GARBAGE!: THE REVOLUTION STARTS AT HOME
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Cast: Andrew Nisker, Glen McDonald
Director: Andrew Nisker
Screened April 22nd as part of Hot Docs

Andrew Nisker’s Garbage!: The Revolution Starts at Home begins as a gimmicky documentary and ends as a fevered rant. Nisker’s topic is pollution and garbage disposal, and his approach is zippy and commercial, but he aims at too many targets over too little time, and some of what he chooses to attack is downright laughable.

Nisker’s obvious model for Garbage is Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, which he mimics like a colour-by-numbers picture. Nisker’s experiment is pretty cute: he enlists his friends the McDonald family to save all of their garbage in their garage for three months to see how much an average suburban household throws away. Things quickly get very crowded, smelly, and maggot-infested in the McDonalds’ garage. In between the McDonalds’ story, Nisker travels around North America, making discoveries about the effects of garbage on the earth, communities, and our own bodies.

Nisker is not the born filmmaker that Spurlock is, because he fails to realize that the key to making a first-person documentary work is to convey that he himself has a strong, dynamic personality. Morgan Spurlock presents himself as a good ol’ boy, and Michael Moore positions himself as a shlubby man of the people, but Nisker is a blank. He has more luck with the McDonald family, who come across as funny and charming. Perhaps Nisker should have abandoned the first-person device and given the McDonald family more screen time to develop into fully formed protagonists.

Garbage also fails to motivate its audience to save the environment. The film moves at a breathless pace as Nisker squeezes in virtually every form of pollution he can think of within the film’s slim 76-minute run time. My overwhelming feeling was not one of inspiration, but rather hopelessness. Nisker lists of so many pollutants that I started to wonder if the only way to make the world green was to revert to the Stone Age. Nisker is right to say that we use too much plastic (incidentally, this film marks the first time I’ve ever heard the phrase “plastic lobbyists”), but he also insists on pointing out that we pollute when we flush the toilet and use the dishwasher. He visits the residents of the Michigan suburb where Toronto sends its garbage, who complain that their property values have plummeted since the dump has been constructed. Well, that’s unfortunate, but the reality is that no matter how much we conserve, we’re still going to need garbage dumps, and there will always be unlucky people who have a house next to one. Nisker goes totally off the rails when he says that our decomposing bodies can harm the earth. Is he trying to say that to save the environment, we should try not to die?

ALL TOGETHER NOW
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Cast: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Michael, Yoko Ono
Director: Adrian Wills
Screened April 19th as part of Hot Docs. Also showing April 20th at 3:45 PM at the Bloor.

Among the more interesting aspects of Adrian Wills’ All Together Now, a documentary about the production of the Cirque du Soleil/Beatles show Love (currently playing at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas), is the sheer idolatry with which it views the Beatles. When Paul McCartney is seen entering the room in behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage, the camera darts around the gathering crowd like a nervous autograph-seeker. Later, during Love’s opening night, the camera catches a few quick glimpses of McCartney and Ringo Starr seated next to each other in the audience, occasionally dancing along and lip-synching the music they wrote over forty years ago. These shots are very quick; it’s tempting to think of the cameraman, after capturing a few seconds of McCartney and Starr, running outside and telling the other crew members, “OMIGOD! I JUST SAW PAUL AND RINGO!”

Well, he does have a point. McCartney and Starr have reached a level of pop culture royalty where they can get a standing ovation for just showing up. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wow, I’m a Beatle!,’” says McCartney during All Together Now. “Only four people in the whole world can say that. In the whole universe!” The blind hero-worship of All Together Now is understandable, but it’s a shame that the rest of the film remains at that same superficial level. The film is slick and efficient, and it contains some modest pleasures for Beatles fans, but it’s not very filling. It plays more like an 85-minute commercial than a documentary.

One of the problems is that there is little suspense over whether Love will be a success. With the mighty Beatles, Cirque du Soleil, Mirage, and Apple names all backing it to the tune of an estimated $180 million, the show ain’t exactly an underdog. A few very minor backstage squabbles (most involving Yoko) are very quickly settled, and there is little inherent drama about a show whose production goes by smoothly. A lot of the behind-the-scenes footage is surprisingly mundane. And yes, this movie has a lot of Beatles music, but so does my iPod.

The film might have been more compelling had director Adrian Willis delved into some of the personalities behind the show. Apart from his glowing portraits of the Beatles and their associates, however, few people are given much screen time. (The closest thing to a scene-stealer is a good-natured African dancer, but Willis uses him rather cheaply as a comic relief). Willis might also have made a more interesting film if he really examined why the Beatles have endured. Why do the Beatles continue to resonate with audiences to such an extent that the last two years have brought not only Love, but also two other Beatles revues (Rain and The Cast of Beatlemania) and a big budget Beatles-inspired movie (Across the Universe)? All Together Now is more interested in adoration than analysis.

In between all the puffery, some really nice moments do manage to creep in that suggest how much better this film could have been. Dominic Champagne, the director of Love, plays nervously with a file clip several times. George Martin offhandedly mimes the cellist part in “She’s Leaving Home.” Yoko Ono has a near-hissy fit over the “sleazy” treatment of “Come Together.” McCartney banters with Martin, recalling with some amazement how songs that he scribbled on the back of an envelope have reached iconic status. Ringo Starr air-drums while watching the show. And McCartney, leaving all false modesty behind, reflects, “We were a really fucking good band.”

A CRIME AGAINST ART
Rating: * (out of ****)
Cast: Anton Vidokle, Tirdad Zolghadr, Jan Verwoert
Director: Hila Peleg
Screened April 18 as part of the 2008 Hot Docs Film Festival. Also showing on Sunday at 1:15 at the Royal.

Contemporary art does itself a great disservice by referring to itself as art. I mean this not as an insult – actually, contemporary art is the first thing I head to see any time I’m in a gallery. I like its audaciousness, its bold experimentation, and its willingness to tackle taboo subjects. But how can contemporary art, which is less concerned with being aesthetically pleasurable than it is with conveying a sociopolitical message, be included under the same banner as Rembrandt, Van Gough, or even Picasso? When artists are no longer interested in the very fundamentals of art – colour, balance, proportion, etc. – wouldn’t it be wise to peg their work under some other label?

Some would suggest that art without form is a masturbatory exercise. While this is a fairly harsh dismissal (there’s considerable though put behind a lot of those canvases that your kid could’ve painted), I have at times wondered whether certain artists find more enjoyment in creating works that are opaque than works that are meaningful. Hila Peleg’s A Crime Against Art is the cinematic equivalent of contemporary art at its worst: boring, pompous, and proudly impenetrable, completely devoid of any stylistic niceties and satisfying perhaps only to those who made it.

Before going any further, I have a confession to make: a little past the halfway point, I walked out of this film. This is the first time I’ve walked out of a movie in ten years. I have exams to study for, and life’s just too short.

A Crime Against Art has a cute premise. A New York artist named Anton Vidokle, fed up with the state of the art world, has put himself, along with curator Tirdad Zolghadr, on trial for crimes against art – namely, selling out to the new bourgeoisie. (I swear to god, this movie actually uses the word “bourgeoisie” with a straight face.) The trial is filmed in the same bare-bones style you might find on a particularly slow afternoon of C-SPAN, with virtually no frills. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I could not follow this film; the dialogue is entirely comprised of the kind of pseudo-intellectual jargon that gets used to inflate small ideas. This film is packed with people speaking so much yet saying so little.

What ideas, exactly, does this movie have? I find myself turning helplessly to Christopher McKinnon’s notes in the official Hot Docs festival guide. He reports: “The indictments are piling up. There are suggestions that the whole trial is a waste of time, or worse still a product of the accused’s puffed up vanity. There is railing against the New Bourgeoisie. The accusations continue: the trial expresses a death wish, a desire for martyrdom. The artists are guilty, guilty, guilty of a gloating kind of heroic thinking. They wish to absolved by their peers, revered by there peers, both. They have colluded with the bourgeoisie, they have eroded artistic agency, they have made impossible the creation of new and meaningful art.”

This is all intriguingly anarchic, yes, but I found it quite simply impossible to follow. The film never explains what exactly the “New Bourgeoisie” is, nor does it clearly and effectively illustrate how artists have surrendered to them, nor does it even mention very many artists by name. This movie does not even show a single example of Anton Vidokle’s work. Is it too much to ask that the filmmakers throw me a bone by placing all this nothingness in some kind of context?

I was about to say that A Crime Against Art might work better for its target audience, but what target audience could this film possibly have in mind? It completely baffled this casual patron of the arts, but I suspect even serious art enthusiasts will be bored. It feels like a home movie that Vidokle, Peleg, and the rest of the cast and crew have made for their own private amusement. Contemporary art does itself a disservice by calling itself art. A Crime Against Art does itself a disservice by calling itself a movie.

AIR INDIA 182
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Director: Sturla Gunnarsson
Screened April 17th as part of the 2008 Hot Docs Film Festival

With the return of Toronto’s popular Hot Docs documentary film festival, now might be a good time to ask: what, exactly, is a “documentary”? It’s a harder term to define than you might think, and while glancing through the Hot Docs festival guide, I started to wonder if any of the festival’s 180-plus films could really claim to be of the same genre.
Most people would point to Michael Moore as the most prominent figure in the documentary genre, but his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts has become the stuff of notoriety. Werner Herzog, whose documentaries have been fictionalized and occasionally completely fabricated, argues that we should look for “ecstatic truth” – a truth “beyond the truth and much deeper than the truth.” Moore’s films obviously fit the criteria. Then again, so does This is Spinal Tap.

Some say Moore is a propagandist, not a documentarian. I don’t think this is true, but it does point out that the line between documentary and propaganda is thin. Is Triumph of the Will a documentary? It covers actual events, but is so skewed that it offers not even the slightest insight into Hitler’s psyche and philosophy, and so dishonest that it fails to even once mention his anti-Semitism.

Can we trust cinema verite? Or do these films lie by trying to convince us that pure, unvarnished truth can be recorded with a camera in the room? The filmmaker Nick Broomfield came to the latter conclusion, and has made a string of films as much about their own making as about their purported subjects. (Kurt and Courtney has a great scene with Broomfield being told over the phone by his agent that his financing has fallen through).

The line between documentary and fiction gets very blurry in Air India 182, the Hot Docs festival’s Opening Night film, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson (Beowulf and Grendel). The film is about the events surrounding the ill-fated plane that, on its 1985 flight from Monstreal to Delhi, was victim to a terrorist attack when a bomb in the baggage carrier killed all 331 passengers. The bombing, Canada’s first large-scale experience with terrorism, only recently made it through the courts, where the chief suspects were acquitted due to lack of evidence.

Gunnarsson makes the intriguing decision to shoot the film as part documentary, part re-enactment, similar to Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo. The staged re-enactments of the events leading up to and beyond the bombing alternate with interview segments with airport personnel, families of the victims, and others involved in the bombing.

The re-enactments are shot in a hyper-realistic verite style reminiscent of United 93, but they’re never quite convincing. There’s just something off about everything. The airports look too spare, the extras look to cheerful, and everything looks too clean. Gunnarsson even has trouble maintaining a consistent visual style. Some scenes are shaky-cam reliant, with heavy-handed attempts at aping the verite style (we sometimes see people from outside office windows, partially obscured by blinds). Other times, Gunnarsson uses impossibly intimate close-ups and smooth establishing shots.

Strangely, Gunnarsson has chosen to stylize the interview sequences. The interviewees are superimposed in front of a blinding white background, and Gunnarsson has them fade out when their comments are over, leaving only the white background. A neat effect, but these scenes are disorienting next to the attempted realism of the re-enactments, and their heavy artificiality makes the interviews look staged, and the effect is quite distancing.

That’s the big problem with this film: its failed stylistic touches keep the audience at arm’s length. Here’s a movie that should pack a real emotional punch, but it feels cold and clinical, like a forgettable TV special. There are great individual scenes (it’s hard not to feel choked up during some of the family’s memories), and the topic is so fascinating that it would be hard to make a film completely devoid of interest. But the overall verdict is regrettable: Air India 182 crashes.

MONSIEUR VERDOUX
Rating: *** ½ (out of ****)
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Martha Raye, Isobel Elsom, Marilyn Nash
Writer: Charles Chaplin
Director: Charles Chaplin
Playing Friday (7:00) and Sunday (3:00) at Cinematheque Ontario

“Chaplin Changes – CAN YOU?” asked the ads for Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 black comedy, Monsieur Verdoux. Monsieur Verdoux was the first time since 1914 that Chaplin did not play his famous Little Tramp (or a variation on that character). The film also marked a turning point in his career and popularity. Already reeling from allegations of Communism and an ugly paternity lawsuit, the man who was once the most famous and beloved single person in the entire world was seen as a lecher and a radical. Monsieur Verdoux only alienated his public further, and apart from 1923’s A Woman of Paris (a melodrama that he directed but did not star in), it became his first box office flop.

The story (“Based on an Idea by Orson Welles”) struck an unpleasant chord. Chaplin plays Henri Verdoux, a dapper French banker who loses his job during the Great Depression. Unable to find employment and with a family to feed, Verdoux embarks on a career of marrying wealthy old women and murdering them for their money. In one of the film’s early scenes, Verdoux is on his latest honeymoon. Wandering through his garden, Verdoux saves a caterpillar from getting squished. Seconds later, a neighbour observes, “He’s had that incinerator going all day.” Guess who’s in the incinerator.

In this scene and others, Chaplin contrasts Verdoux’s charm with his inhuman crimes, which Verdoux views with a startling indifference. Disturbingly, Chaplin the director, while hardly glamorizing the murders, does not go out of his way to demonize Verdoux. Rather, Chaplin turns Verdoux from a cold-blooded killer into a sympathetic antihero. In 1947, this was unheard of.

Turning Verdoux into the protagonist isn’t just a sick joke for Chaplin. As in most of his later films, the plot of Monsieur Verdoux is the launching pad for Chaplin’s political agenda. After Verdoux is finally arrested, Chaplin draws parallels between Verdoux’s killings with the killing brought about by war. “One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero,” says Verdoux at his trial. “As a mass killer, I am an amateur.” How many people would have dared say this in a film two years after World War II?

For a long time, I, like the public, was unable to fully appreciate Monsieur Verdoux. I expected something with a greater laugh-to-minute ratio from Chaplin. Verdoux has funny moments, sure – the scenes in which Chaplin tries to kill the boorish and downright invincible Martha Raye are as funny as anything Chaplin had ever done before. But the laugh quotient is lower than in certified Chaplin classics like The Gold Rush or City Lights. Instead, Chaplin spends ample time on drama, political philosophy, and even suspense.

Though I was critical of the film, I was also fascinated, and over the years I’ve probably seen Monsieur Verdoux more times than nearly any other Chaplin film. Looking back, I think my earlier objections have little merit. Who says Chaplin need focus on humour? In fact, the combination of humour drama, philosophy, and suspense make for a well balanced and ultimately satisfying experience. Did I just say suspense in a Chaplin movie? Chaplin has often been criticized as being a pedestrian director, but watch the scene leading up to the off-screen murder of Lydia (Margaret Hoffman): it’s comparable to Hitchcock.

Chaplin’s previous film, the no less controversial Hitler satire The Great Dictator (1940), had moments of bleakness and misery, but its concluding scene – Chaplin’s infamous six-minute speech – was a hopeful one that believed in the goodness of humanity. Verdoux is a darker and more nihilistic film. Monsieur Verdoux falls short of greatness. Parts of it have not aged well: the drama has a tendency to go sappy and Chaplin’s moralizing isn’t exactly subtle, especially in the film’s concluding scenes. Yet many aspects of the film (its pacifism, the jet-black comedy, Chaplin’s magnetic performance) are startlingly effective. If it isn’t as miraculous as The Gold Rush, City Lights, or Modern Times, Monsieur Verdoux still emerges as one of Chaplin’s most ambitious and stimulating works.

Trash Palace feels like a secret society. In a fairly down-on-its-luck building near Bathurst and King, accessible only to those who have bought an advance ticket at Suspect Video (Queen St.), this bi-weekly celebration of cinematic schlock has developed a fairly loyal following. Every other Friday, the operator of Trash Palace, Stacey Case, shows a feature-length film and assorted short subjects from his collection of 16mm and 8mm films. Most of these films are of questionable quality, but, according to Case, quality is not an issue at Trash Palace.

“How many of you guys have seen Mystery Science Theater 3000?” said Case. After nearly everyone raised their hand, he said, “Okay, I fuckin’ hate Mystery Science Theater 3000. This isn’t about making fun of movies. This is all about love.” Case even pointed out that he, himself, made a trash movie. I took the liberty of looking it up. It’s called Zombie Beach Party, in case you’re interested. Despite Case’s ‘love,’ all the films that were shown the night I attend received a fair number of MST3K-like quips, both from the audience and from Case himself.

First up: a short silent film called White Gorilla, in which several doughy white explorers head into darkest Africa to hunt down a guy in an unconvincing gorilla suit.

Up next: an extended advertisement from the tourism board of Bermuda, hosted by no less than David Ogden Stiers. This sappy, overdone piece of advertising was, believe it or not, the funniest thing shown. I was reminded of a time several years ago when I was over at a friend’s house for a sleepover party, and at about 4 AM, we watched a cheesy video about how to install a hardwood floor. We were making fun of this video like crazy until my friend’s dad came downstairs and said incredulously, “Are you guys watching a video on how to install a floor?” But I digress…

The main attraction was Gorilla at Large, a full-colour 1954 ‘thriller’ set around the monkey cage at the circus. It has one hell of a cast: Cameron Mitchell, Anne Bancroft, Lee Marvin, Raymond Burr, and Lee J. Cobb. You’d almost think Robert Altman directed it. Gorilla at Large was originally filmed in 3-D put projected 2-D, which would explain the many scenes in which the gorilla sticks its hand menacingly towards the camera.

Unfortunately, Case’s16mm print of Gorilla at Large was missing a 20-minute chunk in the middle, and the effect was kind of like the ‘missing reel’ gags in Grindhouse. It created plenty of confusion: in the first section of the film, Cameron Mitchell is a low-paid circus employee, while in the second half he’s suddenly an undercover cop.

If you’ve seen your fair share of bad old movies, you’ve probably seen a lot of flea-bitten gorilla suits. Actually, I would say that the ‘gorilla suit movie’ is a legitimate subgenre. Usually they populate cheap John Agar horror movies, although you can also see them in a lot of old comedies such as those of Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges. The comic set-up is pretty consistent: 1) Bud dresses up as a gorilla for Lou’s circus act, 2) Bud gets knocked out by a real gorilla, who goes on in his place, 3) wackiness ensues.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Gorilla at Large in its truncated state, but I would say that it is an about average entry in the gorilla suit subgenre. It doesn’t reach the artistic heights of the immortal Bruce Li the Invincible or the Stooges’ Bird in the Head, but is significantly superior to Robot Monster and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.

After the thrilling conclusion of Gorilla at Large came a Super 8mm, abridged (17 minutes) version of Creature from the Black Lagoon…in 3-D! The 3-D glasses were of the red-and-blue variety, and it could be charitably said that they didn’t work perfectly. But there was about the novelty of this 3D curio that was strangely appealing. You don’t get to see a 8mm 3-D print of Creature from the Black Lagoon every day.

If Ed Wood-caliber movies are what you’re after, the Trash Palace is an enjoyable experience. It has a unique ambience, it has a certain amount of soul, and the films are actually film, not just a projected DVD (if you’re a snobby purist like me, it makes a difference). Certainly it beats watching Gorilla at Large alone at home.

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Trash Palace’s official website: http://www.trashpalace.ca

FINISHING THE GAME
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Roger Fan, Sun Kang, Dustin Nguyen, Meredith Scott Lynn, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Mousa Kraish, McCaleb Burnett, James Franco, Ron Jeremy
Director: Justin Lin
Screened as part of the Reel Asian Film Festival on November 14, 2007 at the Bloor

The 11th Annual Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival kicked off last night at the Bloor with the opening night gala presentation of Justin Lin’s Finishing the Game. It was a good choice, Finishing the Game is a comedy that satirizes the 1970s frenzy to find a “successor” to the late Bruce Lee, but you don’t need to be a kung fu fan to enjoy this film.

When Bruce Lee died in 1973, he left behind some tantalizing footage for an ambitious martial arts film called The Game of Death, which is most famous for being the film in which Bruce Lee wore his iconic yellow tracksuit (and which was later worn by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). In the years following Lee’s death, an onslaught of Bruce Lee imitators with pseudonyms like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Dragon Lee starred in their own low-budget versions of Lee’s uncompleted film. (In 1978, Lee’s own studio, Golden Harvest, made their own ‘official’ version of the film, but it has been mostly dismissed as an embarrassment).

Finishing the Game is a faux documentary set in the 1970s about a Hollywood studio that has acquired the rights to the unfinished Game of Death footage and is setting up a search to find a stand-in actor to be Bruce Lee’s replacement in a completed version of the film. The candidates include: Breeze Loo, a cocky minor kung fu star who does none of his own stunts and who claims no direct imitation of Bruce Lee (“That cat was always wearing I yellow jumpsuit. I wear a blue one”.); Cole Kim, a talented martial artist who melts into a wimpy fanboy whenever Breeze Loo is around; Raj, and Indian doctor with dreams of being a movie star; Tarrick Tyler, a deluded wannabe who talks endlessly about being half Chinese but appears to be very Caucasian; and Troy Poon, who achieved brief stardom for his role on a high-rated cop show, but whose other roles are all “Chinese Food Delivery Boys.”

The film’s director is Justin Lin, whose debut film Better Luck Tomorrow earned strong reviews but whose subsequent efforts (including Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Annapolis) have been mostly scorned. He’s back with smart material here. Lin infuses the film with some commentary about the poor treatment of Asian actors in American cinema – at one point, a studio executive says of the Game of Death casting call, “I could go over to Chinatown and find a guy who looked like Bruce Lee in five minutes,” and Troy Poon (Dustin Nguyen) is the only character in the film to see that subbing for Bruce Lee is a poor use of Asian-American talent.

A lot of the film’s humour derives from its 1970s setting, with all the ridiculous fashions and slang of the era. Though played for laughs, the 70s milieu is actually surprisingly convincing. Even more convincing are the parodies of 70s TV shows, news reports, and especially chop socky films. We see clips from one of Breeze Loo’s films, Fists of Fuhrer, and it’s a more accurate simulation of the grindhouse atmosphere than Grindhouse was.

Finishing the Game is structured in a faux-documentary format, and it’s obvious that Lin has studied the films of Christopher Guest, right down to the where-are-they-now epilogue. Like A Mighty Wind or Waiting for Guffman, Finishing the Game is chiefly about disappointed people with high ambitions and sometimes delusions of grandeur. If it’s not as consistently funny as the best of Guest’s films, it has a lot of the qualities that made them so good. Finishing the Game has already received a limited theatrical release in the United States, and will be released on DVD shortly. It’s good fun, and worth a rental.

It has been said that when the boogeyman goes to bed at night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris. Well, I bet that when Chuck Norris goes to bed at night, he checks his closet for Werner Herzog, the legendary director who, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders, was one of the leading figureheads of the 1970s’ New German Cinema movement. His films include art-house favourites like his five films with actor Klaus Kinski (notably Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht) and, more recently, 2005’s Grizzly Man and last summer’s Rescue Dawn.

Herzog’s work is matched in fame by Herzog’s reputation for…well, being superhuman. Fitzcarraldo is notorious for the fact that Herzog actually had his South American extras haul a real steamship over a real hill. When he made Even Dwarves Started Small, he put his cast through such hardship that, during the wrap party, he actually threw himself into a cactus (“Getting out of the cactus patch was much harder than diving in”). He filmed the documentary La Soufriere at the base of a volcano that was about to erupt. When he lost a bet with Errol Morris, he actually boiled and ate his shoe.

Recently, Herzog made headlines for pulling Jaoquin Phoenix out of his overturned car (advice to drivers: if you get in a car accident, it’s best to do it in front of Werner Herzog’s house), and also for being shot in the pelvis during an interview. The bullet hit a small book in his pocket, and Herzog said, bleeding through his boxers, “I am not afraid. It was not a significant bullet.” (If you need proof: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3866926922083543140&q=herzog+interview+sniper&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1). The man’s awesomeness clearly knows no bounds.

The Camera Media Bar and Gallery is currently playing a festival of some of his lesser-known works. The Camera is a combination movie theatre/café beneath the offices of Mongrel Media, and is the type of very arty place that one might expect to see in a Woody Allen film. It feels chic, tasteful, and very exclusive, and I understand that Atom Egoyan was involved in its inception…so why is it at Ossington and Queen instead of Yorkville? It’s really quite a miserable area of town, within close proximity to the mental institution, and a disproportionately high number of the surrounding stores are boarded up, covered with graffiti, or both. An odd place for Toronto’s artiest theatre.

Upon my arrival, I was disappointed to find that the first film of the evening would be Land of Silence and Darkness, Herzog’s 1971 documentary about the deaf and blind. It’s a respectable enough film, with scenes that definitely linger in the memory, but it’s also very, very slow. Not ‘hypnotic,’ as Herzog is famous for, just boring. And worst of all, I had seen it only seven months earlier. Take it from me – this film is a chore to get through once. Twice in the span of a year is something I don’t think they would resort to in Guantanamo Bay.

Okay, so I guess it’s clear that I don’t much care for Land of Silence and Darkness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. As many critics have pointed out, it is one of Herzog’s most human, compassionate films. By showing long (long) shots of the blind and deaf deriving simple pleasure from vibrations, water, leaves, and, most of all, human contact, Herzog asks his audience for some simple brotherly love.

The second film, Fata Morgana, should be considered a must-see by anyone who thought that something like Fitzcarraldo was too commercial. It has been called a documentary, but probably just because nobody has thought of a more appropriate genre for it to belong to.

I would have enjoyed Fata Morgana more if I weren’t so fidgety from watching Land of Silence and Darkness for a second time, but on the whole, I found it an interesting diversion. The title Fata Morgana literally means “mirage,” it is comprised of footage of the Sahara, particularly mirages. In the opening scene, we see about ten different airplanes land on a runway, and as the haze and fog accumulates, it looks more and more like a flying saucer. The rest of the film is random images and ideas, a bit like a Werner Herzog sketchbook, and your tolerance for it will depend on your tolerance for Herzog. Towards the end, Herzog attacks the middle class by contrasting the Saharan natives with two middle-aged amateur musicians, playing a dreary song on a stage decorated with kitschy ‘party’ material.

Browsing through the rest of the Camera’s Herzog program, there’s nothing that I would recommend to anyone unfamiliar with Herzog’s work. I would suggest watching Rescue Dawn and Grizzly Man, then working your way through the Kinski collaborations, and maybe Little Dieter Needs to Fly. If, however, you’re familiar with Germany’s most bizarre and outrageous auteur, this festival of footnotes and curios will give a unique perspective into the breadth and richness of Herzog’s body of work. But please: no more Land of Silence and Darkness for at least another decade.

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The Camera’s Herzog retrospective continues next week:

For a once-in-a-lifetime picture of Werner Herzog, Michael Moore, and Terry Gilliam: http://www.imdb.com/gallery/granitz/1664/Events/1664/MichaelMoo_Arun_591144_400.jpg.html?path=pgallery&path_key=Herzog,%20Werner