Elaine Hendrix in What The Bleep Do We Know?

Movies: WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW? Directed by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse and William Arntz

What lurks inside this kooky American documentary is worth trying to understand. The thrust of this film, which has done well at the American box office while irritating critics and logical beings everywhere, is, roughly, that the success of positive thinking has a scientific basis.
This message is so compelling that Bleep has outsold the hot junk food documentary Supersize Me to be one of the biggest grossing documentaries in US box office history.
The question is – can you take its educational/New Age message seriously?
It its leading role is Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, playing a photographer who takes pills for anxiety and who shares her home with a temporary lodger who has terminal perkiness.
In one of the worst scenes, Matlin’s character Amanda learns a lesson from an over-friendly child on a public basketball court.
Directed by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse and William Arntz, this documentary is extremely ambitious in its aims. It wants to be fun, cheerful, scientific, mystic, mysterious, visual and kooky. It achieves all of these aims in varying degrees but succeeds most when it trots out scientists and other “experts” to argue its case.
Theories of quantum physics are then applied to Amanda, as she works a gig at a wedding. It is through her and a lot of animation and bright colours that because observing something effects the event, we improve our reality by changing how we think. It took 30 minutes for the message to make sense to me, but one of the experts – the man who takes time out in his day to ‘rethink’ his life – made a positive impact on me.
New age fluffiness aside, this is a little practical piece of positivity which, if you can stand the presentation, could transform
your life.