Looper

“Looper” is a polished action sci-fi about time travel with enough stylish coolness, emotional depth and narrative elegance to be an instant classic.

Most time travel films fall flat because the rules of the sci-fi are so dense that they collapse under the weight of their own paradoxes. Rian Johnson’s (“Brick”) film makes the characters, their story and their psychology the most important parts, allowing the film’s rules to become an integral part of a well-oiled machine.

In the future, when the mob needs to dispose of a body, they use time travel to cover their tracks, sending a victim back in time to be murdered where the body can’t be traced. The hit men responsible for these killings are Loopers, people on a contract with the mob until a set time when that person is sent back in time to be killed by their past selves, thus closing the loop of responsibility.

The youngest Looper in 2046 Kansas is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and he discovers that a new mob boss in the future is terminating all the Looper contracts. When his future self (Bruce Willis) comes back in time to be killed, he hesitates, and Future Joe escapes, launching him on a mission to kill the mob boss responsible for killing his wife by stopping him before he comes to power.

There are many ways this plot could veer and become something other than the accessible, exciting genre picture it is. Continue reading “Looper”

Rapid Response: Louisiana Story

Two oil workers in Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” are standing on the rig looking out over a river in a deep south bayou. A boy slowly approaches in a small canoe, and when he gets within viewing distance holds up a monstrous catfish he claims to have caught all on his own.

“What kind of bait did you use to catch such a big catfish,” the riggers call out.

“It’s not the bait.”

Flaherty’s docudrama about the Louisiana bayou succeeds because it is an idyllic slice of life using real residents instead of professional actors and on-location settings that gives the whole film a documentary realistic quality. At only 78 minutes long and without much dialogue to support a real story, it really isn’t the bait.

It’s the story of a boy living in the bayou whose life changes when an oil company raises a massive rig to drill in the river that surrounds their home. We see the boy hunting and exploring in the swamp and becoming fascinated both by the world’s natural beauty and the other-worldly sounds and imagery of the oil rig.

Flaherty has in modern times come to be known as the father of documentaries thanks to his film “Nanook of the North,” and “Louisiana Story,” his last film, has been mistaken as such. But the scenarios themselves are constructed and fictional, only attaining authenticity with Flaherty’s often startling style.

Throughout much of the film set in the swamplands, Flaherty removes any and all natural sound and allows the images to speak for themselves in a virtual silent film. So we’re riveted purely by the sights of a crocodile slowly stalking a crane and then seeing it again later with a bird leg sticking out of its mouth or by the quick edits and the aggressive thrashing captured when the boy sets a trap for the crocodile and fights it in revenge for eating his pet raccoon Jojo.

And yet this approach is the exact opposite when Flaherty takes us onto the oil rig. No score accompanies the deafening roar of chains flying or gears moving in workman like precision. Critics have complained that because “Louisiana Story” was commissioned by Standard Oil that the film is not as hard on the effects of oil drilling as it could be (despite that the environment would hardly be a topic of concern in 1948), but the film’s noticeable difference in tone is somehow unsettling from the otherwise peaceful imagery of the swamp.

We see in this film a boy who, although he goes looking for trouble by fighting crocodiles and climbing dangerous oil rigs, is really just trying to do good. The film’s morality and fascination with the real world make “Louisiana Story” an engaging slice of life.

Side by Side: Sleeper and Love and Death

It’s hard to imagine a time now when Woody Allen was not a legend, when he was just a comic appearing on talk shows and “What’s My Line” and making completely ridiculous screwball comedies free of any Oscar pedigree.

But this is the period in the ’70s when Allen was at the top of his game. His two films just before his first masterpiece, “Annie Hall,” were two genre spoofs that, as Roger Ebert said in his review, cemented Allen at the top of comedic directors of the time, ousting even the less prolific Mel Brooks.

These two films are “Sleeper” and “Love and Death,” both of which I watched yesterday. To see the two films together is to realize how similar they are and yet how much they vary from some of his more personal and dramatic work to come later in his career.

“Sleeper” is an ingenious sci-fi farce about the owner of a health food store in 1973 Greenwich Village who wakes up 200 years in the future after never waking up following a simple ulcer operation. He plays much of the early sequences straight and allows himself to morph into a Marx Brother or Buster Keaton sitting in the midst of all this cosmic nonsense. Doctors pull foil off his face to reveal that he’s been wearing his glasses the entire time, and the fourth wall is instantly broken.

We get funny details about the future like how tobacco is actually the healthiest thing for your body, as are fatty foods, both completely opposite of what they believed in 1973. But Allen takes it a step further when they ask him to identify certain historical relics from his time. With a completely straight face he misleads them because, well what’s the difference anyway? “This is Bela Lugosi. he was, he was the mayor of New York city for a while, you can see what it did to him there, you know. This is, uhm, this is, uh, Charles DeGaulle, he, he was a very famous French chef, had his own television show, showed you how to make souffles and omelets and everything.”

“Sleeper” has an outrageous sitcomy premise that forces him to pose as a robot and as a doctor performing a cloning operation, and his slapstick and chemistry with Diane Keaton (who is likewise brilliant, at one point performing a hammy Marlon Brando in “Streetcar” with the utmost charm) is as good as most Chaplin or Groucho Marx.

But Allen adds something more to the comic hysteria. The film’s color palette makes it resemble a ’70s New Age bohemian lifestyle shot in an expansive style reminiscent of Kubrick, with Keaton’s oblivious character acting no better than a spoiled socialite and then a pseudo-intellectual activist. He makes no real attempt to hide the fact that his sci-fi is a blatant comedic allegory about the ridiculous notions of society he’s living in 1973.

And it’s a riot. He’s got as many great one liners as ever and just as many completely goofy sight gags. The orgasmatron. A robot dog. Two Jewish robots in a clothing store. Cops who can never seem to work their high-tech weaponry. “The NRA? It was a group that helped criminals get guns to shoot citizens.” “I believe that there’s an intelligence to the world with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey.” “I’m 237 years old. I should be collecting social security.” “Has it really been 200 years since you had sex? 204 if you count my marriage.”

I could go on, but I have another movie to talk about yet.

“Love and Death” pulls a similar gag as “Sleeper” by putting a modern day character in a completely fish-out-of-water scenario, this time 19th Century Russia to poke fun at stuffy costume dramas. With this film he is again toying with the conventions and cliche of a genre, not adhering to the storytelling rules like in a Mel Brooks comedy but kind of just going through the motions to allow for more punch lines.

Allen plays Boris, a cowardly peasant forced to fight in a war against Napoleon, only to miraculously survive and return a war hero. He sleeps with a voluptuous countess and is challenged to a duel he’s sure to lose. Anticipating his death, he confesses his love for Sonja (Keaton) and she agrees to marry him out of pity in certainty he’ll lose. Soon they grow to love each other anyway and plan to assassinate Napoleon by impersonating Spanish royalty.

All of these story lines are tropes of some Leo Tolstoy novel or something, but Allen glosses over them in musical montages. He introduces an African American drill sergeant, he exaggerates profound soliloquies into meaninglessly poetic monologues and he finds room for a few more vaudeville-esque slapstick routines.

He’s so obvious about how he’s poking fun at all these cliches that the actual wit and charm doesn’t come out as strongly. It’s a bit of a cheesier execution that also doesn’t get across Allen’s two cents as strongly in the end. But he has a lot of fun here, and the movie has its own aesthetic charms that a Mel Brooks film might lack.

What I noticed about Woody Allen in this period is that he plays a character in much the same way Chaplin or Keaton did. It’s an extension of himself and ultimately synonymous with him, but he is acting. In “Sleeper” he seems to play the part of the neurotic coward to get out of assisting in a government revolution he has no care for. We know he has a backbone somewhere. And that’s because in both films he’s somehow an alluring sexual figure, capable of effortlessly seducing women because he exists in the modern day and not in this fantasy he’s constructed.

This is the opposite of how Diane Keaton acts. In both films she’s a loose sex symbol, sleeping around with multiple guys and emanating an innocent verve as she does. It’s a perfect screen persona she shares with Allen, one that allows her to be lovable and yet cynically funny. It’s a far throw from Mia Farrow’s surly character in another Woody Allen spoof, “Broadway Danny Rose.”

Now I find it hard to watch both of these films and not watch “Annie Hall” next, so maybe expect a classics piece on that in just a few days.

Sleepwalk with Me

Mike Birbiglia has made a living telling stories.

Failing to be a one-liner comic like Steven Wright, he started telling his life stories live on stage to sympathetic audiences. Later, his therapist told him to put all his troubling stories down on paper. “Put it on paper. Save it for later,” Birbiglia said on one CD, because his bright idea was to publish these stories on a blog called “My Secret Public Journal.” He finally was discovered by Ira Glass and obtained a segment on This American Life excerpting these stories as personal essays in the vein of David Sedaris. He even got a one-man show off-Broadway telling these same stories.

It was only a matter of time before Birbiglia decided to make a movie out of this life story.

The resulting film is “Sleepwalk with Me,” an indie comedy about a struggling comic with a serious sleepwalking problem learning to wake up and live a better life than the pathetic one he’s daydreaming through. It’s a good-hearted movie that transcends the limits of his stand-up because he allows the details of his sleep disorder to serve as a broader narrative of his life.

He starts the film addressing the audience directly as though he were in a Woody Allen comedy or John Cusack in “High Fidelity.” We know from the onset how anecdotal and autobiographical this film will be. His character’s name is Matt Pandamiglio, but that too is a personal joke, reminiscent of all the early performances he had where emcees wouldn’t even try to correctly pronounce his name and make him Scottish.

His girlfriend of eight years, Abby (Lauren Ambrose), loves him and not-so-subtly hints at getting married and having kids, but Matt doesn’t seem ready. He’s turned off by the fact that his parents seem like two oddballs and yet have been together for 40 years. Is this what marriage does to you? What if the only reason he’s getting married is because his girlfriend is the best thing in his life at the moment, not because he has any level of maturity or financial stability to make his marriage all it could be?

Birbiglia asks these big questions with a feather touch. When most movie protagonists talk about how lame their parents and family are, they do so with an air of cynicism, but in “Sleepwalk with Me” everybody is pleasant, if not a little pathetic. He makes this movie about finding your confidence by laughing at and embracing that pathetic side. Continue reading “Sleepwalk with Me”

Rapid Response: Burden of Dreams

More than one person confused Les Blank’s documentary “Burden of Dreams” as a film Werner Herzog actually made himself when I saw Herzog at the IU Cinema. It’s a bleak documentary about being stuck and blindly continuing in the pursuit of dreams until everything sinks into madness.

Except Herzog did make this film, only his is called “Fitzcarraldo.”

“Burden of Dreams” is the enthralling document of one of the most legendary film productions in cinema history. “Fitzcarraldo’s” only rival in this sense, and “Burden of Dreams'” only comparable rival, are “Apocalypse Now” and the documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” Yet unlike “Hearts of Darkness,” a film made years later and one that aims for the same feeling of madness as its source material, Les Blank’s film was released the same year and is a literal, fact based illustration of impossibility. Yes Herzog got his film made, and it even ends on a bittersweet, happy note, but “Burden of Dreams” treats this idea as an after thought. The struggle and the lasting impression left by surviving this ordeal is still there.

Time and again during his week in Indiana, Herzog referred to nature as a cruel, obscene place where poetry exists, but not in the Disney-fied version most people imagine. Here he says to the camera, “The trees here are in misery. The birds are in misery. They don’t sing; they just screech in pain. If there is a God, he created this place out of anger. Its only harmony is that of collective murder.”

His love-hate relationship with the jungle seems to start right here, and we have it all on tape. Wouldn’t it be funny if before this he was actually a charming, sunny guy?

Herzog himself called “Fitzcarraldo” one of the best documentaries he ever made. It’s the story of a man, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), with a dream to bring opera to the South American jungle by opening his own opera house. His get rich quick scheme involves dragging a boat over a mountain to a parallel river on the opposite side, only for his plan to end in failure after successfully completing that impossible task.

Because Herzog wanted to shoot in the jungle and use a real boat, production on “Fitzcarraldo” had quite literally the same logistical problems amidst so many more. The film describes that the native American extras he paid only $3.50 a day, twice their daily rate, believed rumors that Herzog was planning on raping and murdering their entire civilization. Activists showed the natives Holocaust photos and told them Herzog was responsible for this genocide on his previous film. This coupled with a civil war in the territory he was shooting, forced Herzog to move to an even more remote location, hundreds of miles away from the nearest town.

Blank’s way of illustrating this is poignant and elegant. Rather than use a map or narration, he has Herzog standing alone in the dense jungle. He points one way and says it’s a couple hundred miles until the forest ends. He points in another direction and says the same. He turns yet another 90 degrees and says its even more. The final direction he points in is the shortest, only a hundred miles. But they are really in the middle of nowhere.

Herzog demands the most of his production in the worst conditions. He needs three boats, one to film on one river, one to drag over the mountain, and one to film on the second river, potentially destroying it on rapids. His engineers and DPs know how futile this all is, his actors Klaus Kinski feel trapped, and his extras feel their lives are in danger.

The subtlety of Blank’s film however is that Herzog is never fully portrayed as a madman. His plans seem outrageous on paper or when spoken by the narrator, but he knows his actions will be disastrous no matter what he does, so all he can do is try to lessen the blow. We’re treated to lovely Herzog quotes about preserving native American life (“I don’t want to live in a world without lions”) and of pursuing dreams (“Life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.”), and although we question the brutal nature of filmmaking, only Herzog seems capable of rationalizing its artistic merits.

Blank creates feelings of dread and fleeting optimism through the smallest of details. We see Herzog wading in knee deep mud, and we know he’s literally and figuratively in deep. The news that people don’t even have a soccer ball seems even worse that their lives are in danger. But at least he can get prostitutes on his set or can find a way to keep the beer cold.

The Criterion Collection DVD of “Burden of Dreams” is also paired with another Les Blank documentary short about Herzog, the hilarious “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” a documentary about how Herzog stood in front of an audience, cooked and ate parts of his shoe after losing a bet to Errol Morris that he would never make his film “Gates of Heaven.” This film is a terrific little gem of directorial history, one that encourages people to find the motivation and guts to make movies, even if it means making a clown of yourself for your art.

“We should be foolish enough to do things like that,” Herzog says. He also says soundbytes like “I’m quite convinced cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking,” “A grown man like me should not go a week without cooking a meal,” and “We forgot the salt!”

So you think you can save musicals?

It may come as a surprise to some of you that one of my favorite television shows this summer, and in fact for several seasons now, has been “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Yes, as it turns out I am a sorority girl with a love for dance and musicals.

Perhaps it was an initial love of Gene Kelly and “Singin’ in the Rain,” but I typically admired the show for its enormous dance talent and not for its programming. I once had a colleague ask me if I watched the show, to which I said, “I hate the show, but I love the performances.”

Except that too has changed, as “SYTYCD” as a reality show is leaps and bounds better than its counterparts “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars.”

Unlike “Idol,” where the judges flat out lie about how the talent pool has gotten better and better each year, “SYTYCD” really does seem to be a show that consistently celebrates quality and continues to find 20 enormously talented and flawless dancers who are impossible to choose between week to week. Each show, they perform breathtaking works of actual art from visionary choreographers as opposed to karaoke covers of pop numbers from a carefully selected songbook.

Unlike “Dancing with the Stars” and “Idol,” “SYTYCD” is about dance instead of celebrity, and try as the show might to reward personality or quality, bad, unmemorable choreography can often land a dancer in the bottom three, if not headed home.

This is complimented by the fact that the show’s judges, Nigel Lythgoe, Mary Murphy and a score of other choreographers and actors from Broadway and Hollywood, often give genuine criticism to their dancers on technique, chemistry and form. They do more than just give preferences or catch phrases about being able to sing the phone book (although Mary Murphy has her fair share of annoying tendencies too).

But why I really love the show is that “So You Think You Can Dance” is possibly the best looking reality show on television.

Here is a show that devotes time to making its enormous stage production and cinematography look cinematic. For the most part, the camera work accompanying each dance routine is planned and choreographed along with the performers. The show achieves emotional close-ups without forgetting the importance of full-bodied medium shots that allow the audience to take in the full range of motion of the dancers. It achieves perspectives and clarity that would not be possible if the cameras were only positioned at the POV of the live studio audience.

The camerawork is so precise, I recall a routine from Season 8 that incorporated a mirror on stage. Even with swivels, close-ups and shots from all angles, it was near impossible to spot a camera in that mirror.

I point again to “Idol” as an example of how not to shoot a reality show. “Idol” sets up three to four cameras, one or two in the center of the stage for close-ups of the performer and one on each side for sweeping crane shots. The camera is so uninspired that the interchanges between them are almost like clockwork. The stage right camera slowly pulls way back until it can go no further, we get a stationary close-up, and then the stage left camera slowly moves forward in the same arc pattern mirrored. This is adjusted based on the speed of the song, and nothing else. Every song looks the same, and only the ungodly colors on the stage backdrop change.

This season, “SYTYCD” experimented with lighting on their stage and the appropriate way to film it to the point that they’ve won Emmys the last two years in a row. One routine with Lindsay and Cole this season saw the camera using subtle low angle shots to emphasize enormous shadows of the two dancers along the walls as though it were a moment out of Fred Astaire’s “Swing Time.”

One complaint I have about the show is that in every episode the show seems to be patting itself on the back. “It’s so wonderful that there is a program like “SYTYCD” to showcase such phenomenal artists week after week,” the judges say, as though dance and the show were some horrible underdog.

And yet, they may be right.

Dance is thriving on TV right now, but it’s been completely brain dead in the movies for decades.

I’m not the first film critic to point out that movie musicals are not what they once were, but it probably has not been done in the context of “So You Think You Can Dance,” so forgive me for my lengthy TV review and for burying my lede after nearly 800 words. Continue reading “So you think you can save musicals?”

The Master

Don’t blink. If you do, we have to start from the beginning.

This phrase marks the first time both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix truly communicate with one another in “The Master” and possibly the last time they really get inside each other’s heads.

They’re in each other’s control, both devoting their full attention. We, as an audience, can look away no sooner.

With “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson has made yet another film that demands intense focus and patience. But it rewards those opening their eyes with a vividly allegorical film about the lengths of human control, one with tour de force performances, hauntingly pallid colors and towering images of stunning depth and clarity.

We meet Freddie Quell (Phoenix) languishing over his peers at the end of World War II. Sprawled out on his ship’s upper deck, he looks like the giant in “Gulliver’s Travels” surrounded by swarms of shipmates way below hurling stones to wake him. He’s arrived at this point after a night of heavy drinking, enabled by a lethal cocktail of his own fermenting. This swill will get him into trouble later when it poisons an elderly farmer.

The incident sends Freddie running and hiding as a stowaway to the cruise ship of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), a man who comes to be known to Freddie only as Master. He’s a writer, philosopher, doctor, but above all a man, as he says to Freddie, but more accurately he’s the leader of a growing cult movement called The Cause.

Maybe it’s because he enjoys Freddie’s swill, but Master sees potential, bravery and room for personal growth in Freddie. He takes him into his home, enlists him as a guinea pig for The Cause, performs “processing” on him and believes that through Master’s own guidance, Freddie can be helped.

Master and The Cause are both fictional versions of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and the accounts of the film show the religion’s initial development in the early ‘50s. And yet neither this comparison nor the actual plot of the film give a great sense of what “The Master” is really about.

More so than a nihilistic condemnation of Scientology, Anderson uses this as a setting and metaphor for themes of sexual repression and the possibility of man. Continue reading “The Master”

Rapid Response: Seven Years Bad Luck

Roger Ebert has a trivia question to test if you are worthy of telling him a piece of movie trivia: “Who was the third great silent clown?” The correct answer is Harold Lloyd, he following both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But there’s a fourth. Maybe he’s not a “great” silent clown, but he was an important and famous figure in his time, France’s Max Linder.

I first heard Max Linder’s name thanks to Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds.” If you haven’t seen a film of his, it’s not your fault. Of hundreds of shorts and a handful of features, not even a hundred survive and practically a dozen are even available for viewing. He came from a French vaudeville background and began acting in 1905, actually predating Chaplin and earning him the title of “The Professor” by Chaplin himself. He never achieved fame in America, but otherwise he was a global star. World War I and illnesses hampered his career, and he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925, never knowing the pain of irrelevancy after the silent era.

Now one of his most well known films is “Seven Years Bad Luck,” where he plays a man trying to avoid bad luck after he shatters a mirror, only finding bad luck in the process.

If Chaplin was a lovable and innocent tramp, Keaton was a stone faced clown and Lloyd was a headstrong everyman, then Linder must have been the movie star of the bunch.

Linder’s character was a sociable, wealthy gentleman aptly named Max, and Linder himself was way better looking than the lot of his silent companions. He has a look that makes him resemble a grizzled Clark Gable or even Johnny Depp at times. He looks the part, whereas Chaplin and Keaton were flawless aliens and Lloyd was just lucky to be there.

But what’s more, Linder often plays the straight man in all of his gags. Rather than perform stunts and prat falls, Linder is just unassuming and unlucky. He gets in trouble with his girlfriend when he transforms her living room into a surreptitious dance hall for her servants, blindly plunking away at the piano with his back turned not realizing how much trouble he’s about to get into.

He’s an exuberant and natural presence, and if he’s not as physically talented as his silent clown peers, he can arrange the camera in such a way that the payoff is the same. In one scene, Max (a fairly short guy) hides behind a burly giant to sneak onto a train, walking carefully in his stride and giving the audience a perspective that prevents us from seeing him as well. Another director would just have its audience assume the train conductor couldn’t tell where he was hiding.

Linder also recycles gags from his vaudeville roots, but he imbues his own unique style and punchline into each one. The famous example from this film is an opening mirror gag. Most will recognize it as strikingly similar to the routine performed by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” One man pretends to be the other man’s reflection in a broken stand-up mirror, and the other suspiciously tries to test if he’s actually seeing himself. Something like this could only end one way, but Linder makes it special. He starts to shave in front of the mirror and lather himself with shaving cream. His reflection doesn’t have any cream in the jar beside him, so Linder assumes that, like his reflection, there’s nothing on his brush.

Another age old gag sees Linder get glue on his hand and be unable to let go of anything he touches. Hats, paper, doorknobs. These are all the usual beats such a gag can go through, but perhaps only a director from overseas would be bold enough to make it risque in the way Linder does, latching his hand onto a woman’s blouse until her entire dress pulls off as she tries to escape.

No one trying to get into silent comedy should start here. Linder does not have the pathos of Chaplin or the stunts of Keaton, but he does display roots that reveal how influential and enjoyable he once was.

Rapid Response: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)

One of the best shots in “A Matter of Life and Death” is a deep focus image of Peter Carter (David Niven) sleeping in a chair while through a window we can clearly see his girlfriend June (Kim Hunter) and his doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesay) playing an innocent game of table tennis. The shot has a visual poetry and at once takes place in two distinct worlds.

Such is the nature of “A Matter of Life and Death,” a deep, profound, intelligent and thought provoking film on fate vs. free will that, unlike many films with similar themes, is blissfully playful and fun.

On the new critics’ Sight and Sound Poll, “A Matter of Life and Death” is tied for 90th place, the highest of any Powell and Pressburger film and just ahead of a movie with a similar subject but a very different tone, “The Seventh Seal.”

We meet Peter Carter mid-air on a crashing bomber plane during World War II, and just before he jumps out of the burning plane with no parachute, he spends his last few minutes talking to the on-the-ground operative June, quickly showing himself to be a man with poetry and love in his heart to a woman who can’t help but show compassion and concern.

The film switches to black and white, and we’re in a pristine, geometrically perfect place we quickly realize is heaven. Soldiers come up an escalator with expressions of insouciance as they explain their death, forlornness as one plays a harmonica coming up the stairs, confusion as one soldier searches this place aimlessly, and excitement as a flock of soldiers run upstairs together and start flirting with the angel secretary. It turns out that Peter was supposed to show up here, but his grim reaper, a French fop who blames the silly English weather and fog, caused him to miss. (“Sorry. I… lost my head”) But now that he’s fallen in love with June and has survived, he feels entitled to keep a hold of his life and appeals to the high court of heaven that love should supersede the law of death.

It’s a wonderful story that works like a charm, and its made all the more delightful by its vibrant visual palette. The Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger movies (see: “The Red Shoes”) always seems to pop more than even most films today, and here the look is used to depict Heaven as the sterile, ordered universe and Earth as the otherworldly place of love, magic and possibility. “One is starved for Technicolor up there,” says the grim reaper in a gem of a fourth wall breaking moment. Continue reading “Rapid Response: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)”

My Week with Werner

I’ve been in a state of ecstasy for the past week. One man and three movies have allowed me to achieve a deeper level of truth and understanding of film, philosophy and humanity than with any other director I’ve yet had the chance to encounter.

And yet for all the time I’ve spent with him for the last five days, I’m still struggling to search for the ecstatic truth behind Werner Herzog.

Here is a man with an unmistakable legacy. For him to do a complete takeover of Indiana University and the IU Cinema that I love so deeply is unprecedented. Glorious digital screenings of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Nosferatu the Vampyre” accompanied two Herzog lectures on “The Search for Ecstatic Truth” and “The Transformative Role of Music in Film” throughout all of last week.

It was an opportunity to see some of the best work of a cinematic auteur while simultaneously picking the brain of a notorious character.

Going in, I expected a man capable of candid, spontaneous insanity coupled with darkly poetic and far reaching ruminations on life.

Herzog did not disappoint. His impeccable German diction gives him a nuanced charm, and his hilarious life stories were like sharing moments with an old friend.

But everything I assumed about him was an exaggerated caricature. Herzog is a man of two minds. He is a genius and a madman, a poetic optimist and a dour pessimist, a philosopher and a man of utmost practicality, a realist and yet someone with fantastical dreams and ambitions, a grimly serious speaker and a twistedly sardonic storyteller.

Speakers like my personal friends Jon Vickers and James Paasche described his films as a delicate mixture of reality and artifice achieved through improvisation, impossible shooting conditions and Herzog’s own quest for ecstatic truth. His fictional films are surreal but often draw from reality and authentic landscapes. On the other hand, his documentaries cut deep with their harsh true stories, and yet Herzog shows no qualms at outright fabricating moments and constructing a narrative for his subjects.

The man I witnessed this week is a similar combination of reality and artifice. His poise and character as a public speaker is so captivating that he hits right at your body and mind. And yet his rambling stories and outrageous anecdotes may be little more than apocryphal. But together we get an image of a giant, an artist, and an icon. His presence is truer than anyone working in the movies today. Continue reading “My Week with Werner”