FEATURES:
Description:
Encounters at the end of the world:
Herzog was paid by the Discovery Channel and the National Science Foundation to travel to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to gain some insight into the mysteries of the land at the bottom of the world, promising only that he would not come up with another film about penguins. He criticizes McMurdo as an ugly mining town and rails against the noise and the tractors and yoga and aerobics, which he calls an "abomination". His study of course is less about the sex life of the penguins than about the oddball humans and why they have gone to great lengths to travel to the bottom of the earth. We meet a linguist who had studied the disappearance of native languages but is now growing hydroponic tomatoes in a tin hut, a traveler who went from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, a plumber who is convinced the shape of his hands points to a royal Aztec heritage, and a woman who contorts her body to fit into a gym bag. We see scientist huddled together watching the science fiction thriller "Them" from 1954 and probably films of other genres that even Herzog was not able to include.

Grizzly Man:
This documentary, written, directed, and narrated by German madman maestro Werner Herzog, has very little in it that isn't worth seeing, and at its best brings some of the most captivating, candid, and entertaining documentary footage of the year. The subject matter is an environmentalist/bear nut named Timothy Treadwell, a nobody who became a kind of weird celebrity for living each summer on an Alaskan wildlife preservation with Grizzly bears. He also documented a lot of his time on the island, which Herzog chooses wisely for his film on him. Treadwell may or may not have totally believed a fate like death among his co-habitants would come (there is one scene where he says he'd die for them, another when he says he's safe). But his fate did come, along with his girlfriends, rather grisly as we hear from the details (which, wisely, we never see).

White Diamond:
This is a lyrical film more than anything. Herzog refuses to classify his documentaries as "documentaries" which I respect. Truthfully this isn't a straight forward documentary even if it does follow one man's quest to get his air ship to float above Guyana.

Herzog is an observer more than anything and we see that in how his documentary is assembled, he does not force anything and he will leave his camera on people for longer than you would expect so that they will feel compelled to say something else.

A random man will come up and start talking and Herzog will focus on him for several minutes. This film goes alongside Herzog's other films that represent men with near impossible dreams.

La Soufriere:
When word that La Soufriere, a volcano, was about to explode Werner Herzog dropped everything and ran off to try and find the one inhabitant of the small island that didn't leave. Scientists were expecting an explosion of catastrophic proportions and fled themselves. When Herzog and his camera men arrived on the island they were greeted by a eerily silent landscape and a sense of impending doom. The film that resulted from Herzog's trip is strange viewing experience. As Herzog remarks its as if he were dropped into a science fiction movie where everyone in the world has disappeared but the electric, phones and TVs still worked. Its a place where thousands of snakes fled the rumbling mountain by going into the ocean while the only humans around spend time getting closer to the danger. Its an odd experience as we watch and wait for what we are told is inevitable....

Herzog has made a film of stark beauty that is also deeply disturbing. There is something about it that is not quite right. Of course it has to do with the fact that the film is like real life Waiting for Godot, we are waiting for the end that never comes, despite all the signs. Its an unnerving proposition that messes with your head, but in a good way. Its 30 minutes well spent.

Flying Doctors of East Africa: (Original title: Die Fliegenden Ärzte von Ostafrika)
Herzog documentary takes a look at some volunteers in Africa who fly around to various rural parts just to perform operations and spread the word about medicine. Even though the doctors try their best they are often met with people who either refuse to listen or are afraid of what they are actually trying to do. This is yet another fascinating film from the German director who of course would go onto make some of the best documentaries out there. This film here is like many of his future works in that it doesn't take a look at the subject in an usual way but instead takes a look at strange things other filmmakers might overlook. The perfect example of this is a scene where the narrator talks about hyenas and their appetite for the plane tires especially those made by Firestone. The doctors also have to work with other strange things like one tribe being terrified to climb steps so they have to be lured to climb them to reach the treatment. The doctors interviewed for the project are all rather interesting since they are doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They discuss the benefit of flying around to the patients but they are open with their frustration of the same people who sometimes make their jobs very difficult. Before operations the doctors will tell people not to eat but the African people think food is the way to get healthy and this here causes many to puke into their masks and kill them (like the story to the Newman film The Verdict). Running a short 45-minutes, the movie never overstays its welcome and in the end this turns out to be another winner for the director.

Cast:
Ryan Andrew Evans, Werner Herzog

• Encoding: Region B PAL

• Rated:

• Studio: Revolver Entertainment

• Run Time: 365 minutes

• Blu-Ray Release Date: August 31, 2009
   

Number of discs: 4