A pair with Clint Eastwood http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/303702560

How do I hate thee, bio-pic, let me count the ways.

Well.

Aside from the fact that it is a way of making up for not having a story – I wish somebody would come up with the idea of paying a tiny fraction of a percent of the budget of movies to writers. WRITERS. Come on, let’s hear it for writers…

Aside from that….

The historian in me continually wants to vomit every time I am dragged to one.

Eastwood’s falsification of history in Hoover is a good example. I imagine that almost all of the people who go to that movie enter the picture house knowing approximately nothing about Hoover and come out thinking that’s changed. They won’t have a clue what was true and what was made up, and I expect they don’t care either. Me, I watched it thinking very early on something was wrong: the movie has it that the terrorist bombings which kick off the movie are the work of Communists. Now, I don’t know why Eastwood made up that porkie. Presumably it was either because he personally wants the Commies to look dirtier out of his personal conviction and wish to influence how people think, or because he wanted to make it look like Hoover had SOME sort of justification for what he did in this period, which was to decimate the Communists. The communists who were doing what they could to help the workers of the US. The workers of the US who have been up shit creek ever since Hoover and his mates destroyed the political force which was building support for them. In actual fact it was the work of an Italian anarchist group, the bomings, but hey. Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good bio-pic story, huh. Or a piece of anti-Communist propaganda, if that is what this movie is.

Rescue Dawn. Herzog. Much as I’ve seen a lot of movies in my life, this was the first time I’ve seen a movie and subsequently been ashamed of doing so. It says at the start it was merely ‘inspired’ by the story of Dengler, Vietnam ‘hero’. But in fact this is a bio-pic, made after Herzog also made a documentary about the guy. It is an amazing story of inspiration and heroism. I mean, it would be. Herzog could have simply stuck to the facts and made a good war movie. Instead he changed many important things about the story to make a bio-pic which is the odd piece of truth cobbled together with tissues of lies. And if you are going to say, so? And does it matter? If that is what you are going to say that, then please go to this site: http://www.rescuedawnthetruth.com/ This is where the families of the men who were with Dengler tell the truth. Where they write about what brave men their relatives were, the ones that Herzog turned into cowards and idiots in order to make Dengler look better. Read this site and I hope you will be ashamed too, ashamed of the idea of the bio-pic and what it means to go to such events to be entertained by history turned into mush, truth into fiction.

A pair with Clint Eastwood http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/303702560

How do I hate thee, bio-pic, let me count the ways.

Well.

Aside from the fact that it is a way of making up for not having a story – I wish somebody would come up with the idea of paying a tiny fraction of a percent of the budget of movies to writers. WRITERS. Come on, let’s hear it for writers…

Aside from that….

The historian in me continually wants to vomit every time I am dragged to one.

Eastwood’s falsification of history in Hoover is a good example. I imagine that almost all of the people who go to that movie enter the picture house knowing approximately nothing about Hoover and come out thinking that’s changed. They won’t have a clue what was true and what was made up, and I expect they don’t care either. Me, I watched it thinking very early on something was wrong: the movie has it that the terrorist bombings which kick off the movie are the work of Communists. Now, I don’t know why Eastwood made up that porkie. Presumably it was either because he personally wants the Commies to look dirtier out of his personal conviction and wish to influence how people think, or because he wanted to make it look like Hoover had SOME sort of justification for what he did in this period, which was to decimate the Communists. The communists who were doing what they could to help the workers of the US. The workers of the US who have been up shit creek ever since Hoover and his mates destroyed the political force which was building support for them. In actual fact it was the work of an Italian anarchist group, the bomings, but hey. Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good bio-pic story, huh. Or a piece of anti-Communist propaganda, if that is what this movie is.

Rescue Dawn. Herzog. Much as I’ve seen a lot of movies in my life, this was the first time I’ve seen a movie and subsequently been ashamed of doing so. It says at the start it was merely ‘inspired’ by the story of Dengler, Vietnam ‘hero’. But in fact this is a bio-pic, made after Herzog also made a documentary about the guy. It is an amazing story of inspiration and heroism. I mean, it would be. Herzog could have simply stuck to the facts and made a good war movie. Instead he changed many important things about the story to make a bio-pic which is the odd piece of truth cobbled together with tissues of lies. And if you are going to say, so? And does it matter? If that is what you are going to say that, then please go to this site: http://www.rescuedawnthetruth.com/ This is where the families of the men who were with Dengler tell the truth. Where they write about what brave men their relatives were, the ones that Herzog turned into cowards and idiots in order to make Dengler look better. Read this site and I hope you will be ashamed too, ashamed of the idea of the bio-pic and what it means to go to such events to be entertained by history turned into mush, truth into fiction.

A pair with Clint Eastwood http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/303702560

How do I hate thee, bio-pic, let me count the ways.

Well.

Aside from the fact that it is a way of making up for not having a story – I wish somebody would come up with the idea of paying a tiny fraction of a percent of the budget of movies to writers. WRITERS. Come on, let’s hear it for writers…

Aside from that….

The historian in me continually wants to vomit every time I am dragged to one.

Eastwood’s falsification of history in Hoover is a good example. I imagine that almost all of the people who go to that movie enter the picture house knowing approximately nothing about Hoover and come out thinking that’s changed. They won’t have a clue what was true and what was made up, and I expect they don’t care either. Me, I watched it thinking very early on something was wrong: the movie has it that the terrorist bombings which kick off the movie are the work of Communists. Now, I don’t know why Eastwood made up that porkie. Presumably it was either because he personally wants the Commies to look dirtier out of his personal conviction and wish to influence how people think, or because he wanted to make it look like Hoover had SOME sort of justification for what he did in this period, which was to decimate the Communists. The communists who were doing what they could to help the workers of the US. The workers of the US who have been up shit creek ever since Hoover and his mates destroyed the political force which was building support for them. In actual fact it was the work of an Italian anarchist group, the bomings, but hey. Let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good bio-pic story, huh. Or a piece of anti-Communist propaganda, if that is what this movie is.

Rescue Dawn. Herzog. Much as I’ve seen a lot of movies in my life, this was the first time I’ve seen a movie and subsequently been ashamed of doing so. It says at the start it was merely ‘inspired’ by the story of Dengler, Vietnam ‘hero’. But in fact this is a bio-pic, made after Herzog also made a documentary about the guy. It is an amazing story of inspiration and heroism. I mean, it would be. Herzog could have simply stuck to the facts and made a good war movie. Instead he changed many important things about the story to make a bio-pic which is the odd piece of truth cobbled together with tissues of lies. And if you are going to say, so? And does it matter? If that is what you are going to say that, then please go to this site: http://www.rescuedawnthetruth.com/ This is where the families of the men who were with Dengler tell the truth. Where they write about what brave men their relatives were, the ones that Herzog turned into cowards and idiots in order to make Dengler look better. Read this site and I hope you will be ashamed too, ashamed of the idea of the bio-pic and what it means to go to such events to be entertained by history turned into mush, truth into fiction.

Good

This is one long interview arbitrarily cut into chapters that follow the director’s films chronologically. To fully appreciate this I should have perhaps watched a few more of the films (something I plan to remedy) and realised that it only covers the feature films (I prefer his documentaries) Although saying that the questions allow Herzog to wax lyrical about the film making process, his relationships with some of his leading actors (especially Kinski) and many other tangential topics. This was an entertaining read despite not knowing some of the films in any depth (plot synopsis on Wikipedia was my friend here) and it is interspersed with photographs. However since Herzog has said that he doesn’t really differentiate between features and documentaries as they are all films and all tell a story it deems a little odd to ignore a significant body of his work. I feel that it only tells half the story, or perhaps less. Full of amusing, interesting and sometimes shocking anecdotes this is a great read for his fans and new devotees equally.

Overall – concentrates on the feature films rather than the documentaries, still Herzog speaks eloquently and is always interesting to listen to (or in this case read) ( )