Me, I was working yesterday, even locked out of the law school, so I didn't make it to the big political rally in the center of campus — Bascom Mall. But Meade was there, and he was really inspired. He wrote a song about his nearly ecstatic experience, and he won't stop singing. It goes like this:
I came upon a child of Obam-a She was walking by Sterling Hall So I asked her, "Where are you going?" And this she told me...
"I'm going up to Bascom Mall, I'm gonna join in a political rally Gonna put out my two hands Try and keep my birth control free.
We are starstruck We're beholden And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon."
Then can I walk beside you? I have come here to dialogue And with a Flip cam, I feel like Herzog, Artistically burning.
Well maybe it's just not our year, And maybe, well, Yes We Can But Tammy B and Mark Pocan Have my stomach churning.
We are starstruck We're beholden And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon.
By the time we got to Bascom, We were thirty thousand strong Everywhere you looked - career politicians.
And I dreamed I saw drone bombers Chooming roof hits in the sky, Turning into Obama Pies O'er Bascom Nation
We are starstruck We're beholden And we've got to keep ourselves in government lardon.
"You have to do yourself a favor when you’re out in the countryside and you see a chicken: Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing. By the way, it’s very easy to hypnotize a chicken; they are very prone to hypnosis, and in one or two films I have actually shown that."
Says Werner Herzog. One of the films, Strozek, is the first Werner Herzog film I ever saw. It was a double feature with Aguirre, Wrath of God, which was (obviously) the second Werner Herzog film I saw. I raved about these films to my (then) husband and I saw the double feature again, with him, the next day. For many years I called Aguirre, Wrath of God my favorite movie, but I love Strozek too, and not only does it have a chicken in it; it takes place mostly in Wisconsin. Here's the chicken:
Which name did you impulsively click on first? I clicked on Werner Herzog, who likes "Freaks," "Intolerance," "Rashomon," "Nosferatu," and a movie I don't remember ever noticing before, "Where is the Friend's Home."
About "Rashomon" — which I once wrote an article about — he said:
It is probably the only film that I've ever seen which has something like a perfect balance, which does not occur in filmmaking very often. You sense it sometimes in great music, but I haven't experienced it in cinema, and it's mind boggling. I don't know how [Akira] Kurosawa did it. It's still a mystery to me. That's greatness.
Looking (unsuccessfully) for the relevant clip from "Grizzly Man" — "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder" — I found this video made by a guy who finds that when he reads Anton Chekov short stories, he hears the words in his head in Werner Herzog's voice:
Yeah, I did too. And thanks for posting that 36-year-old trailer. I haven't gone to the movies in many months. I never see that there's anything coming out that I'm even slightly moved to think about seeing.* I thought maybe it was that I am getting old, and I no longer feel the way film needs you to feel to work as film. But seeing that old trailer now... I don't think it is me. It's the pictures that got small.
C Black sees a phrase I used and makes a request. I'm here to answer your questions, so, based on a quick scan of the shelf and probably leaving a few things out, here's my list (in alphabetical order) of 40 DVDs I'd try to get you to watch if you lived with me:
32 Short Films About Glenn Gould American Movie Aguirre the Wrath of God Clockwork Orange Coffee and Cigarettes Crumb Divorce Italian Style Don't Look Back Dr. Strangelove Election Fast, Cheap & Out of Control Fight Club Grave of the Fireflies Grey Gardens Grizzy Man Heathers It's a Gift Lolita Memento Modern Times My Dinner With Andre Nights of Cabiria Pecker Psycho Pulp Fiction Room with a View Rosemary's Baby Royal Tenenbaums Salesman Serial Mom Slacker Spirited Away Streetcar Named Desire Stroszek The Blood of a Poet The Shining The War Room The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl Wisconsin Death Trip Wuthering Heights
Now, you may wonder which of these movies Meade had already seen and which ones have I succeeded in getting him to watch. You may wonder which ones, once watched, produced a negative reaction and about which ones did we see eye to eye. I'll leave that for Meade to say in the comments if he wants. The rest of you are welcome to guess, to produce your own lists, or to opine about mine.
That clip makes me think how my own life would seem so much more meaningful and important were I to have a narrator and some choral music in the background.
"Shortly before 6 a.m., we saw Pogo heading straight for the downtown buildings some 7 miles away.
"Dr. Aingly explained that even if he caught Pogo and returned him to his family, he would immediately head right back for the buildings.
"But Why?"
Encounters At the End of Minnesota A Werner Herzog Film
MayBee said:
The penguin goes every summer to live alone among the grizzly bears.
Yesterday at the Sundance theater here in Madison, Wisconsin, it was opening night for the "Sex and the City" movie. Women were swarming around and inside the place. Some arrived in groups of 4 and wearing short, tight dresses. The "caffe" area that, at Sundance, replaces the concession stand, had a party atmosphere. Were they serving drinks? I think they were.
But we weren't there to see "Sex and the City." We were there to see "The Fall." Unlike the ladies in little dresses, we did not dress like characters in the movie. That is, we did not wear loincloths or red masks with rectangular eye holes or helmets or diaphanous gowns. But we were just as eager to take in the show on opening night.
Here's the trailer that got me:
Watching the trailer again, I can see that it absolutely accurately represents what is in that movie, so if you like that, go see it. If you don't, don't. Here's the Roger Ebert review that the trailer summarizes in one word ("Magnificent"). And here are a few more Ebert words:
Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Otis chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.
The monkey belongs to Charles Darwin, who's out on a quest with the Black Bandit, an Italian anarchist, an escaped slave, and a Indian (whom the man has described as an American Indian but the girl has pictured as a man from India). The alternating sequences of fantasy and storytelling reminded me of "The Princess Bride." And there's a satisfying ending that reminded me of [click for spoiler].
The movie has gotten mixed reviews. To the extent that these say the story isn't coherent, I think they are wrong. Pay close attention and you'll see how it makes sense. You have an impoverished 5-year-old child who is listening to a story told by a suicidal, drug-addicted man. The fantasy sequences are the combination of his words and her visualization. The story takes place in the early days of Hollywood and filmmaking is a theme. The man is in the hospital because he was paralyzed in a fall doing a movie stunt, and in putting a story into words he is like a screenplay writer and the girl is like the director, so the slippage between his story and her imagination tells of the writer's loss of control of his story as it is made into a movie. The little girl is in the hospital because she fell out of an orange tree doing her work as a migrant picker. In her eagerness to see the man's story in her head, she's a movie fan.
ADDED: Importantly, this movie was made without CGI. They made models like this:
Better get that explosion right the first time. I hate CGI — I feel visceral revulsion to it. The beauty of "The Fall" is clearly film beauty, not computer tricks.
The whole "egg salad sandwich challenge" got me thinking about "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe":
If you don't know what the egg salad sandwich challenge is, watch the last part of last night's vlog... and check the sidebar.
You'll say Herzog does it for art, but Althouse is doing it for commerce. And also, it's much harder to eat a shoe than an egg salad sandwich. I concede that it's harder to eat a shoe, but not that I'm doing it for the money rather than art. It was for art that I made that list of 10 Things I've Never Done. And it was for art that I put a price tag on doing various things that I don't want to do. That's for art both because: 1. it's a writing riff and 2. the first thing I wrote about needing a particular amount of money to do was to go see some awful theatrical production. #1 is doing art -- not necessarily the high quality art. #2 is taking a firm stand against low quality art. Now that people are actually offering me the money, it's true that I'm taking the money, but I do see the acceptance of the money as performance art. And, of course, eating the egg salad sandwich -- on YouTube -- will be performance art.
And remember: "Our civilization doesn't have adequate images."
Bonus images:
So Charlie Chaplin ate a shoe for art.... or made art out of our feelings about eating a shoe. In fact, he was eating a prop made of licorice. But I won't cheat. I won't cheat because: 1. I'm taking real money, 2. I can't think of anything that would look like egg salad and not be more disgusting, and 3. any art that may come from this depends on my reacting to actual egg salad.
I have so many DVDs on my shelf that I haven't watched that I've practically forbidden myself to order any more, but I just ordered two things that I wanted to see based on other works recently consumed:
1. "Marjoe." A documentary about a boy evangelist who grows up to expose the tricks he used (with his parents' guidance). This movie is the subject of interesting discussion in the Christopher Hitchens book "God Is Not Great" (which I've immensely enjoyed in audiobook form, read by the author with fascinating emotion).
2. "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." This is a documentay by Werner Herzog about Dieter Dengler, who appears in person in this film and is portrayed by Christian Bale in the current film "Rescue Dawn." I saw "Rescue Dawn" a couple days ago and found the story quite absorbing. Dengler was shot down flying over Laos and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese and -- with the help of a single nail -- he figures out how to escape. In this recent episode of "Fresh Air," Herzog explains why he made a second movie about Dengler.
When I first heard about this project, and later when I saw the early trailers, I halfway hoped that Mr. Gibson might turn out to be an American (or half-Australian) version of Werner Herzog, setting out into the jungle to explore the dark and tangled regions of human nature. Once you get past the costumes and the subtitles, though, the most striking thing about “Apocalypto” is how comfortably it sits within the conventions of mainstream moviemaking. It is not an obsessive opera like Mr. Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” but rather a pop period epic in the manner of “Gladiator” or “Braveheart,” and as such less interested in historical or cultural authenticity than in imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.
"Aguirre: The Wrath of God" is on my very short list of favorite movies. (See my profile.) That "Aguirre" even gets mentioned in the review makes me more likely to partake of the new Mel-o-drama, even if the mention is only to say it's not quite like it.
I finally got the chance to see "Grizzly Man," the one current movie that I really cared about. I loved it. Timothy Treadwell — now there is a character! He'd have been a terrible character in a work of fiction, though, I think, because he was just too strange to believe, too multidimensional, and too silly for his tragedy.
And the story would have been worse as fiction, because things that had to be left mysterious would have been dramatized in a fiction movie. The difficulty in seeing who Amie Huguenard was gave the movie a deep poignancy. How entirely different it would have been if we had seen Amie and Timothy expressing their emotions to each other! How did he get her to go there with him and why did she stay, even when she had one last chance to run?
Like Amie, the grizzly bears are mysterious and unknowable, as the material is ultimately presented by the director, Werner Herzog (who says in the voiceover "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder"). But Treadwell thought he understood the bears and that they could understand him too.
Our wonderful, thrilling central character lived a wild life, figured out how to do some amazing things, but got some things dramatically wrong. Who was he? Was he mostly a frustrated actor, who took to making his own insanely grandiose movie after he came in second in the casting for the "Cheers" role they gave to Woody Harrelson? Did he go back in the end to die out there?
A woman in Mexico cut open her own womb with a knife and delivered a healthy baby boy in her rural home when problems developed during labor, doctors report in a medical journal.
The woman and her son, her ninth child, both survived despite an eight-hour car ride to the nearest hospital and a wait of several hours once she got there, said co-author Dr. Rafael Valle, a Northwestern University obstetrician who learned about the case from a colleague.
"She was asked, 'Why did you do that? Do you know you could have died?' She said, 'Yes, but I wanted to save my baby,'" Valle said Wednesday. He added: "This is heroic to me."
The authors of the report said there are other cases of women attempting the same thing, but none they could find in which the mother and child survived.
The woman, 40, lived in a dirt-floor house with no electricity or running water and had previously lost a baby during childbirth, the authors said.
She was alone when she went into labor, and fearing the same thing would happen when it appeared childbirth was not progressing, she decided to perform the crude C-section. She drank three small glasses of hard liquor first to numb the pain, he said.
Yikes! That reminded me of story told by the great director Werner Herzog--I think it's in the incredibly cool documentary My Best Fiend--about working on the movie Fitzcarraldo. A crew member who was cutting down brush with a chainsaw got bitten by a snake so poisonous it would kill him in seconds. The man instantly used the chainsaw to cut off his own leg, saving his life. I don't trust Herzog not to lie, though, but it's a great story. The C-section one though is in a medical journal ... apparently.
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