Fantastic Fungi review – how mushrooms could save the world

With it spectacular footage of growth and decay and impassioned speeches about the magic of mushrooms, this documentary is a treat for the eye and earHere is a rather oddly-structured documentary-cum-mission-statement that changes its horse midstream. It starts out as a slickly shot nature film and then morphs into an impassioned screed on how mushrooms can – essentially – save the world. The central figure is Paul Stamets, a Denzil Dexterish figure who studies fungi in Washington state and is an advocate for the life form’s centrality to harmonious natural systems. (Though quite how that squares with developing lethal types of mould to extermina te termites is never explained.)If this film resembles a souped-up TED talk that ’s because it presumably took wing from Stamets’ own 2009 TED talk,Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World, and the film contains copious excerpts from his various on-stage lectures: there ’s no denying he is a charismatic and persuasive speaker, both to camera and to live audiences. This film, likewise, is a treat for the eye and ear: the liberal use of speeded-up footage of growth and decay is unfailingly spectacular, while Stamets and fellow interviewees have a gift for a memorab le turn of phrase. “We will forever exist together within the micro-molecular matrix,” Stamets says at one point. “Mushrooms don’t give a shit,” says academic/author Michael Pollard, at another. Though the fungus-eye-view voiceover, by Brie Larson, with it...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Documentary films Fungi Drugs Society Science Culture Biology Source Type: news