6/10
Pretty As A Picture
18 June 2008
It's taken me awhile to feel like I "get" Werner Herzog movies, I often find myself arguing with myself during his stuff. Half the time is, what a pretentious hack God when will this s**t be over, the other half is my God that's beautiful, he really is a mad genius...and by the end I usually don't know what to think.

I've never watched a movie by Herzog where the plot really amounted to much, the scenarios are set up, and they follow their natural courses, but it's the moments along the way, the journey itself, and not the prize at the end, that makes his film's worth watching.

Herzog makes images, often of people being surrounded and enveloped by nature and the world around them, but images I can safely say I'd never seen before anywhere.

Whether photographing a beach, a horde of plague rats, or a man wandering through mountains, there's a photorealism and dreaminess to everything that goes hand in hand, and that it's that kind of paradox that seems at the heart of Herzog, if it sounds like too much or not enough, just get out now.

Nosferatu is the Dracula story most people are familiar with, no Romance here though, just craven greed and lust. But the directors skills transform it into something else...However I would be lying if I said I knew what, because it's not really the point, were given the images and the framework of the story and either we find something beautiful or true or we don't.

I paused this movie quite a few times just to look at it, and that's the best endorsement I can give to this, and a lot of the Herzog stuff that I end up liking(Aguire:The Wrath Of God, Heart Of Glass, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Strosvek, etc). Beautiful, unique, and challenging, but not for everyone.
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