Fitzcarraldo

Slow-moving yet compelling, the movie starts to get interesting about an hour and half into it, when they attempt to move a 360 ton steamboat up a 40 degree slope in the Amazonian jungle. I sort of stopped thinking of it as a movie and became aware of the amazing, insane thing they were doing. I liked how it operated on two levels at this point - both a fictional story and an incredibly difficult task that people were actually carrying out in the real world.

It's odd to consider that the director (Werner Herzog) got a bunch of people to spend several years in the deep jungle and move a huge boat over a mountain so that he could make a movie about people moving a huge boat over a mountain. (Robert notes: That's meta.) Herzog must be even crazier than his protagonist, though not his leading man, since I'm not convinced it gets crazier than Klaus Kinski, who you may remember as the insane conquistador in Aguirre: The Wrath of God. I get the same feeling watching Kinski as I do someone like Katharine Hepburn - less that they are acting than they are simply being some version of themselves in every role they take. In Kinski's case, this is someone possessed by demons.



(This quote from the wikipedia page on Kinski made me laugh:
When Steven Spielberg offered him the part of one of the Nazi villains in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he turned it down, stating: "[...] as much as I'd like to do a movie with Spielberg, the script is as moronically shitty as so many other flicks of this ilk.")

I was very surprised to discover that Kinski's character was originally to be played by Jason Robards, who got dysentery and had to leave the production. I am very interested now in seeing the documentary about the making of the movie, Burden of Dreams. I wonder how much Herzog hated the whole thing by the time he was finished.

I admit that the movie was often tedious to watch, but I did enjoy it. It's the kind of thing that you don't necessarily enjoy any specific part of while actually watching it, but you find it interesting overall. (I usually think of this as something that is interesting from hour to hour, but not from minute to minute.) And unlike many to most movies, the images really stuck with me and I kept thinking about it a long time after I finished it. I probably won't watch it again, however. Of course, considering the impact it made, I guess I wouldn't have to.