Encounters at the End of the World.

First, an online viewing tip. With In Spring, Jamie Stuart takes his glorious crusade against the mind-numbing yet all-pervasive celebrity interview to a new and unusual and funny place. Update, 6/10: Frustrating news, via Karina Longworth: Jamie's felt compelled to remove In Spring and post, in its place, a note on the irony.

Werner Herzog "is a driven man—self-dramatizing, unafraid to pose metaphysical questions, unembarrassed (I surmise) at occasionally sounding like a crackpot," writes David Edelstein in New York. "At first, his newest film, Encounters at the End of the World, is unusually detached, rambling in its approach to the setting - Antarctica's McMurdo Station - and the sundry eccentrics who reside there.... But midway through, an eerier theme creeps in, all the more powerful for Herzog's lack of insistence. By the 'end of the world' he means the end of the world."

Updated through 6/13.

"Given its thematic and visual echoes with not only The Wild Blue Yonder but also The White Diamond, Encounters sometimes comes off as minor Herzog," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Yet intoxicatingly poetic and profound, it's nonetheless also vital, offering an experience that - as with much of the director's superlative nonfiction work - is best summed up by a phrase seen carved in a McMurdo wood banister: 'I sink into bliss.'"

"While Herzog refuses to keep a straight face, he does take Antarctica seriously," notes Matt Riviera. "Underneath the absurd jokes and irreverent tone lies a potent warning about the folly of men, the fragility of the planet and the sombre truth that our species has an expiry date stamped all over it."

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Herzog "about the genesis of his latest expedition, fainting at Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, and the need for documentaries in a world filled with video games, virtual realities, the internet, Photoshop, WrestleMania and breast implants."

Earlier: David N Meyer in the Brooklyn Rail; Christopher Long in Cineaste; Herzog's been a recent guest on the Leonard Lopate Show; and reviews from Toronto.

Updates: "There's no diminishing Antarctica, with its gaping lava lake and mountains that kiss the clouds, but Herzog does something extraordinary in demystifying a continent that hosts small pockets of dreamers, and that the rest of us see only in our dreams," writes Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "It is the inclusion of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in Herzog's film that makes it what it is. To focus on one at the expense of the other would make for a far less nuanced film, and a far less accurate depiction of Antarctica, or, more specifically, of its uncommon denizens."

"Encounters at the End of the World seems to be a conscious attempt on [Herzog's] part to deconstruct the myth of adventurism that so much early Antarctic exploration (and western expansion in general and, well, modern popular cinema) has always thrived on," writes Brandon Harris.

Updates, 6/10: "Encounters lacks the profundity and the sublime impact of the director's other work," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "This is one Herzog film in which his famed voice-over simply isn't the most intriguing take on the images. The strongest part of the anecdotal sketch comes from the particular brand of hard-to-categorize thinkers, drifters, and dreamers who end up at the bottom of the world, and their patient responses to Mr Herzog's grumpy questioning."

Aaron Hillis talks with Herzog for the IFC. They seem to be having a pretty good time - and by the way, Herzog knocks down those Bad Lieutenant "remake" rumors down once, but by his own admission, probably not for all.

Updates, 6/11: "If this were a nature documentary like any other, the casual talk about global warming and other calamities might cast shadows across this bright expanse," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But there's something about Mr Herzog - including the accidental if now well-practiced comedy that colors even his most dramatic pronouncements - that inevitably keeps his pictures from growing too dark. One reason is beauty, which in his hands has a way of keeping the worst at bay; it is, after all, hard to fully despair in the face of so much of the natural world's splendors."

J Hoberman cleverly packs Encounters and Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg into a single piece for the Voice: "Both movies are personal travelogues, wintry in their humor and Nordic in their aggravated sense of impending doom; both feature the director as intrepid, not entirely reliable tour guide."

"I find it easy to get frustrated with Herzog, if only because I doubt I'll ever like what he's doing now in quite the same way, or quite as much, as anything from his otherworldy-good Signs of Life (1968) to God's Angry Man (1980) streak," writes Nick Pinkerton at indieWIRE. " may be in the minority, but Herzog's subjects interest me far more than Herzog himself, or his musings on them.... [W]atch (or rewatch) Land of Silence and Darkness for a sense of the mystery that's been lost."

"Too frequently Herzog overshadows subjects by narcissistically filtering the world through his enormous ego, but criticizing that is like criticizing Hemingway's take-on-all-comers bluster," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "Like it or not, it's where his unique strength lies."

Updates, 6/12: Nearly every review mentions this moment, but Slate's Dana Stevens gives it a nice twist: "Visiting a colony of the continent's native birds, he observes a single male setting out for a mountain range in the opposite direction from his colony and the ocean that's his only source of food. As a scientist notes that the maverick bird is headed to certain death, Herzog leaves the camera on the tiny black figure waddling toward the horizon: the Klaus Kinski of penguins."

"It is a futile act, perhaps, to reject one's life in the hopes of finding something else, but it is an act that Herzog admires," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "He doesn't fully know what this penguin is thinking–maybe the animal simply became deranged–but its suicidal mission supports Herzog's lifelong belief that nature is inexplicably cruel and unforgiving."

"There's a sense that Herzog is at least beginning to try to sum himself up, that he's (quite improbably) worried about his legacy," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door:

But there's still a few blank spots and things undone left to fill in. Late in the film, he pours an unexpected amount of scorn on one Ashrita Furman, a man whose sole goal is to set multiple world records. Having probably set a few unofficially himself, Herzog seems to be bothered by people who do things just to say they've done them (unlike his sensationalist feats, presumably all performed in a disingenuous spirit), and he responds to Furman's assertion that Antarctica is like the moon with a severe rejoinder that it's "not the moon, even though it sometimes feels like it." At first, I thought "How does he know? He's never been." Then it hit me: WE HAVE TO SEND WERNER INTO SPACE. We owe him, and ourselves, that much.

Updates, 6/13: "Encounters at the End of the World is diffuse by nature, bouncing around aimlessly rather than focusing on the strong central subjects that drove superior films like Grizzly Man and Little Dieter Needs to Fly," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Herzog's take on the exterior landscapes may lack focus, but the keen attention he pays to interior geographies is perfect compensation," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson talks with Herzog for the IDA. Via Movie City News.

"[T]he film seems only one more step on Herzog's path to living oddity," writes Marcy Dermansky. "Encounters at the End of the World is just that: a series of encounters that never quite focus or go into depth on any particular subject."

Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2008 1:03 AM