Watching What the #$*! Do We Know!? is like taking college physics from a really entertaining professor.

Part documentary and part pseudo-drama, the film employs a diverse tableau of experts who leave the dusty textbooks behind while questioning the nature of perception and reality. It's a pleasant switch from the usual fare - a smart movie that's not afraid to show off its IQ.

Essentially an exploration of quantum mechanics, the film with the funny name examines how the brain captures and processes information, and how that influences thoughts and actions. The filmmakers offer the data in layman's terms, but the movie never seems condescending or patronizing.

Presented in an alacritous style augmented with comedic computer graphics, the film shakes the foundations of common conceptions, such as the idea that matter is "solid" or that our minds make a distinction between memories and reality.

Similar concepts were explored in Richard Linklater's wondrous animated film Waking Life, which depicts a series of events as part dream, part reality. What the #$*! Do We Know!? looks at the perception-vs.-reality question from a more academic standpoint, but it's just as thought-provoking.

Because physics often depends on the location of an imaginary "observer," the movie features its own observer: Amanda, a divorced photographer played by Marlee Matlin. As Amanda struggles through a typical day, she heads "down the rabbit hole" for an experience in quantum physics.

Amanda is the audience's proxy. She's suffering from depression from her divorce, a condition the filmmakers argue stems from bad wiring in her brain, which can be corrected by breaking old habits.

The movie makes the case that humans can become addicted to certain emotions - love, rage, humiliation - just like a drug, and it takes willpower to break the cycle.

On her journey, Amanda views different versions of herself in alternate universes, meets a basketball-playing kid who explains wave theory and dances to Addicted to Love performed by a group of animated cells with a more than passing resemblance to the late Robert Palmer, complete with backup singers.

In livening up what could otherwise be a dry topic, directors William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente make excellent selections in terms of their talking heads, which include prominent physicists, neurologists and other medical doctors, a molecular biologist and several "spiritual teachers, mystics and scholars."

Virtually all the scientists are charismatic and easy to understand, and the spiritualists make their arguments with persuasive conviction. If the movie is out to change some minds, it just might achieve that goal.

While attacking the most basic notions of reality, the film makes the case - through its panel of enlightened thinkers - that people can actually affect events through the power of thought. The movie threatens to turn into a "positive thinking" seminar at this point, but it eventually snaps out of the doldrums.

The film is summed up by nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, who says that quantum mechanics is the "physics of possibility."



Reach Muller at (602) 444-8651.