#2023 werner herzog watch through

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Into The Inferno

Werner Herzog: Here I met a fascinating tribe of volcanologists...

*camera pans over a group of unconscious people in colourful anoraks*

Werner Herzog: ...some of them overcome by altitude sickness.

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Rushing this to print as I’ve just seen Barbie. Frankly, it lived up to the hype. Did not exceed it.

When people talk about how Continental (read: mostly French) philosophy and art movements precede American ones by roughly ten years, they aren’t kidding. Which is to say that the Barbie Movie (2023)’s fresh whip-smart metamodernist style can be found in what French surrealist horror comedy Rubber was doing in 2010.

Barbie’s plotline exhibits this through a hyperselfawareness that utilizes childlike naïveté (like Elf on five degrees of abstraction) and genre-savvy metacommentary (Existential Ken Doll Dance Offs) to communicate directly to the audience in explicit and unspoken fourth wall breaks. There is the sense that everyone knows they’re in a movie yet they’re still participating in said movie and they cannot just break the fourth wall and escape the narrative despite their knowledge that there is a narrative in the first place.

I’ve got to say that Rubber did it better. This is partially because Barbie doesn’t know what it wants to be (a symptom of a lot of metamodernist texts). One minute Barbie’s getting sexually harassed in stylized but very adult ways, the next minute oversimplifying serious subjects in some attempt to remain child friendly. I feel the other part of this is that, with all respect to Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, the movie didn’t stick all the landings.

With the caveat that this is Mattel’s Capitalist Propaganda Film and so Greta had a corporate veto hanging over her head, there were some places that could’ve been improved. Chief among them was some of the messaging. The movie had a lot to say about the Patriarchy and the female experience (something Gerwig is an expert at communicating) but toward the end the movie abandoned the narrative excellent social critique and delivered the equivalent of a 30min 50’s anti communist propaganda PSA but for twitterbrained feminism. It wasn’t bad, it was just lazy, preachy writing from people who I know can do better.

The overall length should’ve been 20-30 minutes shorter, and the movie could’ve tightened things up and cut unnecessary plotlines that felt like fluff padding out an extravagant runtime that could’ve been leaned out some.

The ending (up until the very last couple scenes) itself was structurally mushy. Partially as a symptom of the Barbie Movie not knowing what it was, partially as a symptom of mismanaged pacing, but too many loose ends gave it a disorganized feeling that was only saved by a fantastic final sequence.

And that’s the kicker. Greta Gerwig is one of the best directors of our generation and despite some noticeable missteps I enjoyed the movie on both a personal and artistic level. The script is whip smart. The art direction is to die for. The film is beautiful and the performances are fantastic. There’s an extended Ken Doll rock opera song. Barbie visits the gynecologist (Twitter moment). The final sequence had the audience in tears.

Everyone’s gushing over the film already but I need to stress it’s artistic and narrative merit, and that I give Gerwig and Noah a lot of leeway because a Mattel-funded blockbuster of the year is a take the money and run once in a lifetime chance to overindulge, and Gerwigs ambition really paid off even if the landing was bumpy. For a movie with supercharged hype, Barbie satisfied me and made watching the capitalism machine print money feel better than it ever felt this side of Reagan. This is worth the watch, but there’s no need to rush to beat the opening weekend crowds to it either.

I hope they get Werner Herzog to direct the Polly Pocket Movie

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Into the Abyss

There's not much for me to say given I think the death penalty is completely foul and Werner Herzog agrees. A real struggle to get through this one.

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Lessons in Darkness

I'm not sure if I came up with this, or if I read it somewhere, but a line kept going through my head while I was watching this. 'Every generation thinks theirs is the apocalypse'. For Werner, it was the Gulf War. It's tempting to point and laugh given our position thirty years later, but his portrayal is spectacular.

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The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner

For such a short movie, it does exactly what it needs to. Rather than a man defying nature, this is the story of a man who respects his limits, while the rest of the world demands he defy them, at the cost of his own life and safety. It's a bookend to Grizzly Man, and you can feel Herzog's admiration for Steiner's determination to respect the laws of physics in every moment of that movie. Sublime.

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The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft

A great many of these 'people do awesome thing and die as a result' movies has Herzog torn between awe and Picard facepalming.

In this he is solidly on the awe side due to the people in question actually doing their best to stay safe- as much as people studying volcanos can be- and were absolute experts in their field.

They respected nature in the way the guy in Grizzly Man didn't- but that didn't matter in the end. Volcanos don't care about your respect or precautions.

And holy crap but their footage was unreal.

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How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck?

Werner doesn't even try and talk in this one, his one attempt at German stymied by whatever passes for German in the Deep South of the US. Half the fun of watching this is putting on closed captions and watching the ai want to die trying to translate auctioneer speech.

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Little Deiter Needs to Fly

Werner Herzog doing an MSTK 3000 for an American War Informercial is something I never knew I needed.

Also Dieter, Refusing to condemn the Vietnam War doesn't make you like your granddad refusing to vote for Hitler. It just makes you a turd.

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Land of Silence and Darkness

Bitch, why are the blind deaf people being taken to a fucking cactus garden? Can't we have them touch, idk, a nice orchid or something?

Thay being said, you imagine what all these people have lived through, it was shot in 1971, and all of them at 70+ years old.

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Encounters at the End of the World

I image this would be his favourite movie, since it appears to be people entirely by different versions of himself. Antarctica is an continent of Werner Herzogs.

I am finally starting to feel inspirer to return to my Mythos story. Would people be interested in a story about a blind reporter who's grandmother was a Cthulhu cultist, falling in love with a Deep One, against the backdrop of the (possible) end of the world? Maybe include; radioactive shoggoths, grand theft auto-ing in an authomatic wheelchair, and cops getting eaten.

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Grizzly Man

1 hour 44 minutes of Werner Herzog doing this:

What a complete moron.