one of my absolute favorites!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

This lo-fi documentary has the unusual subject of pet cemeteries. More specifically, it focuses on the cemeteries at Foothill Memorial Gardens in San Francisco and Bubbling Well Memorial Park in Napa. It's probably as famous for being the film that led German director Werner Herzog to eat his shoe at its premiere than anything else (as encouragement Herzog had stated he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed his film, he did and Herzog duly obliged). Gates of Heaven takes a slightly unusual approach to its subject in that it deals with it in a determinedly straight-faced manner despite its potential for absurdity and lets the material speak for itself. Morris does not interject, nor does he use editing techniques for cheap laughs, taking people out of context. In this way, a film such as this requires more work on the viewer's part than, for example, a documentary by Michael Moore which has a clear agenda and makes it obvious to the viewer what it demands they should be thinking. Gates of Heaven, on the other hand, just presents interview footage and allows us to form our own opinions on what we see.The subjects are the pet owners and the cemetery people. It's made up mostly of static shots of people talking. In all honesty, despite the commendable intentions, this minimalist approach to the material is a problem in that quite a lot of the interview footage is rambling and tedious. It isn't often either very enlightening, or particularly funny. The idea I think must be to take a strange scenario but to use this as a means of looking at the people involved more than anything else. The result is quite mixed, as the characters involved aren't in all honesty always especially interesting and the pet cemetery subject probably requires a more inquisitive approach in order to extract more interesting material. So, while I respect, the philosophy of Morris in this endeavour, I can't say I especially get much out of this film.

This film is ostensibly about pet cemetaries, but is actually a touching piece on the human condition. I defy ANYONE to watch this and not be affected emotionally. If you can watch this and not be affected, you have no soul.

Comparable to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, Bicycle Thieves, and Citizen Kane, in its cinematic brilliance. Touching and poignant, in its own subtle way. Don't look for something obvious to blow you away. Just watch it, embrace it, and feel it. And then you will wonder at it. The film is a documentary about two pet cemeteries, but reaches far beyond this in its scope. It is immensely thought provoking, and the best description possible is that it is a cross between a Norman Rockwell painting, and Phillip Glass song. Be sure to check out other Errol Morris titles. He is a genius.

I saw this film for the first time about 2 years ago on IFC and thankfully I videotaped it. Since then, I've watched it 10 or 11 times and it always fascinates me. I especially like the last third of the film in which we meet the harberts family who own the Bubbling Well Pet Cemetary in Nappa Valley. They all seem so sincere and at the same time they crack me up. Errol Morris just has a way of letting real life people go on and on about a subject without it ever becoming boring...