Herzog Werner

If you're looking for logic in anything I say, please stop. Alex, my good friend from Baltimore, has a logical, informative, highly articulate blog laced with compassion and enthusiasm. ANTIWAR ZONE (click to my right), is his blogging site.

The last time I saw him was last summer. We shared drinks at an Irish bar overlooking the Baltimore inner harbor. He talked about a film director that I knew nothing about except:

1.) He once ate a boiled shoe (saw it on youtube).
2.) He was shot in one of his interviews.

Alex told me about his collaboration with Harmony Korine (don't like that fellow) in a movie about schizophrenia. He mentions a scene in that movie where a fake premature baby was brought onto a subway and filmed without people knowing it was all for a movie. It was too rough an image in my head to handle as a movie....but...a few days ago I saw a Hollywood movie where not a soul warned me about the fake dead baby, so that was my boot camp for a Herzog Werner film.

Side Note: Life is strange that way. About a week ago my dad mentioned this particular Herzog Werner film ("Grizzly Man") because I had just finished, "Into The Wild" and my dad told me about this guy Timothy Treadwell, who I learned all about today. But it was not my dad that lead me to that movie. It was random and as the movie unfolded I remembered my recent conversation with my father.

So I just finished Herzog Werner's "Grizzly Man" which was randomly recommended to me while I was in the good video store yesterday. I loved it. Loved it. However it's almost cosmical to hear Herzog's monotone German voice narrating scenes where he has to butt in to say, "The world is rough and cruel, full of chaos and savagery" etc. Ah the Germans! A jerk could take that tone and turn it into some commentary on the stereotypical German nihilism. I'm a jerk, but I loved the film.

So, to delight and instruct, here is a video of Germany's most well received and (in my opinion so far) talented film maker being sniped during an interview: