More Odds and Ends: End of Reality Edition

346) Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) Dir: Werner Herzog Date Released: April 3, 1977 Date Seen: November 3, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5

RV!: eXistenZ (1999) Dir: David Cronenberg Date Released: April 23, 1999 Date Seen: November 3, 2012 Rating: 4/5

351) Detropia (2012) Dir: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady Date Released: Date Seen: November 7, 2012 Rating: 2.75/5

Aguirre: The Wrath of God: I confess, I'm still slowly making my way through Herzog's canonical films, having only recently "gotten" on the same wave length as his films (first breakthrough was Rescue Dawn, then Cave of Forgotten Dreams). I certainly liked this one, and appreciated the way Herzog expresses his pet themes ("The clouds, they are slowly creeping down the mountain, like so many ignoble dreams of conquest on their way to dissipate on the valley below. Climb, little conquistadors, soldier on to your inevitably inexplicable fates! Life is but a dream, so row, row, row your boat, distractedly down that stream!"). And while I greatly admire the lengths he went to make this film, and was often fascinated by the film's dreamy (ie: Herzogian) atmosphere, I also don't think I'm in love with this one, or as fascinated by it as I am by, say, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Maybe I should check out Nosferatu the Vampyre next....

eXistenZ: After interviewing David Cronenberg, I'm more convinced than ever that this film is a clever, though infrequently under-developed (ex: what the hell's going on with Gas?!) riff on Demonlover more than it is a prototype for The Matrix. Since Cronenberg is a mostly literal-minded (though advanced) thinker, virtual reality just happens to be the way he looks at the next step in corporate espionage/indoctrination. Video games are the future according to this film because they turn tutorial learning into role-playing. So when the goal of the game is revealed to be murder and sabotage, it's not especially surprising: as in any other video game, you learn as you do in eXistenZ. The difference here is, unlike video games that prompt you with knowledge throughout your quest, you only acquire a greater appreciation of your objective at the very end when you've already been manipulated into doing something you maybe didn't want to. Corporate brainwashing, Playstation-style. Of course I like it.

Detropia: Accomplished alarmists Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the co-directors of Jesus Camp and 12th & Delaware, make great docu-horror movies. I've yet to watch one of their films, and not be a little suspicious of their intentions, or the sometimes unsettling ways that they express concern for their subjects. In Detropia, the weakest of the three films I've seen by them, Ewing and Grady push a lot of buttons all at once by enumerating  the various community members effected by Detroit's long, steady financial decline. 

Basically, I was frustrated by Ewing and Grady's sprawling, quasi-symphonic approach to turning their subjects' respective experiences into a collective story. Admittedly, Detropia is the first of Ewing and Grady's films that I've seen after finally watching (most) of The Wire, so that could be informing my opinion. But to my mind, Ewing and Grady tackle a complex situation by establishing, but never fully developing various tenuously connected characters. I want to know more about the union members, more about the self-absorbed hipster artists, more about the opera house patrons...I mean, who are all these people, and what motivates them beyond their sloganeering goals? Detropia succeeds as an artfully arranged collection of disquieting, context-less footage of a severely depressed part of America, but that's about it, for me. Scary, yes, but not very compelling.

92) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

92) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) Dir: Werner Herzog Date Released: October XX, 1975 Date Seen: March 8, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5

Generally speaking, I'm still feeling my way around Herzog's early body of work (teeheehee). I mainly know his more recent movies, of which I'm most partial to Rescue Dawn and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I'm a neophyte when it comes to Herzog's filmography though. I have yet to find the picture that will really break open his filmography for me. I'm looking for his Irma Vep, basically. And granted, I haven't seen Aguirre, Fitzcaraldo, Nosferatu the Vampyre (which I own!) or others. But hey, I'm working on it. 

Case in point: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser was pretty impressive. I'd initially read about Hauser in Paul Auster's New York Stories. And I'd heard that Vincent Gallo is in a new Italian version of Hauser's story...starring as his own doppelganger...and that it's shot in black-and-white...and there's a UFO, too?!

Anyway, this teaser prompted me to watch Enigma, which has been stuck in the bowels of my Netflix queue for a while now. I quite liked it.

What, you want more than that succinct and totally accurate summary? Sure, ok, fine. 

While Herzog's clearly champing at the bit to make a terror-stricken Hauser /the/ emblematic individual that gets persecuted by a thuggish smaller society simply because he's different, that's probably not what impressed me about Enigma. What did it for me was A) Bruno Schleinstein's performance, which clearly came from a strange and tortured place* and B) some of the film's barely subdued dream-like elements. I especially think the latter impressed me. Because generally speaking, Enigma is a sleepy film. 

Ok, now I really got some 'splainin' to do, huh? Though I could be wrong and the prison scenes could in fact have a louder scene, I feel like the loudest confrontation in the film was Kaspar's conversation with a logician, a pedantic academic that comically elaborates a logic puzzle that he then incorrectly solves. The logician says that an inhabitant of a town of liars will reveal himself by speaking using a double negative...which don't make no sense, man.

 But when Kaspar poses a similar question that he thinks will delineate who represents a town of liars and who represents a town of truth-tellers, he follows the logician's lead and poses an equally inane question. It's exactly the same kind of question, too, but the logician gets mad and insists that Kaspar doesn't get the exercise. The scene's take-away is: if Kaspar were to have implicitly trusted this man, which he seems incapable of doing for most other members of the Nuremberg townsfolk, he would have repeated the mistake of this so-called expert.  

But basically: an uptight, over-educated guy yells at a severely autistic guy and it's a sign that society in general is intolerant. This works for me because, as is sort of my watchword, context is key. Herzog's Nuremberg is inhabited by quietly exploitative and meekly sadistic people. Enigma isn't really one of a number of films that woefully try to impress us with the banality of evil however. Instead, it's a story where people that are reactively afraid of change decide to imprison a stranger, sell him to a traveling circus to help pay off their communal debt and then try to re-integrate him back into society when they think that they can impress a dandy-ish aristocrat. The Nurembergers will sell Kaspar out between household chores and afternoon tea simply because they don't have the ethical skill set to reason: 'Hey, that's fucked up. Maybe we shouldn't be doing that.'

So yeah, that I like.

*Note: I just read that this guy was actually deaf? And a pain on the set because he would, like, scream a lot? Or something?

ISF: Mourir Apres de Toi (2011) and 267) Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

ISF: Mourir Apres de Toi (2011) Dir: Simon Cahn and Spike Jonze Date Released: ??? Date Seen: June 20, 2011 Rating: 2/5

267) Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Dir: Werner Herzog Date Released: April 29, 2011 Rating: 4/5

The stop-motion animation in the Jonze short was fun but that's about it. It doesn't make good use of its location in the sense that after watching the short, I still didn't understand why that book store was special. 

The Herzog feature is however very impressive. I had previously read several essays about his films and his apolitical fascination with dreams. So going into Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I knew that Herzog prides himself on being a documentarian that cares more for ecstatic truths than he does for hard facts. But I'm only familiar with his recent films and, with the exception of Rescue Dawn, I hadn't previously been impressed with that approach. So I was glad when I finally connected with one of his documentaries. Cave's mystical eponymous setting lends itself to the kind of idle speculation and philosophizing that Herzog specializes in. And with the exception of the Albino alligators at the end, I actually bought the mad Austrian's out there theories about other-ness and why humans are compelled to absorb representations of ourselves as a means of filling the gaps in our collective unconscious. He expresses it better than I just did, thankfully.

434) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

434) Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) Dir: Werner Herzog Date Released: November 2009 Date Seen: December 6, 2009 Rating: 2.25/5

"It's amazing what you can do with a simplified purpose in life," Terence McDonagh (Nic Cage) explains through gritted teeth at one point in Werner Herzog's remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992)--Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. That one line sums up why Herzog's interested in Ferrara's character but not why he needed to resurrect the character and put him in a new setting armed with a new set of quirks. That's a mystery for the "film theoreticians" Herzog petulantly challenged to analyze his film. Though its more telling in this case, that challenge is reminiscent of when John Waters said he made a movie just so he could have brunch with its female lead on a regular basis.* The difference is that Herzog doesn't know how to make a joke while Waters doesn't know how to stop. It's both Herzog's way of fending off detractors from accusing him of needlessly resurrecting the film and his way of admitting that there's nothing to his logic behind making the film save for his characteristic interest in the character's childishly simplified worldview. It's just that simple, in more ways than one.

Fun though it may be to watch Nic Cage lurk about for two hours in search of his next fix, money to pay his bookie, more drugs, a mass-murderer and then some more illicit substances, it's ultimately pretty disheartening to watch a performer as talented at bugging out as he is do it all for nothing. Herzog's film announces its film's focus on racial tension in a post-Katrina NOLA in its title. Then again, as McDonagh points out to one of a veritable parade of users and soon-to-be victims of his Rx-lust, the "port of call" could be anywhere: he could be there one minute and be in Chicago the next. Race is an issue in any city, making screenwriter POCNO screenwriter William M. Finkelstein's smug fixation with pointing out the racial dimension to McDonagh's self-image as a "White Knight" just another blind lead. Finkelstein doesn't even go that far in fleshing out McDonagh's latent but unavoidable liberal condescension: he defends and/or makes deals with black people but most white people he crosses he hustles and/or holds up. It's especially disappointing considering how far Herzog pushes the envelop when it comes to McDonagh's hallucinations (break-dancing and iguanas: nuf said). Again, it's a real pity that Cage doesn't get material worthy of his awesome shambling performance; I cared enough to see him, not his character, get closure that never came but otherwise, not a wit.

*The exact film and actress elude me; a little help here?