Aldous Huxley: Gravity Of Light
Aldous Huxley is best known for his vastly influential dystopian novel Brave New World, but an insane new Canadian documentary focuses not on his literary output, but rather his later, more questionable position as a doddering, strangely formal godfather of the psychedelic movement. Gravity Of Light director Oliver Hockenhull states fairly early on that this is no typical documentary, and accordingly, those looking for any sort of substantial, concrete information about Huxley or his philosophy are advised to look anywhere but this monumentally self-indulgent intro-to-philosophy exercise in cinematic navel-gazing. Those searching for something that's part PBS special, part bad student film, and part MTV's Amp, however, should find Gravity Of Light to be just what the doctor ordered. Randomly combining dippy computer animation, bad beat-poetry-style rambling, old documentary footage of Huxley and his disciples, freaky philosophizing, and a failed attempt to contact Huxley via a psychic, Gravity Of Light proves, if nothing else, that Huxley was on a "Whoa, what if we're all just caught up in the matrix?" track decades before Keanu Reeves was even born. While Gravity Of Light is a unique documentary, it probably won't appeal to anyone not already enamored of Huxley's fuzzy brand of acid-tinged pseudo-mysticism.