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I think that a persons obsessions tells you a lot about who they are. Are you obsessed with football, fashion or kiddie porn? Meh... Then fuck it- we probably wouldn't get along. For me it has to be films with one particular highlight of my life being the year I spent alone watching three or four of them a night... anything to break up the crying and wanking I suppose. Anyway, during this time I basically face planted the world of cinema and learned as much shit as I could to help distract me from the great depression that is my life. As a result I learnt about a chap called Werner Herzog whose bleak outlook made my own darkness look like a warm puddle of piss in a vast ocean of grim. To be frank, I think that the guy is a fucking genius. For anybody unaware of who he is, I'll explain a bit more in a second but to set him up I have a little quote. You know the sheer beauty of the exotic jungle? Well, during the making of his film Fitzcarraldo, Herzog saw it a little differently, “Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they- they sing. They just screech in pain.” There is nothing that I want more than for Herzog to develop a second career as a zoo tour guide. Can you imagine it? “The Lion is suffering in his rusty man-made cage while the Kangaroo hops about with an ecstatic insanity... And the Orang-utan? Well he just stares into the abyss like a great ginger cunt”. Ah... A boy can dream.
Of all the Herzog films that I've seen, I think that for me the most impressive must be the previously mentioned Fitzcarraldo. Released in 1982, it tells the story of a man who became obsessed with a bat-shit crazy idea that got lodged in his bat-shit crazy head. Fitzcarraldo wants to sail a crew through the treacherous waters of the Amazon until the river ends and they all have to nip outside and drag their 320-ton steamer ship over a mountain and to the water on the other side. Oh and to make this piece of piss mission a little trickier, the area is crawling with natives who traditionally welcome any visitors by killing the living shit out of them. Kind of like a Friday night in Liverpool. And why do they have to do this? What possible end game might they have for such impossible bullshit? Well.. it's because the man in charge wants to harvest some rubber trees to help fund the construction of a fucking Oprah house. I mean- Jesus Christ! Who could be bothered? Just get a bloody jukebox and pump out some crap like Lulu or Sinead O'Connor instead! It'd still make a pretty penny but you know... minus the risk of having some native stick a spear through your fucking head.
Anyway, so I think that anybody whose seen this film would agree that it's clearly a masterpiece. You know how our tender and pampered actors all need their personal assistants to drive them around, get them drinks and massage their anuses or whatever? And how they hang out in their house sized trailers that are worth more money than any hardworking prostitute could ever dream to suffer for? And all so that they can say a few words in front of a camera to the adoration of millions of fans who are all oblivious to their heroes raging addiction to heroin and attention? Well, this isn't that kind of film. Herzog needed a madman to drag a boat over a mountain, whilst surrounded by killer natives and so he took a madman to a mountain and made him drag the boat over whilst surrounded by killer natives. The film was scripted but to all intents and purposes, the story that you see on screen is exactly the story of how it was made. Imagine a Borat/Bad Grandpa type of film in which there's clearly a script but everything else is real and that's basically what this film is. Except that where they have a hidden camera and jokes, this has poetic brilliance and the kind of images that are so beautiful that once seen it'll be as though they've been tattooed onto your retinas with a rusty knife. Fitzcarraldo was obsessed with the idea of getting his boat over the mountain and so too was Herzog who in another of his many quotable quotes claimed that, “If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.” Crikey... And all most directors have to worry about is interference from the fucking studio!
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Speaking of things that are insane though, I think that there's nothing more annoying than our world and the stupid people that live here. Bollocks like Transformers has money pissed all over it during production and as a result is enjoyed by an audience containing significantly more people than braincells. Fitzcarraldo on the other hand has now sadly slipped into oblivion in the minds of the mainstream audience. Michael Bay getting some over-paid dweeb to create a personality-free piece of metal on their computer is so dull when compared to seeing the obsessions of Werner Herzog appear on screen. I mean, this film literally has a three storey boat dragged over a mountain and yet somehow hasn't and won't be seen by a fraction of the cross-eyed dullards that'll traipse towards Bay's aptly named, Age Of Extinction. I honestly can't think of a bad thing to say about Fitzcarraldo and yet to some people it's as though the film doesn't exist. I don't know... It just doesn't make sense to me how something as monumental as this isn't an essential part of our popular culture. Why this film isn't considered as educationally important as any book and taught in schools is not only a shame but proof that the world still doesn't understand the artistic contributions of cinema. Perhaps if kids were taught the difference between something of creative merit and something that is essentially diarrhoea with a light shined through then perhaps we would have a slightly more open-minded and cultured society.
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