Thurston County filmmakers Betsy Chasse, left, Mark Vicente, center, and William Arntz co-wrote and co-directed the film "What the #$*! Do We Know?"

DIANE DE LA PAZ; The News Tribune

If you're frustrated about how your day, your week, or your life is going, make like Marlee Matlin did in "What the #$*! Do We Know?"

The Academy Award-winning actress, best known for 1986's "Children of a Lesser God," stars in this docudrama produced by three Thurston County filmmakers. It will debut tonight at the Yelm Cinemas.

Matlin plays Amanda, a woman wallowing in her own jaundiced attitude toward the world. She's divorced and seems to have given up on finding new love; as a professional, artistic photographer, she screens out almost anything that doesn't fit her mind's pessimistic viewfinder.

Amanda mopes through much of the movie, while her housemate Jennifer (Elaine Hendrix) shines like day to her night. Jennifer likes to paint and dance at the same time: Barefoot, she prints bright colors onto bedsheets, heels and toes inspired by funky music. Jennifer loves life, kisses Amanda on the cheek often and shows us how much fun any day can be.

The Amanda-Jennifer scenes are illustrations, in a sense, of the scientific concepts put forth in the film. "What the ..." is laden with traditional documentary-style interviews with talking heads, ranging from medical doctors to mystics. They strive to explain quantum physics - the science of the very small - and how brain-cell function affects our daily lives.

Then we're switched back over to Amanda, who's searching, though not too strenuously, for a way out of her rut.

To her chagrin, Amanda's boss sends her to shoot pictures at a Polish wedding. By the time our morose photographer gets to the wedding reception, though, she's beginning to see the light. The people she's encountered so far have inserted clues into her brain about how she could change her experiences by changing her thoughts.

Throughout "What the ..." special effects flood back and forth across the screen, aimed at teaching us about brain chemistry. The film feels a bit like a high school science film with the famous actress's taciturn performance spliced in. Co-written and -directed by William Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente, the 108-minute feature moves slowly, with the Greek chorus of experts going on - and on and on - about how each person creates his or her own reality. It's a long-awaited pleasure to see Amanda complete her transformation.

During the closing credits, we see a stream of interesting book titles for further exploration: "Journey to God: The Soul's Journey Within," by Miceal Ledwith; "Molecules of Emotion" by Candace Pert; and "Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief" by Andrew Newberg. The film's Web site, www.whatthebleep.biz, contains a whole lot more.

Throughout the movie, scientists such as the University of Oregon's Amit Goswami tell us that to build a new, improved reality for ourselves, we must untangle from familiar thought patterns. What's required is "radical" rethinking of our place in the universe, said Goswami, author of "Quantum Creativity," "Physics of the Soul" and other books.

Filmmaker Arntz, who lives "in the woods" outside Yelm, is a physicist, inventor and sometime art-house film producer. He made another "combo plate" of a film pairing interviews and narrative about 20 years ago when he was living in Boston; he later tried to break into the filmmaking business in Los Angeles but became discouraged.

"You had to kiss everyone's butt, and you never get to do what you want anyway," Arntz recalled. "So I moved to San Francisco and became a Buddhist. That was the end of that (filmmaking) dream, I thought."

Using Buddhist meditation and visualization, he wrote AutoSys, systems management software that would come to be used by Merrill Lynch, NASA, Boeing and other big clients. In 1995 Arntz sold his company, invented more software, sold that and found himself with the finances to make movies again. He started work on "What the ...," a picture he subtitled "a quantum fable."

"I think people are tired of the same old entertainment thing: boy meets girl ... guy kills baddie," Arntz said. "But there's been no alternative."

Until now. He sees his film as a feature that will inspire people to "use the noggin," while having a good time. The Polish wedding reception scenes, with Amanda confronting some pretty wacky guests, are meant to be comedic - to offer something more than "just an egghead movie."

"A lot of documentaries are a little like church, with a lot of long faces," Arntz said. But "you learn better when you're feeling good. There's interesting brain chemistry that happens when people laugh."

Arntz's film will be working on our brain chemistry for the next couple of weeks at the Yelm Cinemas - longer if it draws good turnouts. Publicist Pavel Mikoloski said "What the ..." is not yet rated and is still in search of a distributor to bring it to other theaters around the country. It contains a brief sex scene and plentiful profanity, but Mikoloski said "it should be fine for older teens."

Even with its well-known star and candy-colored special effects, "What the ..." has a somewhat amateurish feeling to it. But it's a provocative blast of fresh air, ideal for the art-house and film-festival crowd. Audiences will have a chance to see it, and ponder their own neurological potential, at this spring's Ashland, Ore., Sedona, Ariz., and Washington, D.C., film festivals.

Diane de la Paz: 253-597-8876
Diane.delaPaz@mail.tribnet.com

If you go

"What the #$*! Do We Know?" opens tonight at the Yelm Cinemas. For show times, call 360-400-3456 or visit www. yelmcinemas.com.