Out There: FIREBALL: VISITORS FROM DARKER WORLDS

It speaks to how much we can trust Werner Herzog’s perspective that when he makes a documentary about meteorites and it becomes an intermingling of the spiritual and scientific it feels exactly right. We know he’s not proselytizing or imbuing hard fact with squishy woo-woo sentiment. His soothing voice and great eye, not to mention his wry humor and patient inquisitive style, draws us naturally into his deeper contemplation. It’s a state of total openness to the universe and its natural wonders. He’s fascinated by what we can know, but he’s just as drawn to to the limits of what we can know. He’s been on a roll with these deep dives this decade—cave paintings (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), death row (Into the Abyss), the internet (Lo and Behold) and more. Now, for Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, he speaks to people who have spent their lives studying space debris that falls to earth. (Who else but Herzog would ask so simply if people get hit by them often, and not mean it entirely as a joke?) With Cambridge scientist Clive Oppenheimer as his guide and host, Herzog examines notable craters, places where, over the centuries, temples were erected, museums were established, great research took place, and striking art was made. He takes us to labs in Arizona, the Pope’s summer residence —where a notable observatory is run by a Jesuit geologist—and a Norwegian jazz musicians micrometeorites hobbyist collection. He takes us to a tiny Mexican town where the dinosaurs’ fatal blow was struck—only Herzog could call a place “so godforsaken it makes you cry” without sounding insulting. They drop down into caves Mayans thought were entrances to the underworld. He takes us to rural France and Mecca, Antartica and Africa. He’s a man of the world. 

Throughout, staying mainly off camera or delivering his mellifluous pondering as voice over, he emphasizes how extraordinary it is that these chunks of outer space fall to our planet. In fact, they fall all the time, often just dust in the wind, drawn down through the vagaries of time and space to land in what quite literally might be your backyard. Some of the grandest mysteries of all creation softly dropped around us. But in his typical way, he’s just as interested in how these mysteries change our humanity—our recognition that we’re part of something bigger. He knows these celestial objects have shaped how we think about ourselves, and beyond ourselves. And he’s also a terrific guide to these thoughts, entertaining little jokes and asides, per usual, and focusing his camera on interesting details every step of the way—a grinning museum patron, a crumbled shack, a ritual, a clip from Deep Impact. Herzog presents a world that is broad and interconnected, where any one fascinating subject seems to open up endless avenues for wonder.

Role Play: FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC

Of course Family Romance, LLC is a Werner Herzog movie. It’s plain to see, even without his actual presence on screen or via voice over. This short Japan-set feature is an eerily calm vision somewhere between fact and fiction, interested in pinpointing woozy philosophizing that typifies the Herzog style. There’s a scene in which a man who makes his living renting actors to play the role of family or friend for important events — the film is built around a single mother hiring him to play her daughter’s estranged father — interviews the proprietor of a hotel whose front desk clerks are humanoid robots. As the rubbery mannequin slowly blinks in the background of the shot, one man looks at the other and deadpans “When will they dream?” The film plays like a doodle, a quick sketch, on the part of Herzog. It came together quickly, with some real people playing versions of themselves in improvised scenes with others playing roles. He was clearly intrigued by the ideas in this economic transaction, and about the ways in which we are all playing a part in our lives, putting on a false front in certain situations, code switching in others. Yet his camerawork—brightly lit, simply staged consumer digital— here finds less poetry than usual, and approaches a slapdash simplicity that’s strangely amateurish and rough realism. Stilted and static, with reality drifting through fictions on screen and off, the movie proceeds to unfold in scenes by turn fascinating and vacant. And yet, there’s that potent, eccentric Herzog mindfulness and madness simmering underneath. When the film ends, with a striking shot of a child mostly obscured through an opaque glass door, while our main character hesitates entering, there’s a stirring sense of wonderful deep confusion that draws the film's ideas together. I was reminded of Herzog inventing freed POW Dieter’s habit of opening and closing doors, just to prove again to himself that he’s free — one of the more evocative details in another, and better, of his documentary experiments, 1997’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This new film's central figure makes a living selling artificial familial connections, and finds himself confessing in voice over that, in his darkest, quietest moments, he wonders if his own real family might be paid actors, instead. In typical Herzog fashion, it’s a moment of destabilizing whimsy, at once simple dorm-room pontificating, and a cavernous abyss of intellectual inquiry. What makes him a great director is his willingness to get there, in even his most threadbare efforts.

Quick Look: CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

One of Werner Herzog’s two documentaries this year, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, creates a space for wonder. How often are we allowed that in this day and age? This is a film that stretches out as a hushed visual reverie allowing for quiet reflection upon the deepest questions of the nature of mankind and the nature of art. The lovable eccentric German auteur received rare permission from the French government to enter the Chauvet caves in the south of France to film the oldest discovered cave paintings. Because of the fragile ecosystem within this ancient geographic formation, the cave is sealed off year round, only open for brief periods of time for a select group of researchers to spend fleeting moments gathering data. Herzog meets them and lets them speak to us in his typical style of allowing digressions and tangents to unravel with a charming patience. How else would we learn that one researcher was once a circus performer? Who else would find an archeologist who likes to dress up in caveman-style pelts and plays a handmade bone flute, the better to interact with the ancients? Who but Herzog would find it necessary to give us a scene with a man who uses his sense of smell to search for caves? The delightful oddities of these people add interest to the main attraction, which are most definitely the cave paintings themselves. Gorgeously preserved and shot in stunning 3D, which allows their contours and textures to extend towards and curve away from the audience with exciting depth, these paintings are shared to a wide audience in a stirring and enchanting style. These paintings have been preserved and explored in a way only filmmaking would allow. Herzog’s typically lovely narration, droll and inquisitive in his soft German accent, and a swirling choral score that seems to be bubbling up from the very souls of the ancient artists, help create the film’s successful atmosphere, an absorbing, endlessly fascinating window to the past.

Un-Caged: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

The last several years have proven that there is a large market for bad Nicolas Cage thrillers. Remember National Treasure? Ghost Rider? Bangkok Dangerous? National Treasure: Book of Secrets? They all opened at the top of the box office charts on their opening weekend despite being largely terrible. For some reason, the general public will only see Cage if he has odd intensity and likably exaggerated mannerisms tied to a thin character wading through schlock. He’s a great actor though, so it’s a shame that his best projects have a tendency to slip through the cracks. In theory, that shouldn’t have happened to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is at once a very good sleazy thriller and a perfectly marketable film. Why, then, has the film seen only a small limited release and is now being limped out on DVD and Blu-ray? Maybe it’s because it happens to be so cheerfully wicked in its insanity.

Helmed by the great German auteur, and suspected crazy person, Werner Herzog, the movie features Cage as a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. This cop gets addicted to his painkillers and then starts to self-medicate in addition to his prescriptions by lifting some confiscated cocaine from the evidence room. Soon, he’s wandering the ravaged streets of New Orleans, lifting drugs off of unsuspecting addicts and snorting it right in front of them. He tortures and badgers witnesses and suspects, barks out orders, makes backroom deals and bargains, and generally looks at the world through a stare of vague, bug-eyed intensity.  Also, he’s investigating the brutal killings of an entire immigrant family.

Herzog and Cage don’t care much about making this man likable, or even relatable, but they aren’t following him down increasingly depraved paths like Abel Ferrara did with Harvey Keitel in their Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film that’s related to this one in name only. (The Bad Lieutenant part of the title was forced on the picture by a producer with the subtitle Herzog’s idea). Instead, Cage simply presents a man ravaged by circumstance and temperament, mirroring the locale. Herzog’s camera follows his central character through a crumbled and waterlogged city filled with slimy characters and creatures (including hallucinated iguanas and a twitching crocodile corpse), that match the decaying mental state of this bad lieutenant. New Orleans is a place of harsh beauty for Herzog as he uses his usual “voodoo of location” to great effect, not to mention skilful use of his beloved man-versus-wild imagery, not just in the iguanas and crocodiles, but also from the slimy snake the slips through dirty water in the opening scene and the film’s final shot with two men dwarfed by a sinisterly tranquil aquarium.

Often, a Herzog film will become more interesting the more it drifts away from the ostensible point of the scene.  Take, for example, his wonderful Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World in which he places his narration over an interview to explain how lengthy and rambling the interview became. While Port of Call New Orleans remains a luxurious wallow in low genre pleasures and a seriously cracked procedural, there are plenty of excellent moments where the camera drifts away and maybe the plot will follow it. There are plenty of welcome detours, like the aforementioned iguanas that only Cage can see, and there are lots of rich parts for character actors. Jennifer Coolidge unexpectedly turns up playing Cage’s stepmom, but there are plenty of other strange and fascinating moments with a cast of characters that includes a drug dealer (Xzibit), Cage’s coworkers (which include Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon), and a prostitute (Eva Mendes).

This is a film of debauched anecdotes and bizarre incidents, of terrible criminals and sometimes worse officials. It plays like a conventional cop film that happens to be on about as many drugs as are in its main character. Herzog charges the film with his usual intensity of specificity and Cage brings a great performance of the kind that he is capable of delivering, but many recent roles have either misused or reined in. When you have two entertainers as eccentric, engaging and unpredictable as Cage and Herzog, it’s startling, maybe even a little disappointing, to see that, though they create a strange and captivating thriller, it seems to still pull up short. These are two men who could push each other so far over the top that the film would be in free fall. They only get us to the precipice, but what a lovely, beautifully schlocky view.