INTO THE INFERNO (B-minus) - Genius or a victim of attention deficit disorder?
After famously spelunking into a cave in France (see below), Werner Herzog takes to the air to fly over and peer into raging volcanoes. He creates awesome images. Bright orange rivers of fire. Roiling magma that takes on the qualities of a living being. The huffing and puffing of middle earth and its maladies, belching smoke and ash.
After a while, though, those images start to lose their impact. Herzog meanders all over the Earth, exploring different cultures but too often losing his way and, it seems, his train of thought during a frustrating 107 minutes. He ends up in North Korea during the second half of the film and, perhaps startled by his good fortune, goes on an extended riff about life under the world's craziest dictator. This footage from North Korea is quite interesting at times, but what does this have to do with volcanoes?
You could ask the same question about the eccentric archaeologist from the Bay Area whom Herzog spends the middle of the film with, brushing the sand in some far-off land (Ethiopia?) picking out the shards of bones of the humans who perished tens of thousands of years ago, collecting the fossils in his Crocodile Dundee cap. Where in the world are we going with this?
Herzog is known for his own eccentricities -- non sequiturs, off-beat questions, philosophical ramblings. Here he uses an amiable host, Clive Oppenheimer, whose book is the basis for the film. Cheery Clive brings some legitimacy to the reporting, which balances with Herzog's penchant for voodoo, mysticism and cult worship.
The film begins and ends in Indonesia and Vanuatu, indulging the local magic men and staging a few war dances that might make descendants of colonialists cringe a bit. Some of what Herzog has captured is downright beautiful and mind-blowing. But he could use an editor who could boil this down to an hour and give it more structure.
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2011) (B) - Five years ago Herzog presented this haunting, dreamlike tribute to the Chauvet Cave in southern France that only recently was discovered to hold the oldest known drawings and paintings, believed to date back about 32,000 years.
Herzog was honored to present these images to the wide world, and he lingers over them, shooting with his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger (who also shot "Inferno") in the murky depths. The images can be stunning. Stalactites full of crystals shimmer like chandeliers. The lines of the cave drawings thrum as if, any second, they will come to life.
But Herzog can't help overplaying his hand. He imagines a stillness so quiet that you can hear the crew's heartbeats; and then he drums a heartbeat on the soundtrack. Got it. Over and over, Herzog returns to the drawings until, like with the volcanoes, they start to lose their power and allure. He strains to make this experience appear to be profound. By the end, though, his obsession makes the paintings downright hypnotic.
Herzog can't help lobbing those grandiloquent questions at his subjects. He asks a patient archaeologist, who has laser-mapped the cave using millions of spatial pinpoints, to compare those dots to the millions of people listed in the Manhattan phone book: "Do they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their hopes? What are their families? We'll never know from the phone directory." The archaeologist, to his credit, takes the question in stride and offers a sensible answer. At one point, he wonders aloud, "What constitutes humanness?"
As he wanders off the path and explores beyond the cave, Herzog loses his train of thought. At one point, we are treated to a spear-throwing demonstration. He trails after a ridiculous "master perfumer," who sniffs around the caves. OK. When someone mentions shadows dancing, it reminds Herzog of Fred Astaire dancing with giant shadows, and so he splices in that 20-second clip. Heaven knows, anything goes.
Put it all together, and it has the rapturous vibe of an epic poem.
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