In 1988 Werner Herzog’s close friend Errol Morris released his documentary The Thin Blue Line. It was about a man falsely accused of murder in Texas and sentenced to death. Today it still stands as a timely and powerful argument against capital punishment.
Now, nearly a quarter-century later, with state-sanctioned killing still going strong, Herzog himself has traveled to Texas to make a film on the subject. Read more…
Why do the righteous suffer? That is the question at the heart of Terrence Malick’s latest meditation, Tree of Life. This is a film that is so abstract it is hard to believe it was even made.
If I were to claim I understood it after just one viewing, well, I would be lying. This is some pretty heavy stuff. Read more…
Is this the best use for 3-D technology? In Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog employs 3-D not to immerse us in a future world of blue CGI space aliens on a fictional planet, but in our own world over 30,000 years ago.
Herzog ventures with a small film crew into the Chauvet Cave in southern France. No camera crew has ever been allowed into the cave before, which was discovered in 1994. Its walls are covered in paintings that date back 32,000 years, the oldest cave paintings ever found. Read more…
Two homicide detectives arrive at the scene of a murder. A woman has been stabbed through with a saber in a suburban San Diego home. A man walks casually through the crowd outside the house drinking coffee out of a large mug with the words ‘Razzle Dazzle’ imprinted on it. He looks at one of the detectives and says, ‘razzle them, razzle them, razzle dazzle them.’ The man walks to the house across the street, has a conversation with a couple Flamingo’s, calling them his ‘eagles in drag,’ and enters the house. Soon after the detectives learn that he is the victim’s son and the murder suspect. Read more…
Ale and his sister Isamar in their small one-mattress room in 'Chop Shop' (2007)
Chop Shop, the second feature from Ramin Bahrani, is a rare breed. It is a film that tells a story not usually found in American cinema, that of the of a minority living in poverty. It is a work of simple beauty. Shot on location in Queens, New York in the shadows of Shea Stadium, Chop Shop is neo-realism to the core. Featuring a cast of non-actors, it has more in common with Vittorio De Sica’s classic Bicycle Thieves than anything made in the United States. There is no score or soundtrack, all the music and sounds are diagetic. Watching it feels like watching a great foreign film, it takes us to another world because it is so uncommon to see. However this other world is not post-World War II Rome or Istanbul or New Delhi, it is contemporary New York City. Read more…
(In no particular order and totally non-definitive.)
Pan’s Labyrinth – Guillermo Del Toro understands that the purpose of fantasy has always been an escape mechanism. Set in Franco’s post-civil war Spain, Pan’s Labyrinth follows a young girl, Ofelia, as she shifts between a mystifying dream world and an oppressively cruel real life living under her despotic and cruel army officer step dad. Pan’s Labyrinth is a thoughtful examination into the duality between our fantasies and the harsher realities of life and how the two can intermingle and bleed into one another. Pan’s Labyrinth is sublime, beautiful, and easily the best fantasy film of the decade.
There Will Be Blood
Coming into There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson had already directed three terrific films in Boogie Nights, the great Magnolia and the underrated Punch-Drunk Love. However there was nothing in his work that could have hinted where he would go next, an epic period drama about the greed and cruelty possessed by the human race. Think of it as Citizen Kane in hell. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview in the best performance of the decade. The best way to describe his character would be to quote Mike Tyson’s description of Don King in the 2009 documentary Tyson: he’s a ‘wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker.’ Plainview is hateful towards all. He puts on an act of a sincere family man when he needs to, using his son, H.W., as a prop to get to the oil he desires. Once his son loses his hearing in an accident, Plainview no longer has any use for him and sends him off to a boarding school. When H.W. comes back to him later in the film to reveal that he will be drilling his own oil, a competitor, Daniel chases him out of the house berating him as a “bastard from a basket” and telling him he is not his son. There is no sadness or veiled-attachment to be found in this vintage Day-Lewis explosion, just pure hatred. Was Daniel Plainview evil from the start, or is he driven to this point by a combination of greed, power and alcoholism? Read more…
Oftentimes we forget how great of an actor Nicolas Cage can be. In recent years, Nicholas Cage’s dramatic range has spanned from ludicrously hammy overacting (‘The Wicker Man’) to completely phoned in (‘Ghost Rider,’ ‘National Treasure’). However, despite the mainstream Hollywood actor’s succession of placid roles, there has always been the sense that Nicolas Cage possesses an unhinged sense of bravado lying beneath the surface. And in ‘The Bad Lieutenant’, notorious fringe filmmaker Werner Herzog brings out the coke snorting, vicodin-addicted, gun-totin’, crazy son of a fucking bitch in Nicolas Cage.
Throughout his considerable career, Herzog has been known as a zealous, and at times downright mad, auteur willing to go any length to fulfill his artistic vision. On the set of ‘Aguirre: The Wrath Of God,’ Herzog infamously pulled a gun on Klaus Kinski and told him that, “you leave this jungle now and you’ll find eight bullets in you and the ninth one will be for me” after the actor threatened to walk off the set. Read more…
In 1988 Werner Herzog’s close friend Errol Morris released his documentary The Thin Blue Line. It was about a man falsely accused of murder in Texas and sentenced to death. Today it still stands as a timely and powerful argument against capital punishment.
