The Final Take with Parker Mott

3 Stars out of 4
(106 minutes)

Into the Abyss: Michael Perry was allowed to be interviewed for only 50 minutes. The interview took place merely a week before his execution.

“He’s a man who spent three and a half years in prison in Bautzen in East Germany in solitary confinement. As a result, this man sees certain things that other people do not see any more.”

- Werner Herzog, “Images at the Horizon” (1979)

Into the Abyss is a title that summarizes all of Werner Herzog’s films, because this is a filmmaker that advances towards the pangs of madness, where most directors prefer to retreat. I mean, when the director is responsible for titles such as “Even Dwarfs Started Small” and “The Wrath of God”, while also accountable for hypnotizing his actors in Heart of Glass you know each of his works do not want to splash around on the surface. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(77 minutes)

Brad Dourif is your atypical alien in The Wild Blue Yonder.

There’s a statement I’ve read that mystifies me: “Every work of documentary film is, in some ways, a work of fiction… and every work of fiction is, in some ways, a documentary.” How? Isn’t documentary embedded in reality and fiction just a pretence of it? Well, Werner Herzog has unwittingly proved such a paradox in his latest The Wild Blue Yonder, of what I declare is a beautiful lie. It’s a matter-of-fact document of something extraordinary, so it’s a real pleasure to suspend our disbelief. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(95 minutes)

Director Werner Herzog finds passion below in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

It seems every documentary by Werner Herzog is a new experience, and his Cave of Forgotten Dreams is no exception. And it’s shot in 3D!

But that’s not the selling point to Cave of Forgotten Dreams, in fact there is nothing here that acts as a commercial investment. Knowing Herzog, he’s an explorer who uses cinema to reinvent the wheel of the art’s possibilities and, therefore, 3D is applied how a Renaissance painter used chiaroscuro. He wants to invade the film’s space not ours, and draw his world with protrusion as if we could reach out and touch it. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(99 minutes)

A diver's tranquil paradise in Encounters At the End of the World.

German director Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man) travels to Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World. He first insists that this is not a documentary about penguins, though some do make an appearance. The documentary is thoroughly abstract but has an uncanny spontaneity to it as if Herzog is discovering the wonders of Antarctica at the pace we do. This film is not a travelogue though, it is poetry. (continue reading…)

3 Stars out of 4
(94 minutes)

They stare through us in My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was the second film released by renowned German director Werner Herzog last year. His other was the firmly adequate character portraiture Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. My Son, My Son has the same building blocks as Bad Lieutenant: POCNO – a style that presents a feverish detachment, a canon that conquers the narrative. But how he tinkers with these blocks makes My Son, My Son much different than the Herzog film mentioned or perhaps another of his like Rescue Dawn. My Son, My Son at its most minimal brings us back to traditional European art house work by the director – Aguirre: The Wrath of God (in minor ways) and in particular Woyzeck. (continue reading…)

3.5 Stars out of 4
(122 minutes)

Nicolas Cage is the bad lieutenant.

Forget Aguirre: The Wrath of God or Woyzeck, that’s the past–when director Werner Herzog’s best fiend (that’s not a typo) Klaus Kinski ravished the screen with his eccentric character complexities and a Macbeth-like psyche. It’s time for a new nutcase and we found him–Nicolas Cage and, boy, he is a bad lieutenant. Not to be confused with the 1992 version directed by Abel Ferrara (starring Harvey Keitel as the lieutenant), this film takes a little bit from the older film but is regenerated into an equally dark film but more affiliated with a comedic edge. (continue reading…)