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Review: The Way Things Go

Old 05-07-02, 08:33 AM
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Review: The Way Things Go

THE WAY THINGS GO (DER LAUF DER DINGE) - (1987)

Released by First Run Features - 30 minutes, color.


Looking for a film with character development, fart jokes and surprise endings?
This one isn't it. The Way Things Go is more like what we all wanted to see on
Mr. Wizard when we were kids: non-stop science "tricks" involving lots of stuff
bursting into flames. The Swiss artists, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, have
apparently taken over an abandoned warehouse, brought in half of a junkyard (tires,
ladders, tea kettles, wheels, all sorts of good stuff), raided a high-school
chemistry lab to find all sorts of flammable substances and then built a huge Rube
Goldberg contraption that runs for the entire 30 minutes. No dialog, no people.
Just balloons of flammable gas, fuses, little cars with needles on the front,
and tires rolling uphill. There are several places where it is clear that cuts
have been made, but I was never able to tell whether the cuts meant that the
entire process was not accomplished in one take, or whether the cuts just acted
as a "time-lapse" because some of the chemical reactions took several minutes to
bubble up, explode or eat through their container. The whole process is pretty
amazing whether it was done at once or not.

The Way Things Go is full-frame and the video is a bit gritty, but it fits in well
the "industrial" tone of the film quite well. The audio is a passable 2.0, which
is all this film really needs.

Extras: virtually none. A few screens of text (biographies and bibliographies)
which don't even seem to work all that well. (on my player at least, when you
try to return to the menu from one of the info screens, it simply stops the
dvd so you get kicked out onto a black screen and need to start over.) My disc
didn't come with an insert of any kind.

My take: this one certainly isn't for everyone, but for me it was well worth
the purchase price ($14) just to have something different. Run it in the
background next time you have friends over and everyone seems bored... I
guarantee at least some of them will find it riveting and highly amusing--and
the rest of them will be highly amused at how amused the first group are. A
great little diversion that doesn't require your constant attention in order
to entertain you.

Last edited by Eeyore; 05-07-02 at 08:44 AM.

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