On Saturday morning, while my husband and I waited for the first World Cup match of the day to begin, we sat with our coffee and watched the recently released documentary by Michel Gondry, the filmmaker who made the sweet and funny films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, and the action adventure movie The Green Hornet.
His new movie, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? isn't like any of these, however; it's an animated documentary (which sounds antithetical) about Noam Chomsky. Though it's not really about Chomsky, per se, but rather an 88-minute long interview of sorts where Gondry attempts to get at the heart of how Chomsky thinks and what he thinks about.
I'm writing about Gondry's movie here on this blog because not only is the film thought provoking--covering topics of education, linguistics, meta-cognition, philosophy, and scientific inquiry--and about a man, perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of our time, who wrote in his book Manufacturing Consent that "Education is a system of imposed ignorance," but also because Gondry, a whimsical thinker and filmmaker, represents us, the audience, in this dialogue with Chomsky: someone who respects the man, but doesn't always understand or agree with him.
It's the perfectly thoughtful kind of brain candy you all might want to chew on while you're on summer break.
The movie is available for instant streaming on Netflix (and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is available on DVD from the MCC Library)--let us know what you think!
