I’m always excited about a Werner Herzog documentary. Although I found flaws with The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it’s still been one of my favorite documentaries of the year. If the blurbs for Into the Abyss are at all accurate, it certainly won’t be one to miss.

However, last night’s guest, Werner Herzog, demanded some attention. Of course the director is doing publicity for Cave of Forgotten Dreams (which I reviewed after catching at screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival last month).  It’s always interesting hearing Herzog speak, bu especially about Cave which I found extremely interesting.  I do appreciate Colbert picking on some of Herzog’s habits of intensifying the truth, something that particularly bugged me with his skipping over any of the controversy surround the paintings in the Chauvet Cave.

Also of particular interest is Herzog’s discussion of his incredibly strange post script filming and discussing radioactive albino crocodiles (which I found completely out of place and mystifying).

The cave has been in the news for over a decade for its cave paintings, and other discoveries made there.  The images are supposed to date to 33,000 years ago.  Nearly twice the age of any cave paintings known before this discovery.  The paintings show a remarkable understanding of shading, context, and movement.  Fights between animals are depicted, and scientists have discovered things they didn’t know about animals during that time thanks to their depictions on the cave walls.  Herzog goes so far as to call the images an early type of filmmaking.  And claims the artists may have used the three dimensional surfaces of the cave walls to create the illusion the drawn animals were dancing about in the light of the torches they paleolithic people would have used.  It’s a pleasant image, imagining all that.

Herzog’s documentaries are interesting in that he frequently chooses and interesting subject, and uses it as a jumping off point to really document the people involved in and surrounding that topic.  In the spectacular Encounters at the End of the World, much more time is spent discovering the stories of people who have chosen Antarctica as a remote home, then exploring ecosystems and other points of inanimate interest in the frozen region.  The same goes for Grizzly Man.  I did expect the same to happen in Caves.  I was wrong.  Interviews with archeologists and other relevant experts are bountiful.  But the unexpected subject of the film is a mystical mix of what we know about these ancient European people, and what your imagination comes up with about them.  It’s a nearly religious experience watching this movie.

I have personally never seen 3D technology used so well.  The images captured by the cameras are remarkable, and show the depressions and texture of the rock that has been untouched for so many tens of thousands of years.  Herzog’s quirky and thoughtful narration is funny and touching at the same time.  However, as a documentarian, Herzog has an obligation to look at his subjects objectively.  He let himself get too close to the project.  There is considerable debate about the accuracy of the carbon dating performed on the paintings and on other objects found at Chauvet.  There are schools of thought that claim the paintings are old, but not 33,000 years.  The film presents the most extreme beliefs and presents them as facts.  Not that it’s not enjoyable to hear these things, but they may or may not be true.

Because the production crew was so limited in the time they could spend in the cave, not to mention, the area’s they were granted access to were great limited, the film has no choice but to introduce things outside of the darkness of Chauvet.  This includes speaking to an expert about hunting techniques and possible lifestyles of cultures 40,000 years ago.  While good intentioned and relevant, it took away from the sacred tone of reverence present at other moments.  At the very end of the film, there’s a wildly off subject digression that seemed tacked on at the whim of the director which interferes with an already tenuous pacing.

These complaints aside, the images captured in the ancient cave or mesmerizing, and Herzog and his crew deliver on nearly all counts.  I loved it.

3.5 out of 4 stars

It’s been a long time since a movie has left me as speechless as after I watched Werner Herzog’s latest mess of a film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans.  Leaving the theatre, I really, honestly, didn’t have a thing to say about it.  I’m not sure that’s changed.

Nic Cage plays a mildly crooked cop who goes from bad to worse when his back is permanently injured while doing a good a deed.  The injury leads to an addiction to pain killers, which leads to coke, accidentally snorting heroin, falling deeper into a co-dependant relationship with his hooker girlfriend and fellow drug user Frankie (Eva Mendes), and engaging in more and more illegal acts.  These include robbing Frankie’s clients, selling police information to drug dealers, robbing and raping young adults when he believes they have drugs he can take from them in the name of the law.  And he frequently hallucinates aggressive iguanas.

Herzog’s furiously paced film is fantastically uneven and frenetic.  Which actually is perfectly paired with one crazy ass performance by Cage.  This is the good crazy Cage like in Wild at Heart, not ridiculous Cage like Knowing, Ghost Rider, The Wicker Man, Next, Bangkok Dangerous, etc., etc.  Truly, his performance here is fantastic.  Halfway through the film his rampant drug usage mostly paralyzes half his body and forces him to talk like James Stewart.  Here, this is somewhat distracting, but for the most part, it’s a great performance.  There are solid performances by most of his co-stars as well, including Mendes, Val Kilmer, and a fantastic Jennifer Coolidge.

If there was a point that Mr. Herzog intended for me to take away from his film, it has mostly eluded my grasp.  The film is wildly unpredictable, which is refreshing in a genre that is becoming overly familiar.  The ending is so unbelievable, it would be laughable if it had been handled in any other way.  Basically, Bad Lieutenant is just a hell of a ride.  Herzog keeps that distinct sense of detachment that is evident in his documentaries.  This detachment is passed on to the viewer which allows us to keep pesky emotions at bay.  In any other film, that would be seen as a handicap, but here, it works like synergy, taking the sum of all the films parts and supercharging them to create an unforgettable cinematic experience.

3 out of 4 stars