Gambling, Gods and LSD

What an unbelievable waste of talent to create this movie. And a waste of my time to watch it. As well, if someone in the Canadian government made the decision to assist in the funding of this epic time waster, they should either voluntarily resign, or be forced to watch it.

While this movie did have a lot of amazing camera shots and scenery; it had little else. I couldn't determine anything but a vague a plot or plan that I could follow or much less enjoy. I watched approximately 60% of this movie at normal speed (and fast forward through the rest) all the time hoping it would somehow miraculously improve. I couldn't believe there was nothing to this movie but some nice camera shots and images of scenery.

Please don't waste your time watching it. Perhaps the producer of this movie was on LSD when he made it. Who knows for sure!

"Reality is far more mutable, capacious, and capricious than we generally allow ourselves to imagine' - Daniel Pinchbeck from "Breaking Open the Head"

In a society that appears determined to keep us alienated from our true self, knowledge of reality achieved through personal experience or visionary states seems to be a fit subject only for media giggles or academic smugness. In his experimental three-hour documentary that took ten years to complete, Gambling, Gods and LSD, Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler wants to change this. Part travelogue and part photographic essay, the film takes us on a "journey of discovery" to different parts of the globe observing the different ways in which people seek transcendence. During the course of the three hours, we are presented with a dazzling display of images and sounds of nature and humanity: alpine fog, boys playing cricket, running water, a crippled beggar looking at the camera, a moving train, a jet plane reaching skyward among others. Mettler interviews biochemists, heroin addicts, gamblers, born-again Christians, and 97-year old Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, each seeking to express the meaning of their life but ideas are not fully explored.

Beginning with an evangelical gathering of believers at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Church where worshippers writhe on the floor in beatific agony, the camera takes us to Las Vegas, Nevada, Arizona, Switzerland, and southern India. We see a hotel being demolished in Las Vegas as a young woman watches in a dreamlike state from her hotel room, a teenage girl strapped to a machine in an erotic pose as a sex-shop owner describes his Electro-erotic stimulator. Two Swiss heroin addicts talk about their highs and lows, a Hispanic card player shows us the cremated remains of his wife in a red scarf, we visit a dog race in Zurich Switzerland, and experience fire dancing on a beach in India. Described by the director as being about "transcendence, the denial of death, the illusion of safety and our relationship to nature", the camera moves quickly from one reality to the other. The images speak for themselves - some profound, some banal, others simply bizarre. "Ultimately", Mettler says, "the film is about the people who watch it."

Mr. Mettler is a visionary director and his work is audacious and often mesmerizing, but his film left me wanting more. Though drugs are one of the unifying themes of the film and LSD appears in the title, there is no discussion of what LSD is about or of the psychedelic revolution of the 60s that shattered our assumptions about reality and, for better or worse, defined an entire decade. Mettler dwells on the virtues of addictive drugs like heroin but shows us nothing about shamanism, native rites of passage, Buddhist chanting, healing ceremonies, or paranormal phenomena involving the use of sacred plants and substances occurring in nature, phenomena that have led other mind explorers to reach profound personal insights.

Gambling, Gods and LSD is a unique attempt to allow us to see transcendence in the kaleidoscope of human activity and I recommend that it be seen, yet much of it is simply sensational or striving for a "trippy" effect. There is definitely a movement taking place in the world that seeks to define reality outside of the rigid mechanistic structures spoon-fed to us since birth by academics and the media, but the film does not seem to be looking in the right places. Goethe has said, "We all walk in mysteries…under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical limitations". Even in our modern age, the nature of consciousness remains elusive and perhaps now requires us to look through a different pair of glasses.

This is a superb film, but Canadian writer-director Peter Mettler is a victim of his own dazzling vision: he covers a lot of intense psychological territory while he challenges us to look within ourselves. But (and here's the rub) he takes a whopping three hours to do it.

For viewers to really appreciate this work, it is mandatory to see it again, and again, and again. You could spend an entire 24-hour-day studying the intricacies of this film, and you'd still have enough questions to take you well into a second day.

The film has been compared to Godfrey Reggio's epic three-part series (Koyaanisquati, Powataqqatsi, and Nagoyqatsi), but GG&LSD is a very different work in that Mettler offers a cinematic narrative, a series of 'storylines,' while Reggio just flat-out floors you with perhaps the most relentlessly stunning photography ever committed to film.

We visit Toronto, the Nevada desert, Las Vegas, Switzerland and India. We see people who talk about psychic experiences, including (you guessed it) visitations with Jesus and God. We get to imagine what it's like to view building implosions in reverse; we see a man (a self-described 'scientist') who induces female orgasms by remote control; we hear about finite molecules drifting forever from one living organism to another, adopting new 'hosts' as they go, so that none of us ever really dies; we learn about LSD as a drug that liberates our dormant, long-repressed and 'unconscious' inner perceptions of existence itself; and we hear about other drugs like heroin that allegedly (and fleetingly) tend to do the same thing.

Mettler offers us a complicated excursion into the omnipresent mysticism of life and dares us to examine the received 'truths' all around us. What, he asks, is the actual reality of existence? When we dare to look beneath the surface, what does it really mean to be alive and human?

This is all fascinating material, but one quibble I have with Mettler goes something like this: the characters who walk us through these voyages come on the screen, they're interesting, we want to see more of them, and then -- zap -- they disappear, drift away, and we're introduced to somebody else. The transitions can be jarring. There are no resolutions with these characters. But maybe that's the point: in life, there are no real resolutions.

Mettler shot so much footage (he took three years to edit this), that perhaps it should have been a series, a la Reggio and his three epics.

After three hours the audience clapped for almost ten minutes. And although I am an expert at sitting through long film screenings, I rarely find myself thinking that I could have seen more. In the case of "Gambling, Gods and LSD" I could have floated through another hour at least. This is a film that makes you think; a visual essay on the interconnectedness of life on earth as we all search for answers, thrills and inner peace. Mettler spent almost ten years collecting the experiences of North Americans, Europeans and Asians and reorganizing them into a symbiotic work of almost religious attitude. And although the film is categorized a "documentary", "Gambling, Gods & LSD" is far from recalling the instructional movies of driving class or the nature films from grade four. With no narration and only the barest of precept, Mettler's piece recalls not only the visuals of "Baraka" or "Koyaanisqatsi" but structurally brings to mind the greatest work of Chris Marker or Agnes Varda's brilliant "The Gleaners and I". The sound work is also incredible. The importance of silence is rarely so well explored as in this film and the music is both overwhelming and introspective. Highly recommended for those who tire of the pedantic television-style documentary that has permeated our consciousness of late; "Gambling, Gods & LSD" is a film that leaves the audience to make their own story out of what they have just experienced.

This was one of the very best documentary's I have ever seen, though I do not know were to buy it. I saw it on television from 1 - 4 am one night and it really inspired me, it opens your eyes to the truth and realness of life. They filmed extraordinarily in beautiful countries and interviewed and discussed with a certain charm that i had never seen or had not seen in a while. This documentary / movie is partially what got me interested in movie making, expressing feelings and thoughts in a way that only the people who take time to watch and listen will understand and describe to others which in turn will enjoy your ideas. Anyways, I loved it and i am sure you will thank you Nix.

I definitely encourage any and every one to see it.

p.s If someone knows were to buy it (ottawa) tell me haha!