DVD Movie Night: "Fitzcarraldo"

We finally watched the Werner Herzog film "Fitzcarraldo" in its entirety last night. While channel-surfing television over the years, we've caught snippets of the film, as well as part of a documentary about its director and the making of the movie. We had also heard about the movie from other cinéastes and stumbled across references to the film several times in articles and reviews. We even remember seeing newspaper ads for the movie when it was originally released theatrically back in the 1980's, when we were really young. Now we've seen Herzog's film. "Fitzcarraldo" is a stunning and amazing piece of work, though it is one with some technical flaws that undermine it. Far from perfect, it is a great film and one that we'd have to put on our must-see movies list. Herzog's flim is about a crazy, opera-obsessed German-Irish icemaker named Fitzcarraldo, who has made a life for himself in a boomtown along the Amazon River during the rubber boom of the early 20th Century. His real love is opera, and he concocts a quixotic scheme to raise money to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rain forest. The plan involves him trying to sail a steamship upstream to a rubber plantation in an unsettled part of the jungle, where the river is unnavigable and the area inhabited by a fierce indigenous tribe. For the scheme to work, Fitcarraldo must move this ship over a mountain from one river to another. For the authenticity of his film, Herzog arranged for a real local tribe of Amazon natives to help carry an actual steamship over an actual mountain separating two rivers. It's all captured on celluloid in the telling of this incredible story.

Air Massive rating: 4 stars out of 5

Posted by Robsam at April 30, 2006 02:30 AM