Konterr Brilliant and touching

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

szm-1 Boring, quasi intellectual film. If you think that watching films is painless - try Bodysong. It's not even a film. Pummel has cut other document films, and made his own one. Only scenes (without voice or author's comment) and terrible music, and people think that this is real art... I was on this film in cinema long time ago. Now I look and it's high rated (6.7 is to high). I lost my money on this film that day, and lost humor. I think that producer hasn't spent 5 minutes on scenario. "Women are breeding, men are killing each other, people like dancing, and there were also a Nazi on this world, lets show it all". This is whole idea. If some aliens would seen this film, they wouldn't think much, they would just destroy human race, to make something good to world.

bob the moo Opening with footage of sperm fertilising an egg, this film begins a montage of archive footage from different places and times that encompasses the act of birth, growing up, teenage experience, sex, violence, war, spirituality, creativity and death. Having said that it is probably unfair of me to note that it is not wholly successful because when your aim is to sum up the human condition in less than 90 minutes then even attempting it is worthy of credit.Pummell is credited as writer and director but a massive chunk of credit belongs to those who pulled together this mass of archive footage from all over the world and all over the last century. Pummell groups it together well to establish themes that generally do flow well together to create a general impression of what it is to be alive in overall terms of experience (ie not specific of individuals as such). In doing this the film slightly falters when some clips are dull and others are fascinating but this comes with the territory and the overriding impression is one of being carried along. It is an experimental sort of film and as such will not easily win a mass audience but it does deserve to be seen by many more people than its 150 odd votes on this site suggests have seen it.Pummell benefits from the skill of those that provide him with his images and although he is "director" it is fair to say that this role is not as it would normally be considered as all of the material has been directed and filmed by others. These others are uncredited as far as I can see but they have captured a great range of footage, some good, others stunning. El-P has called it when he said that this is basically what you need to sit ET down in front of to give him an idea of what being human is. The soundtrack is haunting and well put together to mostly compliment the footage; my favourite being the jazz building to (literally) a climax during the section that depicts the passion and joy of sex.Overall then a fascinating film that aims for an impossible goal but does a very good job of getting surprisingly close to achieving it. The footage is good and is well used by Pummell to develop themes and threads that combine to sum up the human experience. It is hard to put into words but it is not at all as patronising or arty as that sounds because it is surprisingly accessible and impacting (although you should be prepared for images of graphic sex, violence and births).

rutkins With all due respect to the person who wrote the first review saying the footage was 'second rate', I think he misses the point. The reason why a lot of the clips aren't well shot or famous is because they are shot by amateurs about amateurs - this is a film about real life, and about a common humanity. Incidentally, there are shots of astronauts and atom bombs, and also some very famous clips, such as the clip from the old film 'the kiss' and the infamous shooting of a Vietnamese man.The giving birth part of the film was for me rather painful to watch, which surprised me because, having seen Irreversible the week before, I didn't think anything could shock me. Many of the clips were funny, and others moving, but the film was flawed for a number of reasons. Primarily, I was confused by the order in which he tackled the various themes, which instead of going chronologically from birth to death exploring themes in-between, went from birth to death to rebirth, religion, marriage etc.. Also, having spent about 20mins on childhood and the teenage years, he spent no time on the elderly, unless you count the 'death' part.I also felt that the plinky-plonky music didn't really help much, particularly during the 'sex' sequence. Why is there freaky jazz music going on over the sex part? Why is sex portrayed as some strange, subversive, aggressive part of life? I'll never understand why in 'serious' films hardcore sex attracts aggressive jazz music, when if you watch a hardcore porn movie it always has soft jazz music.Although there were many parts of the film I enjoyed, it didn't have the coherence or forward thinking approach of similar films such as Koyaanisqatsi.P.S I don't know why people would walk out of a film like this - it was marked '18' in the UK, so some of the scenes were expected, and all the reviews I read for it clearly stated that it was a series of clips put to music. Besides, it's not that long.

mthe I saw this film at the world premiere in Rotterdam, 3 weeks ago. I didn't know what I was going to see. The only thing I knew was the music was composed by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. According to the title I thought the film was going to be like an ode to the human body, or something...It was far from that; a better discription for this film would be: an experimental summary of all the bright and dark sides of life that every human being will encounter during his or her existence... Beautiful and moving it is. This film feels as a strong, videoclip-like story, not as an documentary. Though, the whole film consists completely of archive footage. Every piece of footage of every highlight in the history was used to accomplish a stunning effect. (The director of this film told us, before the film was started, every shot has a story and every story can be found on their interactive website.)This was all superbly guided by a score that, in my opion, sounded very fresh and modern and it harmonized wholly with the visuals as its counterpart.