What the Bleep Do We Know?

Last year's small-scale sleeper success entitled "What the Bleep Do We Know?" is part documentary, part drama, part comedy, part New Age hooey, part religious, part spiritual, and part 9th grade science educational video. In a sense, it's an amalgam of quantum physics, spirituality, and bad acting, accompanied by documentary interviews from some pretty smart and some pretty nutso "scholars" out teaching in the world today.

After starting out promising--where it appears the movie is going to be more of a documentary rather than following any real, concrete narrative--it slowly slips into the bad kind of weirdness that no one eventually would want to attach their name to. Sure some parts are fascinating and do make us think and I love how the movie explores how quantum physics is so closely related and intertwined with the traditional Christian worldview, BUT at some point (and I'm not sure exactly where or when---maybe when Marlee Matlin was screaming at herself in the mirror and smearing toothpaste all over the mirror and just hitting at it in some fit of rage that makes the audience ask, "what the bleep is she doing?") the movie gets bad---really bad.

Sadly, it could've worked so much better without the ridiculous excuse for a story the directors attempt to underly all the interviewees' comments with. All the trippy special effects look like they're from the 80s, and apart from some great camera shots of beautiful Portland, Oregon, everything else the camera catches is inevitably not very interesting. By the 80 minute mark (of a 108 minute film), I was so annoyed with how the film was being executed I wasn't sure whether I should turn it off and break the DVD in half or go put on something like "Moulin Rouge" (b/c one scene sadly reminded me of a musical, which made me think of "Moulin Rouge," which made me wish I was watching that movie instead of "Bleep"). The sections of the film on brain waves and memories are fascinating, but then the movie switches to a wedding scene and begins talking about how people addicted to sex process their thoughts, which sounds interesting but quickly turns into a campy, irritating and brainless mess. The movie never feels quite right, which is its point I think, but that doesn't make it a good movie. Like any idea gone bad, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" is one very very few people will even be able to tolerate and sit all the way through. I'm still baffled as to how this small-budget movie made a whopping 10 million at the box office (the "walk-out factor" had to be way high for this one) with such loopy logic wrapped in such an unappealing package.

So when it hits DVD shelves in a week or two, do yourself a favor and avoid what could possibly be the most annoyingly disordered and blah-blah-blah movie of 2004. Unless of course you want to see what all the hype was about...but I'm warning you, it was hype because it was BAD, not because it was good.