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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

July 17, 2008


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2008-07-17

This movie is not about penguins

Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World offers a more human look at Antarctica

(Encounters at the End of the World, opens Friday at the Globe)

A-

Encounters at the End of the World is hardly Werner Herzog's best film, but it is probably one of the best big-screen nature documentaries (sorry IMAX) of the last year and a respectable exercise in Herzog-ian ecstatic truth-telling, to boot.

In it, everyone's favourite austere German narrator takes the reins for a trip to the Antarctic - a strange, wonderful and unique environment so far south that compasses can't help but point north.

Herzog begins his vacation in McMurdo - the American HQ for the National Science Foundation and, as Herzog puts it, "an ugly mining town." There, repeatedly, Herzog meets the confluence of professional oddities that comprise McMurdo's meagre population of 1,000-odd nutjobs with PhDs and a thirst for adventure.

Produced by the Discovery Channel, which was responsible for Herzog's intriguing Grizzly Man (2005), Encounters at the End of the World is first and foremost a nature doc, accented by the now-trademark severity and extremism of Herzog's voice-over. The reflective meandering of the film's material and interview subjects suggests that Herzog had no grand schematic visions prior to his Antarctic journey, and the entire film has a home-movie travelogue feel to it. Indeed, early on, Herzog suggests that images of undersea, under-ice-bed divers, sent to him by a scientist friend, were the motivation compelling him to travel to the barren wilderness, Nagra in hand and cameraman in tow. (Jokingly, but not so, Herzog claims that with his Discovery Channel producers, he "left no doubt that [he] would not come up with another film about penguins.")

As Herzog observes all manner of strange Antarctic reality, from the outdoor electric guitar recitals (without an audience) given by resident scientists to the death-wishing of some penguins' instinctual migration patterns, audiences should be thankful they have such a fun and enlightening tour guide.

But if, like near-all titles in the Herzog canon, Encounters at the End of the World is shy of a masterpiece, the jaw-dropping marvels of the Antarctic's natural environment should prove enough to shore up disappointment; this is a place where the water temperature is below freezing and single cell organisms exhibit signs of higher intelligence.

As Herzog continues his snapshot journey, even if his penultimate goal remains less than fully articulated, one can be assured of the rarest movie treat: an accomplished nature doc by one of our time's most accomplished filmmakers.
— Walter Forsberg

The king of sci-fi?

Writer Harlan Ellison's story is told in new biographical documentary

(Dreams With Sharp Teeth, July 18-20, Cinematheque)

B+

Bad movies don't make the cover photo of the bi-monthly Cinematheque schedule and the new bio-doc, Dreams with Sharp Teeth is proof. Charting the life of renowned science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, the film is a collection of interviews, words of praise from friends such as Robin Williams and Village Voice critic Carol Cooper, archival TV interviews and veritÈ-style moments from Ellison's current everyday.

Ellison is the kind of writing personality who gets you plain riled up. In his critiques of television and modern media, he's not afraid to call a spade spayed, and he is more than outspoken about his disappointment with the ways in which modern media culture conforms - instead of transforms - society. He describes himself as a cantankerous old Jew, so the film is in many ways not just a biography but a compendium of curmudgeonly complaining about everything from religion to the afterlife to Aaron Spelling.

Even for those (this critic included) unfamiliar with his writing, Ellison's whining is generally charming in and amongst the story of his early NYC, one-cent-a-word literary testing grounds, his military service, his rise to the summit of fantasy writing and his mixed success in the realm of TV and movie script-writing.

Along the way, Ellison shares his personal mantras about the hard slug of a writer's life ("The trick is staying a writer") and his life-long goal of establishing respect for the profession.

If there's one main criticism to make about the movie, it's that filmmaker Erik Nelson doesn't quite successfully bring Ellison's writing to life by having him recite selected passages into the camera, wearing sunglasses, against a blue-screen. The weak and cheesy computer-rendered visual interpretation of Ellison's other-worldly imagined universes fall pretty flat as support material, but I guess you have to credit director Nelson for trying, even with a small budget.

For all Ellison's endearing, unapologetic self-righteousness, this writer wouldn't be surprised if - at some point during the film - moviegoers didn't stop taking Ellison seriously simply for the fact that he writes sexy space stories. Even if the science fiction genre has adopted the euphemistic term "imaginative literature" for itself, it's still improbable to become literature for the ages.

Nevertheless, Ellison can always dream.
— Walter Forsberg

Beating the point to death

Errol Morris makes a powerful anti-torture film, but is it necessary?

(Standard Operating Procedure, July 18-20, 23 & 24, Cinematheque)

B+

At this point, there can be little doubt that the correctional atrocities and very real torture committed by the United States' military at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison have become defining symbols of the most recent American misadventure in Iraq. The very photographs which brought the atrocities to light (thank you Mr. Seymour Hersh) form the basis of the new film by Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris.

Afflicted by box-office failure, audience fatigue and fellow Oscar-winner Alex Gibney's similarly themed and concurrently released doc, Taxi to the Dark Side, Standard Operating Procedure may lack drop-dead zeitgeist genius and the stylistic mastery of other Morris films (2004's Fog of War, or 1988's Thin Blue Line) but politico-junkies, inquiring minds and Morris fans will nevertheless sit captive as many former prison guards and perpetrators - now released from military jail - explain their motivations directly into the Interrotron (Morris' patented, eye contact-inducing interview camera/teleprompter).

These interviews, edited with thoughtfully paced cuts and interspersed with reflection-inducing black, make Morris' movie scary - not because of the graphic violence and humiliation depicted in the photos, but because of the terrifying general lack of remorse and occasional giggle, or smile, that interviewees let slip.

Perhaps scariest of all, the infamous Lynndie England (see: thumbs up) has a nervous twitch-like smile when describing the circumstances at Abu Ghraib, "(it was) unusual, weird and wrong, but the example was already set."

Incredibly, fellow guard Sabrina Harman evaluates the context of "Gilligan" - the hooded detainee standing on a box, wires attached to fingers, who was told if he got off the box he would be electrocuted - by claiming, "it was just words. If the wires had actually been connected to electricity, that would be torture."

For Morris, a filmmaker so often and intriguingly concerned with pathos and the Paul Harvey-esque story-behind-the-story, the Abu Ghraib saga is great material. Thousands upon thousands of photographs documenting the detainee abuse (in full college-frat-boy style) provide shocking, if desensitizing, witness to the dehumanized activities of the U.S. military, and form the basis for several of Morris' trademark shadowy reenactments.

In the hands-down best one, Morris distills one detail from a Military Intelligence interrogator's account of the events into the beautifully perfect metaphor of a Nerf ball being thrown at the prisoners.

By film's end, Morris' work doesn't achieve perfection for the mere reason that audiences will have thought long and hard about this topic before.

Making fresh that which has been ground into the brains of disgusted global audiences already for years isn't Morris' forte and Standard Operating Procedure ultimately falls short of Morris-standards of documentary transcendence.
— Walter Forsberg

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