Jack Reacher

Twists and meaningless McGuffins galore, “Jack Reacher” requires a patience that this pulpy movie doesn’t fully earn.

Look, I get that killing is bad no matter how you go about doing it, but Jack Reacher is a plain thug. Only firing a gun if he’s within point blank range, Reacher prefers to beat the pulp out of lesser opponents, finally getting in a few brutal finishing moves to the crotch, by breaking legs or wrists or finally stomping someone’s face in.

He makes for a disturbingly cold action hero, and the movie that shares his name, “Jack Reacher,” feels much the same.

Blending TV crime procedural talking points with hyper violent vigilante excitement, “Jack Reacher” explores the investigation of a man who went on a sharpshooter killing spree, murdering five random and innocent people, only to frame the attack on an Iraq War veteran discharged for a similar attack. Just before he’s beaten and goes into a coma, he asks for Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise), his former military detective, to come and help him.

Based on Lee Child’s series of novels, “Jack Reacher” has a distinctly literary quality for an action film. It’s labored with a heavy backstory and conspiracy nuance, but all of it in arguably the wrong places. We learn an awful lot about the supposed murderer, the female lawyer, investigator and love interest (Rosamund Pike) and her relationship with her father (Richard Jenkins) and the bizarre mastermind without even much of a reason to be in the movie (Werner Herzog being absolutely sinister and iconic while barely lifting an eyebrow), but very little about the mysterious Jack Reacher. Continue reading “Jack Reacher”

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!”

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”

Review: Into the Abyss

One of Werner Herzog’s first requests in his documentary “Into the Abyss” is, “Describe an encounter with a squirrel.” But we know Herzog; you can practically hear him asking it in his chilling German accent along with speculations about smuggling sperm out of a prison, and it almost sounds sadistic.

But from these oddities Herzog gleams a devastating and powerful film that examines death and loss from those who live with death, those who bring death, those who bring life and one who will know death very soon. Continue reading “Review: Into the Abyss”

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I can imagine the History Channel approaching Werner Herzog to make a documentary on Chauvet Cave. In my mind, they ask if he would make an informative but cinematic documentary with lots of talking heads because they have very successful shows like “Modern Marvels.”

But of course Herzog has no interest in making such a film, and instead he makes “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” a film with beauty and philosophical ambitions that far surpass those of the scientists who discovered, studied and preserved this cave dating back to the dawn of man. Continue reading “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”