Monthly Archives: August 2016

Werner Herzog’s “Even Dwarves Started Small”

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Werner Herzog’s 1968 film Even Dwarves Started Small has a very specific and demanding vision dominated by extraordinarily long takes, the camera mercilessly watching as to what might unfold, be it a truck driving in an endless circle…Werner Herzog’s "Even Dwarves Started Small"Dwarves looking at pictures of nude girls…Werner Herzog’s "Even Dwarves Started Small"Or a chicken eating a dead mouse.Werner Herzog’s "Even Dwarves Started Small"Much is demanded of the audience, too much, throughout this drifting narrative in which dwarves yell and laugh maniacally as they wreck everything they can find.Werner Herzog’s "Even Dwarves Started Small"Says Herzog: “Film is out about our collective dreams and also our collective nightmares, something that cannot be extinguished from our minds.”Werner Herzog’s "Even Dwarves Started Small"

Nightmare indeed.

Ice Friday: Par Lagerkvist’s “The Dwarf”

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It’s not so much the story in Par Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf as how he develops the dwarf’s perspective, that, as a dwarf, there is no way to be disguised, especially to oneself.

I live only my dwarf life. I never go around tall and smooth-featured. I am myself, always the same. I live one life alone. IMAG2772I have no other being inside me. And I recognize everything within me, nothing ever comes up from my inner depths. Nothing is there shrouded in mystery.

Fuck You, Chris Harrison!

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I watch The Bachelor for all of the right reasons. I am painfully amused by people making fools of themselves, confessing to devastating breakups, the loss of an alcoholic parent, awkwardly displaying their sensitivity just to make it as a low-level celebrity. Fuck You, Chris Harrison!And yet as pathetic as the participants may appear, one can’t help but feel sorry for them, their lack of understanding for the contracts they’ve signed, the blood in their deal with the devil. Fuck You, Chris Harrison!The Bachelor brand preaches a skewed morality – a GQ/ADHD cocktail of defending superficiality- to which all participants adhere, while they are coaxed to reveal their personal wreckage, be it a former love’s betrayal, a famous brother or deep, bitter anger. Fuck You, Chris Harrison!Host Chris Harrison has been employed to feign concern – “I know it isn’t easy for you to be out here with your heart on the line…but how did you survive that crushing day?” – to create the victims and monsters.Fuck You, Chris Harrison!And propagate the reality of this reality that love is sex, empathy is dishonesty and dreams only last until the next commercial.

How Stupid Can an Audience Get?

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Hollywood Cookie Cutters can be a guilty pleasure, good as background chatter, to be glanced at between reading, writing and or having a nap. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has an occasional edge. Straight Outta Compton has scenes with great music. straightoutta10 Cloverfield Lane has John Goodman. Midnight Special has domes of light. midnight special domesAnd Everybody Wants Some has the glimpses of what Richard Linklater used to do – make a decent film.everybodywantsssomeAnd yet each of these mind-numbing 2015/16 releases – desperately displaying arc points as they stumble derivatively through genre – scored an average rating of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. This begs the question: How did audiences get this stupid?ABC_donald_trumpOh, I forgot.

The Great Divide

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The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above the timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. 20140804_095338They wade up through the ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with watercourses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. (Angle of Repose, 254)