Aguirre, The Wrath Of God: This film contains the single most breathtaking opening shot in film history, and it’s not even close. I never forgot it, even with that grainy film quality the Spanish party descending through the Andes mountains like ants while eerie Popol Vuh Mellotron music drones away is so hauntingly awesome that I didn’t even need to have revisited it once in the last 20 years (and I DIDN’T) to be immediately blown away by it again. Then there’s the ending, no slouch itself in terms of eeriness with insane actor Klaus Kinski playing insane conquistador Lope de Aguirre as the last man alive on the raft, with the Mellotron music coming back as monkeys swarm all over him. Somehow you really feel like you’re in 1560, too, even though this wasn’t a very big budget movie. In between the epic opening and close is about 90 minutes of slow death, with various interesting bits of madness between gluing the film together–the sad monologue from the kidnapped black prince, the interrogation of the Indian, the guy playing the happy flute, the weird “battle” scene, the blank stares of the women on the boat. I bring these little things up because I’m reminded that someone here said that Cormac McCarthy’s worldview wasn’t very interesting all by itself, and by comparison, if Herzog hadn’t had all these little ideas (and Kinski and Popol Vuh, too) this film’s pretensions would cause it to collapse. I mean, it’s not like you can’t guess within the first five minutes that things are not going to turn out very well for the Europeans, no? Furthermore, can you tell that this film was made by a man who was still in his twenties at the time of filming, and not yet the legend he’d become, even with all the horror stories about the making of the film (pulling a gun on Kinski, etc.?) I should have revisited this one more; thank God it’s relatively short, too, unlike another certain Herzog film I could name…

Fitzcarraldo: ....that’d be this one, which had an even more legendarily disastrous shooting than Aguirre, largely because, as anyone who has ever read a single word about the film knows, Herzog, like the film’s title character, actually pulled a steamboat up the side of a hill using pulleys, even though he was told by his advisors that the cables would likely snap and kill everybody. The scenes of the ship being pulled up the hill are really something, almost as breathtaking as the Aguirre opener, and they would be even if you didn’t know the crazy stories about the filmmaking (or the filmmaker.) Unfortunately…they’re only about 20 minutes of a 157 minute long film, and as cliched as it is for me, Billdude, to say this, a lot of the rest of this damn thing just plods and meanders by comparison. I used to think the whole thing was epic, but I was a kid then and I think the glowing reviews (especially Ebert’s, natch) sort of talked me into it, and the fact that I’d forgotten the vast majority of the rest of the movie makes me feel like I’m not full of shit for saying so. I don’t hate all of the rest of it–it’s nice to see Kinski smiling and holding his cigar while Caruso sings away on the boat, and I’ve never forgotten “I WANT MAH OPERAH HAUS!!!!” But overall, my opinion of this movie has kind of plummeted. Get your knives out…

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht: This, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise; I hated it when I was 23, finding it too cold and dead and empty, but nowadays I happily eat that sort of shit up with an ice cream scoop. It’s just a really good tone poem, full of eerie 1970s-looking low lighting and locations that could easily pass for 1897 and a nice lower-key performance from Kinski as a ratty and sickly Dracula and some more Popol Vuh. Ever hear “Vergegenwartigung”? It’s 17 minutes long and appears on an album PV did in the 1970s that also contains the Aguirre music, and it’s just this distorted synthesizer feedback noise ominously fading in and out for a long time over a celestial Zeit type atmosphere (way more effective than that, though); in Nosferatu, it’s used very effectively while Bruno “Ranting Hitler” Ganz wanders around Dracula’s castle barely finding anything. The final scenes with Van Helsing are weird and almost humorous, but that’s one of the few notes that I didn’t care for. I should have given this film a rewatch decades ago, I feel stupid for having not gotten into it the first time.

Bamboozled: This film has about as many things as a film can have wrong with it without tipping completely over into the fucking toilet; the visual style, based on poor lighting and a hand-held camera, doesn’t do anything for me (or the movie) at all; Damon Wayans, as the main character, has been allowed to use some sort of hideous sub-SNL-caricature manner of reading his lines for the entire duration of the movie and subsequently ruins just about every scene he’s in, and the whole thing collapses into a heap of who-gives-a-shit well before it’s over; it also has the subtlety of a jackhammer. That last aspect actually works well in the early scenes with Michael Rapaport playing a total jagoff of a studio executive who spouts all sorts of offensive bullshit while repeatedly claiming that he isn’t a racist at all because he has a black wife, etc. It’s all downhill from there–and really, what does it say about your film when it peaks with unsubtle satire featuring Michael Rapaport overacting? I can’t quite say I hated the film, but I’d be hard pressed to say why; Spike Lee makes a few points that are still up for debate today, I guess, like about white writers failing to write for a black audience, but I found myself really checking my watch during the final, like, fifteen minutes of montage showing pickaninny caricatures from old movies and such. I’d also forgotten pretty much everything about it except for a faint hint of the Rapaport scenes anyway, but there’s good reasons for that. Not a film I’m likely to revisit a second time.

Bullets Over Broadway: I think this was the most well received film Woody Allen made in the 90s, but most of that decade seems like a fallow period for him now (I’ll be rewatching Husbands & Wives, which I recalled liking a lot, but God knows if it’ll hold up.) The only thing I liked in this at all was when Dianne Wiest told John Cusack that the world will open up to him like a great big vagina, something like that, a belly laugh compared to most of the rest of it. Elsewhere, this is just annoying obvious caricatures of obnoxious neurotic stage-actor types mixed with obvious caricatures of Mafia types–something Woody Allen could do in his sleep. If I liked it before, I couldn’t tell you why. It’s another film that I’d forgotten completely, but that just means it’s another example of a film that I had good reasons for forgetting completely.

Ray: Jamie Foxx pretty much is this movie–replace him with any less of an actor and the movie doesn’t have a hell of a lot going for it; perhaps the easiest target Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story had at the time of its release. Tick off the list: numerous ham-fisted flashbacks to Ray’s childhood, cliched “fight with the wife, fight with the studio guy, fight with the mistress, watch Ray squirm as he gets off drugs” scenes, all of ‘em…hell, the infamous “you’re the first person to combine gospel with R&B” bit that people have been making fun of for two decades now isn’t even the worst offender (but seriously, WHOSE idea was it for Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds to play Ahmet Ertegun?) I know that not everybody sneered at this movie in 2004, and Foxx did win that Oscar, but the same could be said for Bohemian Rhapsody, and I have no idea which film is the worse ofeender.