This was one of the funnier movies I've watched in a good long while. It presents itself as a documentary about Werner Herzog filming a documentary about the Loch Ness monster legend, but is actually a clever mockumentary; a film within a film within a film. Spinal Tap for cinephiles. I wouldn't call it as good, or as grand in scope as Tap, but that's definitely the spirit it's going for. There's a couple of interesting things about this. One, when it came out, I guess there was some mystery about whether or not it was a legitimate documentary, or they were at least being vague about it. I don't know, it seems really obviously fake to me. But then, I guess thousands of people believed Blair Witch Project was legitimately found footage, so I don't know. In any case, I knew it was fake before I watched it, and this didn't affect my enjoyment of it at all.
It's also interesting how funny the cast is, considering they are, for the most part, playing themselves. Zak Penn is a hilarious asshole as the writer/director. He really is a writer, of the vastly, vastly underrated Last Action Hero, the pretty okay PCU, and the unseen by me third X-Men, among others. He plays a writer who wants to break into directing, which he was, and this movie was his directorial debut. The camera and sound guys are legit camera and sound guys, but they happen to be very funny, natural actors. And of course, it's Herzog that ties it all together. I think Zak Penn said there was no other director they could have done this film with, and I'd have to agree. Herzog is funny, charismatic, and you could buy him working on almost any project, from Julien Donkey-Boy to Jack Reacher. This film is a gasser for Herzog fans. Hilarious references like "This is the most chaotic production I've ever been involved in. And I've been a part of some bad ones." *mutters* "At least I'm not dragging a boat over a hill." "What was that?" "Nothing." The legend of Herzog directing Klaus Kinski at gunpoint is alluded to when Zak Penn pulls a gun on Herzog (in this case a flare gun... which is unloaded). It's fun to see some of Herzog's real life friends in cameos in an early dinner party scene, like "Hey, here's Jeff Goldblum for no reason. And who could that be at the door? Why it's Crispin Glover!" It almost seems like Herzog just invited them over for dinner without telling them he was filming anything, much less a mockumentary, which may well have been the case.
As funny as Herzog is, Michael Karnow as the cryptozoologist steals every scene he's in. Even the boat's captain, who was not an actor, but legitimately the boat's captain, shines in this. He's got unteachable comic timing. Basically, this was a good idea that went off without a hitch, caught a lot of good luck, and the result is great, funny, very entertaining film.
I don't even know what to say about this. This was made at the same time as Even Dwarfs Started Small (reviewed below), and taken together, they show Herzog as either extremely pretentious, completely out of his mind, or both. I don't know what he was on about. Fata Morgana isn't even a film, really. It opens with five minutes of a plane landing over and over again. That tells you what you need to know. If you can watch that and enjoy it, you'll probably like Fata Morgana, and if not, you probably won't. I'd say it's really only for the Herzog completist, or for those coming down off ecstasy. It's shots of the desert (which I do like looking at, but not necessarily, you know, as a movie), accompanied by a reading from the Popol Vuh. I had read that Herzog considered this a collaboration between the director and the viewer; what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it. Knowing that, and since I could read the Popol Vuh excerpts on the subtitles, after about ten minutes, I muted it and put on Sunn O))) OO Void instead. It was awesome. I think Herzog would approve. As an aside, the original idea with this footage was to present it as being another planet. Re-appropriating documentary footage in this way was done years later in a couple other Herzog films, including the much better The Wild Blue Yonder, also reviewed later in this blog.
Okay, what the fuck? This is easily the most bizarre of Herzog's films I've seen yet. I've seen all sorts of significances and allegorical interpretations applied to this, but when I actually sat down and watched it, it just seems weird for the sake of weird. Which fits Herzog's personality. I really think he was just messing around. This was his second film. I haven't watched his first, Signs of Life, yet, but from all accounts it's good, and won him a lot of acclaim and respect. I suspect Dwarfs may have been meta-commentary. Starting small indeed. I don't know how far ahead Herzog planned, but I'm sure he knew he was going to be a great filmmaker. Maybe he just did this one as a sort of inside joke?
Anyway, the plot involves a revolt on a penal colony, with a 100% dwarf cast. Crazy shit ensues. A slaughtered pig. A van driven in circles for what seemed like forever, and finally down a hole. A pinned bug collection, dressed for a wedding. A crucified monkey. And the film closes with a kneeling camel ("Look how pious he is!") and one of the dwarfs laughing at this for what seemed like but couldn't possibly have been a good ten minutes, laughing so much and so hard that he started to cough and lose his voice. There's a lot of crazy laughter in this. There's a lot of shots of chickens doing odd things for not much apparent reason. Herzog is legitimately freaked out by chickens: "Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world."
This film reminds me a little of Tod Browning's Freaks, not because there were a couple of little people in that too, but the tone is similar. It's sort of unsettling because it's just so aggressively strange. I haven't even mentioned the bizarre, warbling soundtrack yet. I don't know what to make of it. Considering he followed this and Fata Morgana, two of his objectively worst films, with two of the best films I've ever seen, not just from him, but from anyone (Aguierre: The Wrath of God and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), Herzog was showing, right from the start, that he couldn't be boxed in. He is, and was, his own master, and you will never get what you expect with Herzog. This might be a good one to watch high.
This is one of the best films I've ever seen. A lot of people say this is Herzog's best work, and while I'm not ready to go that far, with a few more viewings, I could see myself holding it equal with the twin masterpieces Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. It is spectacular. This is the true story of Kaspar Hauser, who was chained in a cellar for the first 17 years of his life, completely uneducated, and having never seen the sky, trees, grass, or another human except for a mysterious man in black who fed him and, one day, deposited him in a town square bearing a letter (the text of which is recreated exactly in the film) which says, to paraphrase "I can't keep this boy anymore, take him and do with him what you will."
Kaspar's perspective, free from preconceptions we hold so deep we're not even aware of them, is really quite profound. It fascinates me the way he says something "dreamed to me", and moves me when he gets tears in his eyes and says "Mother, I am so far away from everyone." And when he asks "What are women good for?", it means something different than almost anyone else asking this. The film was apparently very accurate, with the exception of the actor Bruno S. being much older than the real Kaspar.
Bruno S. is much of what makes this film so incredible. We're seeing another example of Herzog's fiction films being as real as any documentary: Bruno S. was the unwanted son of a prostitute. He was often severely beaten as a child and spent much of his youth in mental institutions. He supported himself driving a forklift, but he was also a self taught musician and painter. He played 18th century style ballads on piano, glockenspiel, accordion and handbells, and his art was shown in exhibitions of outsider art. In an echo of Kaspar Hauser's "it dreamed to me", Bruno (whose real last name was Schleinstein) said he "transmitted" his songs, rather than singing them. Herzog saw a documentary about him, and cast him as Kaspar Hauser. There was some controversy in Germany at the time, that Herzog was taking advantage of an unfortunate, but I don't find that remotely true. By Herzog's own admission, Bruno was very distrustful of him, and had to be "listened to" for many hours on the set each day, to get him comfortable enough to act. You can still see him sneaking glances at the camera during the film, but rather than detracting from its authenticity, I think this adds to it.
The scene in which Kaspar is placed in a sideshow, the scene where a high society fop tried to take him on as a ward, and the scene where a professor tries to test Kaspar's logical capabilities with a riddle are among the finest movie scenes I've had the pleasure to watch. It is a wonderful film. Besides this one, Herzog made another film with Bruno S., Stroszek, which he wrote specifically for Bruno. It is also one of Herzog's most highly praised films, and I can't wait to see it; it will be in the next round of my Herzog completist project. So glad I took that on. For every Fata Morgana there's two Kaspar Hausers.
Incidentally, the German title of this film translates to "Every Man For Himself and God Against All", which is not only maybe the best movie title I've ever heard, but worthy of being a personal motto.
This was great. It's about ski flyer Walter Steiner, who was a carpenter in his day job. Ski flying (which I had not heard of before this film) is a more extreme form of ski jumping, where the skiers go much higher and farther. Steiner is the best in the world by such a wide margin that he has to start his jumps halfway down the ramp, lest he completely overshoot the landing area and fall to his death (which he comes within a meter or so of doing). I was reminded of David Foster Wallace's essay about Tracy Austin, specifically his discussion of the Greek idea of techne - a mastery of your craft so absolute that it becomes a communion with the gods. Walter Steiner has done this, and that's what makes the film so interesting (the fact that he's actually "flying" only drives the point home). Herzog doesn't really spell the implications of what you're seeing out so much, you just have to draw your own conclusions. You see Steiner injuring himself from flying so high and so far, shattering world records, sitting completely alone at the top of his... sport? Passion? And doing all this without even starting at the top of the ramp. What does it imply to be so good at something? I get overwhelmed in the presence of seemingly unnatural greatness sometimes, in significant and insignificant ways, everything from hearing Christina Aguilera sing, to some of the more intense Street Fighter tournaments. And it is that techne that affects me that way, that sense of tapping into something greater than yourself. (The ending of the last race in the Wachowski's Speed Racer [which was a great movie, I don't care what you say] gets me that way too.) Herzog understood that, and that's what Woodcarver Steiner is about. He has called it one of his most important films. It's available on YouTube in its entirety.
I debated whether to give away the secret to this film in my review, but I knew it before I watched it, so to properly give my reaction, I'll have to. (Spoiler alert)*** It's mostly fake. This was a "documentary" that Herzog fabricated out of whole cloth. That said, I would call it more of a psuedo-documentary, like a mockumentary, but not meant as a comedy. It's a fiction film shot in documentary style which expresses real truth. And in truth, the films of Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), which were the first documentaries as we understand them, were also fabricated in this way, so Herzog was really only staying true to the format: it's not true, but it could have been. There are two sections of the film. One deals with a legend of a Russian city which was about to overrun by the Mongol Horde. The people prayed to God for deliverance, and God transported the city to the bottom of a lake. During a short time of the year, the ice is thick enough to support pilgrims, but thin enough that you can see the city through the ice on the bottom of the lake, and hear the bells of the church. The pilgrims shown doing this are actually two drunks Herzog paid to crawl around on the ice (the guy on the left in the picture there is actually passed out).
The second portion deals primarily with a Messianic figure who claims to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Funny how he looks just like the white Jesus. He does a spot on imitation of the popular conception of Jesus, which was of course nothing like the historical Jesus, but that guy really is a revered religious leader, known as Vissarion, and he really does claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus, so this part isn't totally false. The name "Vissarion" (nor his real name) are used, so I'm not sure if he's appearing as himself or playing a character similar to himself. In any case, he's pretty charismatic.
Bells From the Deep is a fascinating film, true or false. It represents Herzog's exploration of Russian mysticism, and gets at the spiritual heart of one of the most interesting areas of the world. There are many fascinating scenes. You also get to see some great Tuvan throat singing, some Russian faith healers, some chanting pilgrims (who are really ice fishing). Good times.
This was a first in my Herzog journey. It just wasn't very good. It wasn't maddeningly weird or unapproachable like his other films I didn't enjoy as much. It just wasn't that good of a film. Appropriately enough, Herzog himself doesn't like this one much either, and doesn't consider it his film, because he didn't write it. Knowing that, it's kind of funny that he's the first person you see in the film, doing a cameo as the director of a televised rock climbing contest. Scream of Stone (I prefer the German title, pictured, even though the film is in English) is about a rivalry between a TV rock climber (...ok?) and a veteran mountain climber, and who will be the first to scale Cerro Torre. The dialogue is really bad, which I can forgive Herzog for, but it's also delivered really poorly, which he has to take some of the blame for. I actually thought it was dubbed at first, because everybody spoke in that peculiar, stilted way you hear in bad kung fu dubs, but no... that's just how they were talking. There were some good actors in this: Donald Sutherland and Brad Dourif. Dourif worked with Herzog several times, but it's too bad Sutherland was wasted in this. I would have liked to see he and Herzog work together on a better film.
I don't regret watching it, it was okay. Just not up to Herzog's usual standards. There are some spectacular helicopter shots towards the end. And Brad Dourif is legitimately really good and funny, as a sort of burn out who shows up out of nowhere several times throughout the film like "Whoa, man... like, you got any chocolate?" and he in fact has the titular line: "You're never gonna get up there. Cause Cerro Torre's not a mountain, man. It's a scream of stone!" I'm going to go ahead and spoil the ending because I'm not really recommending the film and the ending is an example of why not. Brad Dourif's character (who left four fingers and his name on Cerro Tore) claims to have climbed the mountain for Mae West. When our two rivals finally have their showdown, the young hotshot falls and the veteran makes it to the top, only to be horrified to find an ice axe stuck up there with a picture of Mae West hung on it. And my reaction was "Why is he acting so surprised? Oh wait, they didn't believe Brad Dourif when he said he climbed it before?" I just took him at his word.
An example of another Herzog/Dourif collaboration and of Herzog re-appropriating documentary footage. Dourif plays an alien who comes to Earth from a frozen water planet (the "wild blue yonder"). As an aside, I had to laugh when the film opened on the back of Brad Dourif's head, and he spins around all wide eyed, like "I come from the Andromeda Galaxy!" ("The Brad Dourif story!") But he tells a pretty interesting story about how his race came to this planet when theirs became uninhabitable, but that aliens basically suck and didn't really accomplish anything. He talks about how we on planet Earth wanted to do something similar; leave the planet and find another one we might be able to populate. This is intercut with footage of a real space mission, and when they arrive at Dourif's home planet (using time tunnels), they drill through the ice and swim around. This footage of the underwater alien world is actually a dive in Antarctica.
It's beautiful footage, and Dourif's story is interesting. I do think the film could have been a lot shorter, but it's still kind of hypnotizing. There's some great stuff here. When the astronauts come back from the wild blue yonder, it's 800 years in the future and humanity is long gone. The Earth has reverted to its primal state. The shot Herzog uses to demonstrate this is gorgeous:
A wonderful documentary of William Gibson riding around in the back of a limo, musing on life. Gibson really seems to have his finger on the pulse of society. He knows exactly where we are and where we're going. It was demonstrated to me recently that there are people (even nerds) who don't know who Gibson is. This is the guy who invented the word "cyberspace" (which is cool, cause it's a really easy to digest byte of information that lets you know how important and prescient he is), but if you haven't read Neuromancer you should stop what you're doing and do that instead. It will blow your mind, in more ways than one. You'll recognize it from elsewhere, for one, because of how influential it was. A lot of the stuff he was talking about will seem commonplace now, but remember, he wrote it before any of that existed.
Seeing him 15 years later in No Maps, he hasn't lost his edge at all. Talking about the Oklahoma City bombing, and how that affected him and what he thought of it, I thought it was strange he didn't cite 9/11 as an example of what he meant because it fit perfectly. Then I realized 9/11 hadn't happened yet. He was just right on the money again. It won't do for me to just describe the different things he talks about here, because you should really just watch it yourself (it is on YouTube, though segmented, there's not one big file with the whole thing), but he talks at length about technology, drugs and drug culture, modern society, and the way in which modern tech has advanced to the point that it is both inescapable and invisible, echoing the famous "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I love these ideas, and identify with them. Personally, I think magic and technology are just different ways of talking about the same thing: information. Everything is information and how we process it, and Gibson is right there with me on that.
Besides his personal philosophies, there's also lots of interesting information about his life and his writing. All of this was new at the time. I don't think he had really done much in the way of interviews before this, so I can't imagine what a gold mine this film must have seemed like upon its release. I give this my highest recommendation. Oh, and nevermind about that "Featuring Bono & The Edge" blurb on the cover. That really doesn't amount to anything. This is all Gibson.
The introduction of the nameless butcher who appears in all of Gaspar Noe's films, first as the protagonist of I Stand Alone, and then in cameo roles subsequently. Carne is typically twisted for Noe, if not quite as stylistic as his later work. It's short: 40 minutes. The butcher's wife leaves him with their autistic daughter, whom he develops incestuous feelings for, against his will, and perhaps because of this, on the day of her first menstruation, he misinterprets the situation, stabs a boy she had been seen with, and is sent to prison. The aftermath of his release from prison is the opening of I Stand Alone.
I love how Gaspar Noe uses huge "WARNING" title cards, warning of shocking content, then, without a second's pause, graphically shows a horse being killed and butchered. Gaspar Noe is absolutely one of my favorite filmmakers, but I don't think this early work compares to what he was going to do later. It's interesting but not truly great.
There was an episode of the German television program "Through the Night With..." where Harmony Korine (another of my favorite filmmakers) shows Gaspar Noe around Nashville. They did have a very, very tenuous connection, through Carne. There's a scene in The Wire where Johnny Weeks (played by Leo Fitzpatrick, star of Kids, the first film Korine wrote) described the opening scene of Carne to his pal Bubbles.
This was an amazing film. If Kaspar Hauser were not on this list, it'd be the best film in this blog by a wide margin. It's been called an essential 90s movie, which I'd say it is, but it's pretty timeless as well. From what I've read, it's an angry response to Thatcher's England, which, sorry to say, I only understand in the most general sense, so I couldn't really approach it on that level. As a character study, it's about nobodies. It stars David Thewlis, in easily the best role I've ever seen him in, as Johnny, a true bastard. He's charismatic and somewhat educated, or at least well read, but these qualities don't make him any better of a person. He uses his intellectual "superiority" to mock and brow beat those around him. He makes himself feel better by being "smarter" because he has nothing else to take pride or satisfaction in. He's cruel and selfish, but I, at least, still like him to a certain extent. It's disturbing to me how much I could relate to this character. I've been just like him. I almost feel shame. The female characters are definitely better people than the male characters, though no less broken.
What does it all mean, this depiction of hollow, broken people living hollow, broken lives? According to Mike Leigh: "My feelings about Naked are as ambivalent as my feelings about our chaotic, late twentieth century world, and probably as ambivalent as the film itself, which is, I hope, as funny as it is sad, as beautiful as it is ugly, as compassionate as it is loathsome, and as responsible as it is anarchic. But I really don't want to pontificate about this film. I'd rather let it speak for itself."
So says the man himself: make of it what you will. I think it's another signpost on the road to Hell, myself. Society, not just "modern" society, but all of it, everything, is dying, crumbling in on itself. Chaos and nihilism are the only viable responses, and it's naturally the intellectuals who see it first. The meaning is there is no meaning. In Naked, I can see parallels to (just among works I'm familiar with) Withnail & I, Trainspotting and Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction. Although this latter is American instead of European, and deals with the wealthy instead of the poor, that drives the point home even further. The emptiness is universal, and inescapable. Other explicit influences include Hamlet and Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (one of Mike Leigh's favorite films). Thewlis's background reading included Candide, Gleick's Chaos, and the teachings of the Buddha.
Aside from the deeper significance of this film, I can't praise it enough as an entertainment. It truly is funny, and the dialogue is crackling. I wasn't familiar with Mike Leigh before this film, but apparently his style is to do lots of in character rehearsal and improvisation with his actors. It shows. Everyone is unusually good. There's no shortage of reasons to watch this film. So I'd advise you just do that and see what you think.
A melodrama from Nicholas Ray, who is most famous for Rebel Without a Cause. Rebel is the only one of Ray's film most people have seen, and was the only one I'd seen, before this. I know he's pretty well respected among cinephiles, and Goddard famously said "Nicholas Ray is cinema." I did like Bigger Than Life a lot, for a lot of reason, but I have to admit it felt pretty over the top, pretty Reefer Madness. That may be justifiable, though. The acting is good. James Mason and Walther Matthau are such distinctive actors as to be almost caricatures, but I believed them in their roles here, and Barbara Rush is probably the standout of the cast. Mason plays a meek schoolteacher, prescribed cortisone for a rare, life threatening condition, an inflammation of the arteries. Painkillers make him feel great, he starts to take too many, and absolutely loses his shit. Spoiler alert, but the climax involves Mason's young son trying to steal his cortisone because he doesn't like how dad's personality has been warped, and Mason decides to kill his family and himself. He reads aloud the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and his wife tells him "But you didn't finish it! God stopped Abraham." and Mason responds "God was wrong." with a nice "Dun dun DUUUN" musical sting. That really is pretty extreme.
On the other hand, though, it was 1956. The gee shucks Norman Rockwell nuclear family reality this depicts may not have been reality, but it was how American liked to perceive itself at the time. Everyone probably wondered what was wrong with their family, why were they so different, because they had (gasp) problems. Norman Rockwell wasn't reality, so maybe a little kick in the pants was appropriate. Because this wasn't entirely a Reefer Madness hack job. Prescription drug abuse was and is a real and dangerous problem, and while it's probably not going to make you kill your family, the message is a valid one. I can't imagine how shocking this would have been to a 1956 audience. If only there had been a film like this for casual alcoholism (Revolutionary Road would be written five years later, but how many read it?).
The film is also absolutely gorgeous. I watched the Blu Ray Criterion release and it looks good enough to hang in a museum. I love the 1950s as a period, just the clothing, the cars, the architecture, the vernacular and the way people carried themselves. It's all here. There's one scene with a breathtaking matte painting outside a hospital window (probably a disservice of the crystal clear transfer. You likely couldn't even tell it was a matte painting if the picture wasn't so sharp), and it made me realize how much I miss matte paintings and practical effects and the old style of film making now that everything's digital. Now you kids get off of my lawn.
“My
feelings about Naked are as ambivalent as my feelings about our chaotic
late twentieth-century world, and probably as ambivalent as the film
itself, which is, I hope, as funny as it is sad, as beautiful as it is
ugly, as compassionate as it is loathsome, and as responsible as it is
anarchic. But I really don't want to pontificate about this film. I'd
rather let it speak for itself.” - See more at:
http://www.emanuellevy.com/review/naked-6/#sthash.yls3qIAz.dpuf
“My
feelings about Naked are as ambivalent as my feelings about our chaotic
late twentieth-century world, and probably as ambivalent as the film
itself, which is, I hope, as funny as it is sad, as beautiful as it is
ugly, as compassionate as it is loathsome, and as responsible as it is
anarchic. But I really don't want to pontificate about this film. I'd
rather let it speak for itself.” - See more at:
http://www.emanuellevy.com/review/naked-6/#sthash.yls3qIAz.dpuf
“My
feelings about Naked are as ambivalent as my feelings about our chaotic
late twentieth-century world, and probably as ambivalent as the film
itself, which is, I hope, as funny as it is sad, as beautiful as it is
ugly, as compassionate as it is loathsome, and as responsible as it is
anarchic. But I really don't want to pontificate about this film. I'd
rather let it speak for itself.” - See more at:
http://www.emanuellevy.com/review/naked-6/#sthash.yls3qIAz.dpuf
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