Thoughts On The Dead

Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: klaus kinski

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, And No One Wanted This

April 19, 2020 / / 3 Comments

Hey, Mick. Whatcha doing?

“We’re doin’ a tewevision show, aren’t we? Gonna spwead a wittle joy an’ all that t’the faaaaaaaaans.”

That’s nice of you. What’s with Charlie?

“Chahwee?”

Charlie.

“CHAH-weeeeee.”

Char. Char. You make the sides of your tongue hit the roof of your mouth.

“He’s my drummah, in’t he?”

Oh, don’t say that. He gets angry when you say that.

“Don’t bewieve that story. It’s scuh-wuh-wis.”

Huh?

“Scuh-wih-wis.”

Are you trying to say ‘scurrilous?”

“I don’t care.”

Seriously, why is Charlie air drumming?

“I don’t care.”

Don’t be putulant.

“I’m not being petch-oo-wint.”

Don’t say “petulant,” either. Don’t be it or say it.

“Wisten, you. Don’t tell me–”

SHWUZZNERGNERGNERGBLAMPF!

“What wuzzat?”

Ah, shit.”

“JAGGER, YOU ARE A BAG MADE OF FLESH AND FULL OF SHIT!”

“Kwaus?”

“KLAUS! MEIN NAME IST KLAUS, YOU FILTHY ROAST BEEF-FILLED PIG! ENGLISH IS MEIN FOURTH LANGUAGE UND I SPEAK IT BETTER THAN YOU!”

“Where did Wonnie go?”

“RONNIE! HIS NAME STARTS WITH A FUCKING ‘R!’ OH, WHAT I WOULD GIVE TO HAVE ZE LUFTWAFFE BACK!”

“Wude.”

SHWEEEEEEEEEBADUMDEEFLOMK!

“What’s all this, then?”

“Michael. Come to me.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“This is your name. I had a name once, but it got lost somewhere in the sea of time. Come to me, Michael, and we will be mopey together. I have a castle.”

“I awso have a castle.”

“Mine is spookier.”

“I don’t wanna.”

“Fine. Do you have any Bauhaus records?”

“I might. Hey, what happened to Charwee?”

“Are you trying to say ‘Charlie?'”

“I am saying Chahwee.”

“Not what I’m hearing. And, you know, I’ve got a great set of ears on me.”

FLOOZUMKADOOSH!

“Oh, what now?”

“I HATE YOU SO MUCH.”

“Pwease stop yewwing. Why are you in a spacesuit?”

“I am an ice pirate.”

“Cool.”

Thoughts On Two Other Werner Herzog Films

April 19, 2020 / / 5 Comments
  • Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made five pictures together, two of which–Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo–everybody’s at least heard of, and three–Cobra Verde, Woyzeck, and Nosferatu the Vampire–that don’t get as much attention.
  • There’s a reason for that.
  • Aguirre is a transcendent piece of art that cockslaps all the Big Important Questions right in the face.
  • Fitzcarraldo had a boat getting dragged up a mountain.
  • The other three are okay.
  • I’m guessing that Woyzeck is fine; I did not watch it because it’s the only one not on Amazon Prime.
  • The film does intrigue me, though.
  • Mostly because Klaus Kinski makes this face.
  • What caused that face?
  • Was it a lady?
  • Was it the crushing nincompoopery surrounding him?
  • Was his lunch not prepared properly?
  • I did not see the movie, and so I cannot tell you.
  • I did see Cobra Verde and Nosferatu the Vampire, so I can tell you about them.
  • Again: fine.
  • Aguirre had me on the edge of my couch, barely blinking and thrusting my entire consciousness into the image; when it finished, I almost just restarted the flick.
  • Got through about an hour of Cobra Verde while fucking with my phone and scratching my nuts, got sleepy, kipped out, woke up, read some of John Farrell’s Richard Nixon: The Life, listened to the new Fiona Apple, scratched my nuts some more, then finished the last hour.
  • In fairness, part of my wavery interest can be blamed on the atrocious dub: The movie should be in German, but the version I watched was in (shitty) English, and I don’t think Klaus Kinski did his own dubbing.
  • It might be my fault, though.
  • Not the dubbing.
  • I wasn’t the one making the decisions on that.
  • It might be my fault in that there may have been a German language/English subtitles version available, but I cannot figure out how to access the settings to do things like turning the closed captioning on or off.
  • But now is not time for the Blame Game.
  • If the Blame Game were to be played now, then we would have to blame China.
  • So let’s not play the Blame Game.
  • Cobra Verde is about a slaver.
  • He’s the good guy.
  • Already, I’m not onboard.
  • I’d enjoy a film in which the slaver suffers for his sins, but that does not happen in Cobra Verde.
  • Klaus Kinski has a series of sexy adventures on multiple continents, and then dies in the last scene for no reason other than “the lead character dying” is always a boffo way to end a picture.
  • It’s just sequence after sequence of Klaus Kinski having the time of his life fucking his way through Brazil and Benin.
  • That’s how he gets to Benin, actually.
  • He fucks too much in Brazil, so they send him there.
  • Enthusiasts, I’ll just lay all my cards on the table right now: I may not have 100% followed the plot of Cobra Verde.
  • First he’s poor, and then he murders someone, and then he’s a bandit, and then he’s leading an all-female army in a coup against an African king.
  • The flick is downright picaresque.
  • “Cobra Verde” is his name, or at nickname, or whatever.
  • It just means “green snake.”
  • Which is not a very cool bandit name.
  • If you walk into the saloon and announce yourself as “the Green Snake,” then all the other outlaws are gonna laugh at you.
  • It’s no “Sundance Kid” is all I’m saying.
  • Like Charo talking dirty, it sounds better in Spanish.
  • This is what Klaus Kinski looked like:
  • Yes, that is Captain Crunch’s outfit.
  • Klaus Kinski, in the opening scene, beats Captain Crunch to death and steals his clothes.
  • I have no idea why the lawyers allowed that to happen.
  • You would think the Quaker Oats corporation would be opposed to that sort of use of their intellectual property.
  • The 80’s were a different time, I guess.
  • You probably don’t have to watch Cobra Verde, but check this out:

  • Aren’t you glad you checked that out?
  • Pretty song.
  • You don’t wanna know what they were singing.
  • You’ll start crying so hard you puke.
  • The only other necessary scene in Cobra Verde is one that the film shares with Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, but not Nosferatu: Klaus Kinski physically assaults the extras.
  • All three of these movies feature a mentally-imbalanced former Nazi going utterly apeshit on a gaggle of locals making a buck a day to wear silly outfits and get ordered around by Werner Herzog’s assistant director.
  • BEATINGS.
  • Klaus Kinski hands out ACTUAL BEATINGS to the background players, all of whom are women and/or people of color.
  • Twitter would lose its shit if this came out today.
  • On a related note: Would Klaus Kinski love Trump?
  • This one could go either way.
  • On one hand, Klaus Kinski despised Americans and nothing is more American than Trump.
  • On the other, Klaus Kinski was a giant asshole, and giant assholes love Trump.
  • FUN FACT: As pointed out by Buck Mulligan–not only a Valued Commentator, but a skilled producer of children–Klaus Kinski spent the last few years of his angry life in Lagunitas, just a few miles from where the Dead bivouaced in ’67; this was his Blockhütte, which he named Himmel Auf Erden.
  • (Blockhütte means “log cabin” and the other thing means “Heaven on Earth.”)
  • This is a picture of Garcia, Bobby, and the ol’ Pig at Lagunitas:

  • (FURTHER FUN FACT: This is the only extant photograph of Pigpen’s feet.)
  • And then there’s Nosferatu the Vampire, which is not about Nosferatu, but Count Dracula.
  • But apparently they’re the same guy.
  • And Nosferatu wasn’t named Nosferatu, anyway.
  • His name was Count Orlok.
  • “Nosferatu” means “vampire.”
  • The movie should’ve been called Orlok the Nosferatu.
  • But then people would have thought they were buying tickets for a terrible scientifictional picture.
  • See if you can keep this straight, bozo: Nosferatu the Vampire is a remake of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was a straight-up theft of Dracula (the book)
  • That actually wasn’t that complicated.
  • Dunno why I felt the need to challenge you like that.
  • The “bozo” was completely unnecessary.
  • I’m not gonna apologize, but I do acknowledge that I should.
  • Anyway, this is Klaus Kinski as a dracula:

  • Herzog, we have a problem.
  • Y’can’t put the fangs there, man.
  • That’s some Bucky Beaver shit, man.
  • C’mon, man.
  • It’s supposed to look like this:

  • That’s scary!
  • Stay away from me, Mr. Dracula!
  • Don’t you bite on my neck!
  • Ooh, I’m tingling and my bumps are becoming goosed.
  • And then there’s this:

  • I do not feel fear.
  • I just feel bad that his parents couldn’t afford to send him to the orthodontist.
  • MOVIE PITCH: Dracula gets drafted.
  • I call it Sergeant Dracula.
  • At this point, all I have is the title, but you have to admit it’s a hell of a title.
  • It begs questions.
  • “Dracula’s in the army now?”
  • “How does a nocturnal creature of sin get by in an overwhelmingly day-based organization?”
  • “Does he wear his normal clothes, or the regulation uniform with, like, a cape and his medal?
  • I always wondered about Dracula’s medal.
  • This one:

  • Where does Dracula even get a medal?
  • And for what?
  • Did Dracula blow up the Death Star?
  • Anyway: Sergeant Dracula.
  • We get the script together this week, put together the funding over the summer, and start shooting the instant that the insurance companies say we can.
  • Who’s with me?
  • Why must you drift down these tributaries of triviality?
  • I am rudderless, and at nature’s whim.
  • You’re just a shithead.
  • Also that.
  • Nosferatu, of the four Herzog films I watched, least tickled my pickle.
  • Holy GOD was that a terrible sentence.
  • Are you still here?
  • I was leaving, but then I heard that abomination; you should have the alphabet confiscated from you.
  • Oh, hush.
  • Mopey Klaus Kinski in dreary European castles doesn’t make it for me; gimme crazed Klaus in a jungle.
  • And, as I mentioned, he does not assault a crowd of extras.
  • Which is not just boring, but a breach of Chekhov’s Rule.
  • Chekhov wrote that if a gun is introduced in Act One, then it must go off in Act Three.
  • Klaus Kinski is the gun in this scenario, and beating extras is the going off.
  • The beating necessarily follows his presence.
  • This is Drama 101 stuff, folks.
  • I couldn’t help comparing Nosferatu to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as they’re both based on the original novel and so have mostly identical plots, characters, and even dialogue.
  • (ARGUMENT: Francis Ford Coppola is the American Werner Herzog, or vice versa. Both went insane making river-based movies, and also made a dracula picture. I am now realizing there is not much to my argument. Also, Herzog is insanely prolific while Coppola took ten years to make each movie because he was such a pain in the ass. Yeah, this is a shitty argument. This entire parenthetical was a mistake. I regret coming in here.)
  • One metric in which Nosferatu beats Bum Stroker’s Dracula is in the casting and performance of the actor who plays the doomed Jonathan Harker.
  • Coppola cast Keanu Reeves, and I respect everyone involved for the decision.
  • Keanu was trying to expand his range.
  • Coppola took a chance on a young artist.
  • I respect that.
  • Didn’t work out.
  • Keanu was so bad I’m surprised his performance stuck to the celluloid.
  • You can almost hear him reminding  himself “Talk fancy, Keanu!” as he airily overarticulates every line.
  • But in Nosferatu, the Harker character is played by veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, who you may remember from such hits as a shitload of European movies you’ve never seen, and this classic meme:
  • Wait.
  • New movie idea: What if Hitler was a dracula?
  • Wrap this up.
  • I probably should.
  • Yeah.

Twenty-One Zooms, But One Will Do

April 18, 2020 / / 1 Comment

“Buzz–”

“For the love of God, man.”

“–I’d like to bring the conversation back to a previous subject.”

“Is it chuds?”

“It is.”

“Can’t we talk about space, Bob?”

“We’ll have time after the chud thing. Y’know what the ‘C’ stands for, right?”

“I actually don’t.”

“Cannibalistic. Not cannibals. Cannibalistic. Their behavior was akin to, but not exactly like, cannibalism. That, uh, kinda freaks me out the worst. It’s the not-knowing.”

“I can see where that would be spooky.”

“I’ve been checking for chuds since I saw the picture originally. Whenever I come back into the house, I immediately check all the closets and under the beds. They’re not like zombies. Zombies moan and bump into stuff. You can hear ’em coming. Chuds? Silent, but deadly. Folks say that about farts, but farts aren’t actually deadly. That is, uh, hyperbole. Chuds’ll gut ya, though.”

“Bob.”

“Coronavirus is nothing compared to a chud.”

“Bob.”

“Y’know, I’m sure there’s some sort of app that would let us watch the film together. I own it on VHS, laser disc, Blu-ray, and I also have it memorized so I could just act it all out for you.”

…

“Please let’s talk about something else.”

“Do you want to stop discussing the film, C.H.U.D., or the morlockian creatures known as chuds?”

“Both. All. I wanna stop talking about everything…did you hear that?”

“The screaming? Yeah.”

“My connection’s getting little cock-eye. Lemme see if I can–”

SHWIZZLEfeeeeeeeeeeTHOOP!

“I WILL EAT YOUR COCK, YOU BEARDED SHIT, AND PISS IN THE EMPTY HOLE!”

“Billy?”

“BILLY IS MY FRIEND, BUT HE IS FILTH! HE IS THE SCUM OF MONGREL FEET, AND I WILL ONE DAY DRIVE A BUS INTO HIS FACE!”

“Did he send you?”

“NO ONE SENDS KLAUS KINSKI ANYWHERE! YOUR MOTHER WAS A DRUNKEN GOAT, AND YOUR FATHER SUPPED ONLY ON STRANGER-COCK!”

“Oh, no. My folks were real decent folks. Solid California Republicans.”

“It’s no fun yelling at you.”

“Never stopped Phil.”

Man’s Best Fiend

April 17, 2020 / / 1 Comment

I cannot read your expression.

“I’m smiling, Ass.”

Are you?

“Funny story: the pillows behind me are made from the skins of my previous dogs. This guy’s barely gonna make a cushion. But I love the little fucker.”

What’s his name?

“Myballs.”

Huh?

“His name is Myballs. That way, I can walk around all day asking women if they like Myballs and wanna pet Myballs.”

That’s a good bit, Billy.

“One of my favorites. Not gonna lie, sometimes I also have my actual balls out.”

You shouldn’t do that.

“Yeah, but it’s a little shouldn’t. There’s much bigger shouldn’ts out there. Remember when whats-his-face killed all you people?”

The Holocaust?

“Yeah, that thing. Well, that shouldn’t have happened, should it? That’s a huge shouldn’t, man! Compared to that, ‘shouldn’t hang sack at the Baskin-Robbins’ is a tiny little shouldn’t. Barely even noticeable.”

Are you higher than usual?

“Maaaaaaaaybe.”

Jesus, man.

“I’ve been hanging out with Kinski. That guy’s the tits. He tackled a fireman for no reason. Then he fought the Dalmatian. He’s like the Tasmanian Devil! Plus, he’s got a doctor’s bag full of pills.”

What kind of pills?

“No idea. They all got German names. Terrible language, Ass. Sounds like your mouth is having a nightmare.”

It’s a bit harsh.

“I can’t say enough good stuff about the guy.”

This is Klaus Kinski we’re talking about, right?

“Solid dude. I weaponized him.”

You what?

“Hey, Kinski! Thoughts on my Ass says you suck!”

“HE IS THE ONE WHO SUCKS!”

“BRING ME YOUR FACE TO FUCK AND EAT!”

Jesus!

“See? I love this fucking guy!”

The Webcast Of God

April 17, 2020 / / 0 Comments

“Hi, everyone. Welcome to our regular Friday night webcast. I’m Dead archivist David Lemieux. Joining me is the co-host of Tales From The Golden Road, Gary Lambert, and NBA Hall-of-Famer and Deadhead Bill Walton.”

“David, it’s no coincidence that we meet tonight on Zoom, because that’s what the Grateful Dead’s music does to me, and to us all. Who hasn’t been zoomed to Jupiter by a world-shattering Other One, or zoomed in their rear areas by a tasty Music Never Stopped? The great Aretha Franklin once asked ‘Who’s zooming who?’ and tonight I have her answer: the Dead is zooming us, Miz Franklin.”

“I love your enthusiasm, Bill.”

“The French call it joie de vivre, David. That’s more words than ‘enthusiasm,’ but fewer syllables. The French have always been known for their efficiency.”

“Have they?”

“Oh, yeah. For years, that’s how Coach Wooden would end our practices. ‘You looked good out there, boys, but don’t forget that the French have always been known for their efficiency.’ Kareem and I still wrap up our phone conversations with the phrase.”

“That’s very sweet, actually.”

“Kareem’s a pussycat. David?”

“Uh-huh, eh?”

“Why is Gary not speaking?”

“The restrictions of the dialogue-only format. It just gets too confusing with more than two people.”

“Gotcha. I’m getting a bit of scramble on my end here. The connection’s getting–”

SHWIZZLEbleeeeeeeeeeZAP!

“LEMIEUX! YOU ARE THE DISEASED CUNT OF A DEAD MOOSE!”

“Um…Bill?”

“THE GORKY MUTANT HAS BEEN DISPLACED BY MY GENIUS!”

“Oh, hey, Klaus Kinski.”

“KEEP MY ESTEEMED NAME FROM YOUR THIN CANADIAN LIPS! USE THOSE LIPS FOR EATING BEAVER ASS, AND PRAISING MEDIOCRITIES! I WILL RUN YOU OVER WITH A CEMENT TRUCK!”

“Y’know, if I’ve offended you, then I apologize.”

“APOLOGIZE? APOLOGIZE!?”

BANG!

…

“Did you just shoot Gary ‘Legs’ Lambert?”

“YES! AND I ENJOYED THE ACT SO MUCH THAT I EJACULATED CONCURRENTLY! MY JOY RUNS DOWN MY BEAUTIFUL THIGH!”

“You are a mean man.”

“Ja. Bring me a cigarette and a teenager.”

San Francisco Boys

April 17, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Hey, Billy. Is that a movie star?

“Nah. It’s the Governor of California.”

Historically, those two professions have not been exclusive of one another.

“His name’s Gavin…Something. He was the Mayor of San Francisco after the black guy with the expensive suits and before the black lady with the goofy name.”

It’s weird that I know who you’re talking about.

“Ass, I paint a word picture.”

I thought you were quarantining in Hawaii.

“Got bored.”

Sure.

“Besides, look how handsome this son of a bitch is. People this good-looking are immune to the ronabarrett.”

Coronavirus.

“I banged Rona Barrett. In my defense, I thought she was Mary Hart.”

No one knows who those people are, Billy.

“Doesn’t change the facts: I fucked.”

Great.

CELL PHONE NOISE

“I gotta take this. It might be Leeza Gibbons.”

It’s not Leeza Gibbons.

“Might be,”

…

“Yello?”

“YOU WILL LICK MY ASS, YOU COCKING CUNTSHITTER!”

“Mom?”

“I FUCKED YOUR MOM IN HER HEART! HER BLACK HEART THAT WAS FULL OF SHIT AND VILE STUPIDITY! COME TO THIS BRIDGE SO I CAN THROW YOU OFF IT!”

“What is that, the Golden Gate? At this hour? Fuck that.”

“FUCK YOU, AMERICAN SOW! YOU ARE A SOW THAT GIVES MILK THAT IS NOT MILK, BUT SHIT. YOU ARE MILKY SHIT MAN! THIS IS YOUR NEW NAME! THIS IS WHAT I CALL YOU!”

“Man, you’re fiesty. I wanna point you at some fuckers I don’t like.”

“I HATE ALL THE FUCKERS!”

“Yeah, we’re gonna be friends. You holding?”

“Ja.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

Thoughts On Some Werner Herzog Movies

April 16, 2020 / / 10 Comments
  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
  • Fitzcarraldo.
  • Two movies, one story.
  • “Klaus Kinski attempts to defeat the jungle using only the power of his face, fails.”
  • The man had a face.
  • His skull was well-hung.
  • Not a beautiful face.
  • Klaus Kinski was not a Chris.
  • He wasn’t All-American Chris.
  • Or Aussie Bro Chris.
  • Or The Other Chris, what’s his name, I think he was maybe in the new Star Trek films.
  • No, Klaus Kinski was not a Chris.
  • This was him (left):
  • Also: Yes, that is a real monkey.
  • Y’know that credit that informs the viewer that “no animals have been harmed in the production of this film?”
  • Aguirre does not bear that credit.
  • It actually got worse for the little guy.
  • I’m not even gonna get into what happened to that poor horse.
  • (If you haven’t watched Aguirre yet, and are wondering if you would enjoy it, then just look at the GIF and ask yourself, “Do I wanna know what led to that man who looks like Satan yeeting that primate ?” And, Christ, I hope you answer “Yes.” Worst thing a person can be is incurious, especially about hurled monkeys.)
  • LOOK AT THIS GUY’S FUCKING FACE!
  • DID YOU LOOK LIKE I TOLD YOU?
  • Stop yelling about dead, poorly-behaved foreigners, please.
  • HIS FACE IS TOO BIG FOR HIS HEAD!
  • Stop it right the fuck now.
  • Ahem.
  • Although, if we’re honest about our math, Klaus Kinski’s face only generates two miili-Helens.
  • Helen’s punim launched a thousand ships, and Klaus’ only two.
  • Can’t argue with the numbers, Enthusiasts.
  • Aguirre is 80% Klaus Kinski’s face, and 20% the opening scene where the whole of the expedition walks down an Ande.
  • You never realized that each individual mountain in the Andes was called an Ande, did you?
  • This here’s an educational site.
  • Anyway, it’s 1560 or so and the Spanish are conquistadoring.
  • It’s not like the French could do it.
  • They couldn’t even pronounce “conquistadoring.”
  • But the Spanish, freshly free of Moorish rule, could conquistador you up one side and down the other before you could say “Why did you kill my entire village?”
  • They weren’t slow, like a conquistawindow; they were fast, like a conquistador.
  • THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!
  • But it made me giggle, and that’s all that matters during these trying times.
  • The indigenous folks the Spanish have enslaved have stories about a city made of gold.
  • Donde esta este ciudad de oro? the Spanish ask.
  • And the natives would point to the jungle and say De esa manera. No tan lejos. Es fácil de detectar. 
  • (The natives had learned Spanish by that point, or at least had access to Google Translate.)
  • So the Spanish went hot-assing into the Amazon, via the Amazon, and that was just the worst idea.
  • Everything named Amazon wants you dead.
  • The mythical lesbians with bows.
  • The next evolution of the Company Store owned by that little penishead.
  • The river.
  • The rainforest.
  • You ever meet a guy named Amazon Hufnagle, RUN.
  • But there’s one tenet that white people have held sacred since time immemorial: If the locals tell you not to go somewhere, go there immediately.
  • “Rapids, shmapids. You are talking to a Christian, sir. Ready the rafts!”
  • And then no one ever sees them again.
  • Both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are loosely based on true stories.
  • Incredibly loosely.
  • Imagine a ghost giving you a tugger.
  • Or that 38 Special is specifying how you should hold on.
  • Or that Precarious Lee had a cousin who slept around a lot.
  • That loosely.
  • Both Don Lope de Aguirre and Brian Fitzgerald (known as Fitzcarraldo because the locals can’t pronounce Fitzgerald) existed, and each sort of performed the main action of their fictional iterations.
  • Aguirre really did go searching for El Dorado, lead a mutiny, and then declare himself King of All This Shit Right Here.
  • Fitzcarraldo really did (force enslaved natives to) drag a steamboat over a mountain.
  • But that’s it.
  • We don’t know much about Aguirre because he lived in 1560 and everyone who knew how to write was too busy lopping off the heads of everyone who didn’t to keep a journal.
  • But he wrote letters back and forth to the King, and the King wrote letters about him, and the Court Archivist (Don David de Lemieux) kept the correspondence, so we know the general parameters of Aguirre’s spiral into madness and monkey-tossing.
  • The shit about Fitzcarraldo’s just made-up.
  • Yes, he did get a boat over a mountain, but he had it disassembled and carried over the pass.
  • And it only weighed 30 tons.
  • That almost sounds reasonable.
  • Werner Herzog is not a reasonable man.
  • He is A German man with a dream.
  • It involves climbing a mountain.
  • All German dreams involve climbing mountains.
  • And schnitzel.
  • All German dreams involve climbing mountains, and schnitzel.
  • In Werner Herzog’s dream, the mountain was smack in the dampest asshole of the world’s largest jungle, and instead of climb it, he wanted to shlep a 300-ton steamboat over it.
  • I am unaware of Werner Herzog’s schnitzel dreams, but I do know that his new documentary, Wener Herzog’s Schnitzel Dreams, will be airing on the Food Network in June.
  • 300 tons.
  • The original was 30, and–once more–it was humped over in pieces and then reassembled in the new river.
  • (This was all about rubber. During the Industrial Revolution, Europe needed it, and the Amazon was still the only place in the world where it grew. Until a European stole some tree bulbs and started plantations in Asia, but that’s another story that’s exactly like the silk story. But I digress.)
  • Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are certainly not merely entertainment, but art.
  • Entertainment makes promises, and then succeeds or fails by measure of how well it’s lived up to said promises.
  • A comedy is successful if it makes you laugh.
  • A babadook movie is successful if it frightens you.
  • Art asks questions.
  • And one of the questions that Fitzcarraldo asks is “Was this all really necessary?”
  • Go watch this:

  • Did you watch that?
  • Who do you think the villain of the piece was?
  • I think it’s the guy who shanghaied several tribes worth of people into the middle of a jungle and underpaid them to literally pull a literal steamboat up a literal mountain, all the while permitting Klaus Kinski to scream at them.
  • He could’ve filmed five miles outside of town.
  • Or–and this is a wild idea–built a fake boat.
  • I think that’s called a prop.
  • They use ’em in movies all the time.
  • But, no, Werner Herzog wanted realism in his completely made-up story that sprung from a vision and originally starred Mick Jagger.
  • (Fitzcarraldo was the South American version of Apocalypse Now: the production was protracted and throughly unhinged, the weather and locals conspired to destroy everything, and the documentaries are–in their way–just as good as the films. Fitzcarraldo might have been more fucked, as the original leads were Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger as his dumbfuck sidekick. Robards got sick and went home with 40% of the scenes shot, which meant a production hiatus, which meant Mick had to go home and assemble Tattoo You out of scraps so the Stones would have an excuse to go on tour. Klaus Kinski signed on after many, many raving fits on the telephone to play Fitzcarraldo, and Mick’s dumbfuck was written out of the script.)
  • It is mind-boggling how many people took concrete steps towards murdering Klaus Kinski.
  • Not just wishing him dead.
  • Pretty much everyone who ever met him did that.
  • I’m talking about making a plan, gathering the tools, plotting an escape from the scene.
  • People on at least two continents aborted attempts on his life only at the very last moment.
  • Plainly, the man was mentally ill.
  • Movie stars are tops at throwing strategic tantrums; Klaus Kinski did not do that.
  • I always had the sense that Marlon Brando was an asshole because he knew he could get away with it; that’s not why Klaus Kinski misbehaved.
  • He was a crazy person.
  • Here, go read this.
  • Klaus Kinski was the German Ginger Baker.
  • Go watch Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or go watch ’em again.
  • They’re on Amazon Prime, which has a deeper collection of old and obscure films than Netflix, but which keeps recommending that I watch not one, but three of Tyler Perry’s Madea pictures, and I don’t know why it would do that.

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