What The Bleep Do We Know?

[dominicansoul]

I thought it was all wet!

[Fidei Defensor]

[quote name='Winchester' post='1649156' date='Sep 6 2008, 11:34 AM']You are the worst cynic, ever.[/quote]
Oh well.

[Ziggamafu]

How ironic. My neighbor recently lent my that DVD to watch. I had not actually watched it yet. I figured it would be New Age, however, since she also lent me [i]The Secret.[/i]

[T-Bone _]

One of my old roommates loved that movie. I couldn't stand to watch it.

[Brother Adam]

Turned it off after 10 minutes. Boring as all get out and full of nonsense.

[Dreamweaver]

I would like to know if Dr. Emoto's findings have been replicated by other researchers in other labs? What other samples? His research raises more questions, and I'll admit I'm a skeptic.

I saw the "What the #)@#)" DVD at a rental place and was initially excited, seeing all the mathematical and scientific symbols on the cover, then I read the back and was disgusted that it was a bunch of namby-pamby new age stuff disguised as real science.

[Cow of Shame]

I really really hated this movie, and I've never even watched it. Here's a few examples why

The filmmakers (all of whom are affiliated with the New Age sect Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, or RSE, in Yelm) [color="blue"]decided not to remove footage of David Albert[/color], a philosophy professor at Columbia University and one of the film’s few legitimate academics, [color="blue"]who has publicly denounced the distortion of his views through selective editing.[/color]

Ok, if you want a long review:
[url="http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04/what_the_bleep_.html"]http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04...the_bleep_.html[/url]

This is a good start from [url="http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/reviews.cfm/id/1178/page/what_the_bleep_do_we_know__.html"]http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/reviews.cfm..._we_know__.html[/url]
[quote]Few things are as dishonest as those who seek to replace one religion with another, simply by couching that religion in less institutional terms. It's not religion, then, but "spirituality," or even worse "empowerment." God is killed, or at least banished, only to be brought back under the guise of scientific inquiry, even though the goal is the same: self-improvement. [color="blue"]What the #$*! Do We Know!?, then, is like a cross between a Norman Vincent Peale tome and the dribblings of that weird guy on the bus who smells vaguely of urine. It's an endlessly bizarre rumination on quantum physics, as if channeled through a few of the more technobabbly episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.[/color] We hear several "experts" (all unidentified until the end, lest we feel like geniuses for listening to the so-called wisdom of a chiropractor and some New Age guru reincarnated as the Buddha), but the main thrust is a fictional "story" involving Marlee Matlin as an angst-ridden photographer. Of course, listening to these wackos alone wax poetic in front of desert landscapes and roaring fireplaces would have driven me from the theater within ten minutes, but the story was a truly ridiculous addition indeed, as it followed Matlin from basketball courts to Polish weddings, all in search of the very things these brilliant minds were discussing. Combine that with acid-trip graphics and literal representations of abstractions (such as peptides acting out the "Addicted to Love" music video), and you have a film that would easily fit into any category of propaganda, only it's so absurd that I can't imagine anyone actually falling for it. But as we live in a country that feeds an entire industry of self-help manuals, perhaps it's not too much of a stretch to understand this film's appeal.[/quote]


Here's a synopsis from [url="http://pubs.acs.org/cen/reelscience/reviews/whatthe_bleep/"]http://pubs.acs.org/cen/reelscience/reviews/whatthe_bleep/[/url]:
[quote]Some movies are so bad, they’re funny. “What the Bleep Do We Know,” a pseudoscientific docudrama that purports to link quantum mechanics and consciousness, would be a riot if people didn’t take it so seriously.

Since its release in April 2004, this independent film has become a cult hit, playing to packed houses and grossing over $7.5 million. It’s a cocktail party sensation that has generated a powerful intellectual buzz. Unfortunately, the movie's popularity makes a frightening statement about a modern public’s fundamental disconnect with real science.

“What the Bleep” alternates between interviews with ersatz scientific experts and a dramatization of the coming-to-consciousness of a divorced photographer named Amanda. According to the movie, quantum physics dictates that reality is merely a creation of our thoughts. Extrapolating the particle/wave duality of matter to absurd extremes, it tells us that people and even basketballs only settle on their reality when they’re “observed.” Among the more outlandish assertions are that people can travel backward in time, and that matter is actually thought.

The movie hammers home the notion that addictions and other human miseries are merely the product of negative thinking. Despite the film’s sexy premise of malleable reality, its underlying note of puritan righteousness is deeply conservative.

The movie’s ‘experts’ spout nonsensitudes like “The trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery” and “At the deepest subnuclear level, you and I are one.” The experts’ identities are finally revealed at the end of the movie. Despite their sometimes impressive pedigrees (many have Ph.D.s or M.D.s of some sort), most are affiliated with new-age institutions such as the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Maharishi University of Management.

Many of them, like the movie’s producers and directors, are devotees of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior channeled through a woman named TZ Knight. Ramtha, ‘speaking’ through Knight, also appears in the movie, smugly exhorting people (in an accent that fades in and out) to think for themselves.

“What the Bleep” trots out scientific studies to bolster its thesis, including a flawed 1993 experiment in which mass meditation by thousands of people in Washington, D.C., allegedly lowered the city’s sky-high murder rate. Also featured is alternative-medicine guru Masaru Emoto’s notorious experiments claiming to show that water crystals influenced by thoughts such as “I love you” are beautiful, while those influenced by “You make me sick; I will kill you” are distorted and ugly.

The normally engaging Armin Shimerman, who played Ferengi bartender Quark on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and Principal Snyder on the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” makes a disappointing appearance, intoning, “If thoughts can do that to water, just think what they can do to you.”

All this is interspersed with the story of Amanda, played by deaf actress Marlee Matlin. After her divorce, Amanda is having an existential crisis. She plays mystical basketball with a charismatic tot, relives her loutish ex-husband’s infidelities, and endures a dysfunctional wedding, eventually coming to realize that she makes her own reality.

After tackling quantum physics, “What the Bleep” lurches on to the brain and its chemistry, a segment clearly designed to appeal to young folk. The new-age soundtrack gives way to peppy rock music, while the movie devolves into a moralistic lecture on how addictions can be overcome by positive thinking and the experts invoke generalities about peptides and receptors. Helping us grapple with this is a surreal gaggle of computer-animated, Jell-O-like blobs that flirt, eat too much, and yell at each other.

[color="blue"]What’s most odious about “What the Bleep,” though, is its message of profound self-absorption: The universe is all about you, and everything in your life is a product of your mind.[/color] Try selling that idea to tsunami survivors in Southeast Asia.

As the movie draws to a close, a long-winded chiropractor informs us that he “takes the time to create his day, infecting the quantum field.” I left the theater in need of a good quantum disinfectant.[/quote]