I like that poster. Oddly, I didn't realize this was meant as a horror film. I would have called it more of an action film, with some horrific scenarios, but a lot of action movies have those. This movie was just a lot of fun to me, since religious extremism is kind of a hobby of mine. The cast was great fun (Ben Affleck, by his own admission, stole half of them for Argo based on liking this film). John Goodman is one of my all time favorites (and hey, my dad looks just like him!). He and Michael Parks are go-to workhorses. I've never seen a bad performance from either of them, even in bad films. Both Skyler and Badger from Breaking Bad are in this, sort of fun. This is one of those movies with lots of Deep Blue Sea deaths. You know the kind I mean: out of nowhere, WTF kills of characters you had every right to expect to live through the whole thing.
Probably as good as the film itself is the story behind it, which you can hear Kevin Smith discuss in his Q&A Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell. Both are available to stream on Netflix. I love Kevin Smith. I may not love all his work, but I love him as a person. (I'm a big fan of Mallrats, Dogma, and all his lectures and Q&As. I'm a medium fan of Clerks and the Clerks cartoon. The rest I could take or leave or haven't seen). Every time I think he's losing it, he totally brings me back. In Burn in Hell, he totally justifies Cop Out. Both his motivations for making it (the short version: integrity. I know, I know, just hear him out), and also this: he tried to get Red State made for years with no success, until one day a producer says "Nah, I don't want to read the script, I don't care about that." "Why?" "I saw your name on a poster next to Bruce Willis's name, so I know you know how to make movies. How much do you need?" Also, in Burn in Hell, he discusses how part of his motivation to make Red State was his friend Malcolm Ingram's documentary...
Finding community in a community that wants nothing to do with you. I love stuff like this, as it's pretty much a practical end to the argument of homosexuality being a choice. If it were, these people would not make that choice. Some of them, anyway, as that's another thing I like about it. Some of the people in this movie really are freak nasty, because yeah, some gay people are like that. It's honest, there's no agenda. Fred Phelps himself is interviewed in this. He's a very charming guy, and, not to justify his actions, I truly don't believe they're coming from a position of hatred and prejudice. They're rooted in a legitimate belief, and he'll tell you straight up they just want attention. They make their signs as awful as they do because they want cameras on them. He'll say that straight up. As I've said for many years, if you want those people to go away, quit paying attention to them. That's what I think of Fred himself, but as with a lot of extremists, it's his followers you have to worry about. He just attracts the absolute scum of the Earth to him like a magnet. One guy in this movie makes one of the best/funniest justifications for being gay I've ever heard: "I like dick, men happen to have 'em." Preach on, brother!
Another film about gay issues. This is such a beautiful movie. This is one of the best movies I'll see all year, and if you see one movie I talk about in this blog, it should probably be this one. It's not flawless, but it's one of those films that's so well done and so meaningful that the flaws don't really matter. This is about a gay couple raising a young son in Tennessee. The boy's biological father is suddenly killed in a car accident, and his sister makes the decision to take the child from his other dad, basically cutting them out of each others lives. It goes from there, dealing with the man's struggles to get his son back. I like this because it takes a very contentious political issue, and makes it a purely human story. None of the politics matter here, this is just about a dad and his son.
This is a debut feature from Patrick Wang. He wrote, directed, starred and produced, and based on this, we're looking at a major talent. I think Roger Ebert once said everyone has one great film performance in them: playing themselves. Patrick's performance as Joey is so real, I actually kind of suspected that this was a fairly autobiographical film. Among other things, his Tennessee accent is spot on. Nope. Ethnically Chinese, Patrick Wang is from New York, and graduated from MIT. I guess this was just a story he wanted to tell, and it's a story worth telling. If someone's mind needs changing about gay parents, this is probably as good as it's going to get. If you can watch this and not be moved by it, I don't think you're going to be moved.
I'm about to hit you with a lot of Herzog. I've been making an effort to make my way through his entire filmography, which has been an absolutely wonderful, rewarding experience. So, in case you get Herzog overload, I'm starting with my strongest recommendation. If you watch one Herzog film I mention, I recommend this one. Carlo Gesualdo was a 16th century Italian prince and composer. He's known for composing madrigals which used a chromatic language which would not be rediscovered in music for another 300 years. He was also something of a madman. Legends abound of his bizarre personality and behavior, and he famously murdered his wife and her lover. His castle is cursed. This film about him goes absolutely off the deep end. You will see: the preserved corpses of his murdered wife and her lover on display in a chapel, as he injected them with some kind of strange poison (no one to this day knows what) that preserved their intravenous system. Patients of a mental hospital fritting about Gesualdo's ruined castle, claiming to be the ghosts of he and his wife. Bizarre artifacts which none can explain and caused Gesualdo to lose months of sleep.
Parts of this film are so strange, I started to doubt the veracity of it as a "documentary", and after one scene in particular (which I won't reveal), I decided "No way. That's staged." And sure enough, it was. When I looked into it later, a lot of this film was made up by Herzog, and learning that really helped me to understand him as a filmmaker. I learned that he has released documentaries which he fabricated entirely, and even his serious documentaries often includes a scene or two thrown in for dramatic effect. He's said that his documentaries are fiction and his fiction are documentaries, and after that, I gained a whole new appreciation for him as a filmmaker. As he said about Death for Five Voices:
"Most of the stories in the film are completely invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound possible truths about Gesualdo. I think of all my 'documentaries', Death For Five Voices is the one that really runs amok, and it is one of the films closest to my heart."
I can't give it a higher recommendation than that.
Pictured is the German title. The majority of these Herzog films I'm discussing are German language, from early in his career. They're not widely available in commercial release, but easy enough to find online with embedded subtitles. This one needs no subtitles, and is one of Herzog's documentaries with no fiction, as it's really less a documentary than a document. It's just a sermon by Huie Rogers at The Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. That's it. Single camera, nothing else except some footage of the very run down neighborhood cut into the middle (I believe while Herzog was reloading his camera). Huie is one of those rantin' and ravin', hootin' and hollerin' type of black preachers I love so much. If you think of James Brown in The Blues Brothers (which came out the same year as this), that's pretty much him. Just a man doing what he does. Make of it what you will.
Another film about a preacher. This time he's a televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott. Televangelists, in my estimation, are usually either frauds or insane, but based on this, I don't find Gene Scott to be either. Well, ok, maybe he's a little insane, but even though he screams for money on a nightly basis, his heart seems to be in the right place. That's the most interesting aspect of this film. Herzog always seems to find the most interesting people to profile. Scott had a long career, but we're seeing him here in 1981. It's something to behold, just on a level of the hair and the suits and the smarm, because this is late 70s/early 80s televangelism at its funniest. The (again) screaming and anger about sending money, the rock bottom fashion sense and the atrocious singing are all here. If you want to hear the corniest songs you've ever heard in your life sung by the greasiest rubes this side of Mayberry (and this is in Los Angeles), look no further. Scott also liked to rant against the FCC and has a band of wind up monkeys he uses to do so, so uh, there's also that.
(Side note: these German language films about English speakers have a unique element. The people speak English, Herzog dubs voiceover in German, and I read subtitles in English. It's an odd way to take in dialogue, but what are you gonna do?)
Sorry for the white text on black, but that is the title screen, and there's no DVD cover. This is about the 1976 world livestock auctioneer championship. By Herzog's standards, this is approaching a fluff piece, but there are still some of his signatures here. He discusses his horror at the language of auctioneering, a language so extreme, but simultaneously musical, and how only capitalism could produce such a beautiful, horrible language. The championship is held right in the heart of Amish country, and he contrasts the way a championship of capitalism conflicts with the Amish lifestyle, who are not competitive or capitalistic at all. He notes how in the Amish dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, there isn't even any way to say "world championship". Since Pennsylvania Dutch was originally rooted in German, he is curious if they will understand him if he speaks German to them. They don't. (As a side note, I would really love to see Herzog do a whole documentary about the Amish, but I know they wouldn't want to be filmed, or have attention drawn to them). There's a little of that, but most of this film is just documenting the contestants doing their thing. All the people who get one on one interviews are characters. I had to smile a bit at the guy who ends up winning the whole deal (he's Canadian, of all things), and how overjoyed he is. He's achieved a dream he's wanted since he was six years old. It's a great feeling. Then he says he can't think of a single other profession where they get the best together and have a world championship. No?
This is absolutely essential, but better to watch if you're already familiar with Herzog's work. This is about Juliane Koepke, the sole survivor of Peruvian LANSA flight 508, after it disintegrated in midair following a lightning strike. At 17, she free fell into the Peruvian jungle, and trekked her way to safety over twelve days. It's an incredible story of the human spirit. Juliane is really something else. She and Herzog return to the crash site 27 years later, examine the wreckage of the plane, and retrace her journey out of the jungle. She's very detached about the whole thing, but I guess you have to be, after surviving something like that.
The reason it's better to come to this with some knowledge of Herzog is for context. He wanted to make this film for years, he just had some trouble tracking Juliane down, as she tended to shun publicity after the crash. The reason he needed to make it is that he was almost on the doomed flight himself, and was only saved by a last minute itinerary change. He was location scouting for Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and in fact, while he and his crew were making their way through the Peruvian jungle, the 17 year old Juliane was no more than a couple of streams away from them, fighting for her life.
The jungle will eat you alive. As Herzog said about it: "In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel." Juliane was not an average kid. Her parents were both biologists and she had grown up in the jungle. She knew it, and she knew how to survive in it already. There's absolutely no way she'd have lived otherwise. She grew up to be a biologist herself, and married another (Her husband is a wasp expert. Just the existence of such things is interesting to me). She observed bats in a hollow tree for a year for her master's thesis. These things would probably be interesting enough for a film on their own, but oh yeah, let's not forget that she fell out of the sky and clawed her way through twelve days of hell on Earth when she was a kid.
Okay, back to the modern era with Herzog. This one's available to stream on Netflix, and I think it's another one of his best. Like Grizzly Man (probably Herzog's most famous documentary), this is assembled from footage that Herzog didn't shoot. That's good, in it's way, as it means he was so moved by what he saw that he had to make a film of it. He's a great editor, and his narration adds a lot to any film. For my money, forget Morgan Freeman. If someone was going to narrate my life, I'd want it to be Werner Herzog (with Rutger Hauer a close second). This was a moving sort of film to me, because, based on the writings of Daniel Quinn and some other things, I got very into the idea of living off the grid. Being totally self reliant, and living off the land. These people are doing it, for real. And they are, as the title suggests, happy. Make no mistake, it's a hard life, because this is Siberia. Rule number one about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. But they're still making it work.
I think that also provides an interesting contrast between the young Herzog and the old Herzog. Young Herzog was bleaker than bleak. He never completely lost that. I'm reminded of this quote from Grizzly Man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.", or his comment that Into the Abyss (a film which made me change my opinion on the death penalty) would actually be a good title for all of his films. But there's a positivity to his narration here that I wouldn't expect. The young Herzog might have painted this as harsh existence with little reward, but he doesn't. It all depends on how you look at it, and if you want to see this as an idyllic way to live, you can. I sort of did... until I saw what the mosquitoes were like in the summer. Oh... dear god, no.
Rule number two about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. This is a 1959 Soviet film about a geological expedition that runs into trouble. Scenarios include an all time "Oh shit..." moment as it goes from bad to worse for these poor bastards. I watched this based on a recommendation from a friend, which was based on my recommendation of Happy People; generally about how the taiga can just annihilate people like the parasites we probably are. That comes across, definitely, but this is a really good film. It's a good story, the actors are likeable, and it's really well shot. There are some truly beautiful shots in this. The one they used for the Criterion cover there is one of them, but there's no shortage. The camera work is very innovative, particularly for the 50s. It's, for lack of a better word, intimate, almost like you're the fifth member of the team, but subtle enough that your attention isn't really being drawn to it, except in the very opening scene, where it's used entirely appropriately. I was just really, really impressed with the quality of filmmaking overall.
I know very little about Soviet films. This is only the second one I've ever watched. The other was Battleship Potemkin, which is one of the most well made movies in history. If you haven't seen that, the whole thing is on YouTube, so check it out. You'll recognize so much of it from other movies you've seen, it's been alluded to and stolen from so many times; like the first time I watched Citizen Kane I recognized half of it from The Simpsons. Battleship Potemkin is like that, but even more so. It's a Communist propaganda film, so you should probably bear that in mind, but it deserves to be seen.
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