Director Errol Morris is less a moviemaker than a tastemaker, a tour guide to unbeaten paths, and here his nose for the odd and the eccentric has led him to sit down to chat with four diverse specialists, a wild-animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robotics scientist, and an authority on the naked mole rat. A linking theme of man's relationship to nature can, with concerted effort, be detected, but the movie does not escape a feeling of arbitrariness. ("In and of itself," admits the last-mentioned of the interviewees, "the mole rat could have been -- a bird!") And the equally arbitrary cinematic gimmickry -- the slow-motion, the fast-motion, the tilted cameras, the occasional saltings of grainy black-and-white -- does not alter the essential and uncinematic feeling of yackety-yak. Interspersed clips from bottom-drawer Hollywood, featuring a giant insect, a robot with lobster claws, and Clyde Beatty in Darkest Africa, are the most fun to look at, so much so as to enkindle a hankering to be looking at any one of those movies instead. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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