>Mel Talks

>Mel Gibson has a new movie coming out and as part of his public rehabilitation, here’s an interview he gave that’s as revealing as it can be considering the legal questions that remain unresolved. He does well.

Gibson is like all of us, looking for redemption after a fall only his was more public than most. Give him credit. At least he’s trying. Early reviews of The Beaver has been unkind to the movie but Gibsion’s performance is getting some good reviews. No doubt he’s a talented actor – a talented director, too – so if nothing else, seeing this movie will be an opportunity to watch a man use his work as part of his contrition. A rare occurrence these days.

(Here’s my prior post about his troubles with a slightly bizarre rant from a commenter.)

Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and ‘Grizzly Man’

Here’s the final installment of Leo Grin’s fascinating essay on film director Werner Herzog:

As stated earlier, in his teen years Herzog had a deeply affecting flirtation with Catholicism that has echoed down throughout his life. “I have always thought of my films as really being one big work that I have been concentrating on for forty years,” he says. “The characters in this story are all desperate and solitary rebels. . . They know their rebellion is doomed to failure, but they continue without respite, wounded, struggling on their own without assistance.” Herzog maintains, and I agree, that when the history of his career is written Grizzly Man “will be a centerpiece” of his canon. But it was only after many viewings that it occurred to me (a veteran of eight years of Catholic grade school) that one of Grizzly Man’s chief virtues is that it’s a supremely decent film, acting as a kind of extended novena for the lost soul of Timothy Treadwell.

I doubt there are other directors working today that you’d use the word novena to describe their work.

My dim memory of the movie was that it treated Treadwell far more sympathetically than he deserved. His foolishness cost him not only his life but the life of his girlfriend’s and brought all kinds of sorrow to their families. But this essay is more generous to Herzog than I am and might make the movie worth a second viewing.

My links to these essays, though, are intended to bring attention to a director who insists on his own vision. Not unusual, you say, most, if not all, movie directors are megalomaniacs and you might be right. But it sounds like Herzog is mining a seam that’s unlike any other. While he may not be a conservative – I have no idea of what his politics are and don’t really care – what he finds valuable are the things that last.

Maynard James Keenan: The Rocker Who Makes Wine

Hey, I’m just like rockin’ wild man Maynard James Keenan! We both make wine:

Maynard James Keenan, one of rock’s most enigmatic personalities, is having the time of his life these days not only as leader of the hydra-headed project Puscifer but also as a winemaker. Gone, at least in public, is the angst-ridden man we saw fronting the megasuccessful Tool and A Perfect Circle, bands that redefined heavy alternative rock.

A bawdy group with a rotating cast, the musical part of Puscifer resumed its multimedia U.S. tour in Atlanta on Tuesday. The winemaking Mr. Keenan appears in “Blood into Wine,” a documentary that had its Feb. 19 premiere in Scottsdale, Ariz., about two hours south of this former mining center and ghost town that’s home to his Caduceus Cellars and Merkin vineyards as well as his handsome wine-tasting room and his Puscifer store, which sells distinctive clothing and other branded materials. Mr. Keenan has lived here since 1995, when he fled Los Angeles in search of tranquility.

Okay, maybe Keenan’s not using wine kits and plastic food buckets and stashing ‘em behind the shower curtain in the bathroom while they ferment but, hey, we’re both winemakers.

Once again, it cracks me up to find out cutting edge rockers like Keenan turn out to be a lot more ordinary than you’d think. So ordinary, it’s radical:

As “Blood into Wine” makes clear, the 45-year-old Mr. Keenan isn’t a musical celebrity who lent his name to a product. He gets down into the soil to plant and destem vines and pick grapes. He’s learned oenology with painstaking deliberation. When I visited him here on the cold and rainy day following the film premiere, he drove me over to his vineyards and explained in detail his passion for winemaking and the potential for Arizona’s Verde Valley to be an important source of American wines. The last time I saw him on stage with Tool, he wore a Mohawk and skimpy shorts, growling as he stalked the stage and clung to the shadows, and I expected to meet an intense man grappling with the complex issues he raises in some of his songs. Instead, I found a convivial host, a quick wit and a savvy businessman who lives a life of his own choosing.

A great profile. Read the whole thing.

More Werner Herzog

Here’s the next installment of Leo Grin’s essay on Werner Herzog. (More about my growing infatuation with the filmmaker.)

“Is the ecstatic truth actually a religious term?”

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

So in Hollywood, to tout conservative views is to be considered an outsider, a maverick, a wild man:

When he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) — a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was shot down and tortured during the Vietnam War, only to stage an amazing escape — the Left noticed that the usual anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be found. “The film was generally very well received by American audiences,” Herzog says, but adds that “Inevitably I was asked why I did not denounce American aggression in the Vietnam War and why the film made no political statement.” Herzog’s reply to this pressure was to double down, raise more money outside of the system, and make Rescue Dawn (2007), a fictional treatment of the exact same story starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Werner Herzog, you see, is no slave to political correctness, no lap-dog for the media, and not at all on board with the hippy-dippy attitudes of the Hollywood Left. He saw in Dieter Dengler a man who, in his words, “had all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a kind of frontier spirit.” That was what counted, and no amount of disparagement was about to deter him from portraying Americans at their best.

Next week, Grin takes a closer look at the only film of Herzog’s I’ve ever seen, Grizzly Man. I remember the movie as an unsparing look at a mis-guided, foolish, obsessed man; I’ll be glad for the chance to re-visit it.