Critics Ravage “Hoax” New Age Film

Article posted Mon Oct 11 14:04:37 2004

An independent film directed and produced by followers of the New Age channeller/guru J.Z. Knight called What the Bleep Do We Know? was released last February (and is still in theaters). The film, a bizarre blend of mysticism and quantum physics, has became a minor hit and earned about $4.4 million in the first six months of release. Some of the “scientists” featured were reportedly unhappy with the way they were portrayed by the filmmakers and said that they did not understand what they were participating in. Skeptics were, of course, less than impressed with the film, but given the New Agey overtones, one might expect audiences and critics to have embraced it.

What the Bleep?’s director and producers have focused on grassroots publicity efforts and cast themselves as film mavericks who will show up a Hollywood that was not high-minded enough to embrace their ideas. It’s perhaps not surprising that a cult-like film would achieve a cult-like following, and it seems that much of the revenue is generated not by new filmgoers but by repeat ones trying to figure out just what the film is trying to say. Meyer Gottlieb, president of independent film distributor Samuel Goldwyn Films, said that he attended a Los Angeles screening and met hundreds of people who “told me that the movie had an impact on their lives. Many had seen it two or three times.” One devotee, a sixty-two-year-old Californian who has seen the film twelve times, said, “It’s a relief to get out of the [constant] barrage of negative news and explore the deep connections between mind, body and spirit.…The movie is such an aberration for Hollywood, a world driven by fear and the bottom line.”

Mainstream filmgoers have more or less ignored the film, while the critics have almost universally panned it. Maitland McDonagh, of TV Guide, says the film “quickly tumbles down a rabbit hole of annoying psychobabble, dubious science, and embarrassingly silly animation.” Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan described the film as “Part talking-head documentary, part live-action narrative featurette and part goofy animation [that] fails on all three levels… stiffly written, badly acted, choppily edited, and awkwardly redundant…On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes. Bleep, indeed.” Nick Schager of Slant magazine concluded that, “If people are truly able to construct their own destinies, then I can only hope that What the Bleep, with its hokey and derivative CGI, John Tesh-influenced score, and screeching electronic sound effects, will beget a future devoid of these filmmakers’ creepily cultish work.”

Because the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative, ads for the film are deceptive and take blurbs out of context to suggest critical praise. The Los Angeles Times, for example, is quoted as calling the film “Mind-Bending!” though a look at the actual review (by Kevin Crust) is decidedly less enthusiastic: “…It’s easy to question how much further you wish to go with the movie.…The journey produces more questions than answers [and is] a mixed bag…fraught with an excessive amount of navel-gazing.”

Film critic Roger Ebert called the film a “hoax” and published a reader’s comment (apparently one of many) that said, “There’s little to no accurate science in the film, and, as a physicist pointed out recently, the individuals who are quoted are pretty far from qualified experts on the field of quantum mechanics. Case in point: One of the persons expounding on causality and quantum physics…is a chiropractor.” Ebert responded, “I knew there had to be something fishy when the expert who made the most sense was channeling a 35,000-year-old seer from Atlantis.”