equations really are indispensable for understanding the theory. Thus even a mainstream explication of quantum theory would be treading on thin ice.
Second, the many-universes interpretation of quantum mechanics--heavily drawn upon in the movie--is by no means universally accepted by theorists. In fact, most of the film's scientific claims would be disputed by mainstream science. This is not a tyranny of the majority; it reflects the basic fact that ideas stand or fall on their merits in the scientific arena. Of course, holders of minority opinions have always responded that the mainstream is just shutting them out. My personal opinion: if your points are so valid, it should be easy for you to prove them to me in a way I can believe.
Third, it is simply wrong to claim that quantum behavior dominates the physical world on the scale at which we experience it. Macroscopic objects do not exhibit quantum behavior; this is why the quantum theory was developed so much later than classical physics. The de Broglie wavelength of macroscopic objects (roughly speaking, the distance scale on which they exhibit quantum-mechanical behavior) is vanishingly small. Thus the language of quantum mechanics is not useful for discussing our everyday life, except in the well-trodden metaphorical sense.
The biological claims made by the movie are only moderately reasonable. The film's discussion of receptor biology (my area of professional activity) is not entirely without value but the proposed epigenetic effects (neurons up-regulate less-used receptors, and this level of regulation is passed on to daughter cells) are illogical. CNS neurons are generally considered to be post-mitotic. The discussion of neuropeptides is imprecise and is dominated by an obsession with addictive states. The ultimate message, that positive thinking can improve one's life, is something we already knew.
Throughout the film, various experiments are discussed; these are drawn from a rogue's gallery of discredited and in some cases (the Emoto water study) blatantly fraudulent studies that do not stand up to scrutiny.
This film has been praised for being so thought-provoking. Most people mean that the content--accepted hook, line, and sinker--is serious food for thought. I would argue that the film's only value is rather in providing copious target practice for sharpening one's baloney detection skills.