Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

  This is from my film class.  As you might imagine, given that I didn't even post anything yesterday, I am woefully behind on my Oscar nominees.  I actually bought a bunch in the hopes of getting to them but that's most likely not going to happen.

I can't express how ready I am for school to be over.  People keep asking me what I plan to do once I graduate.  Here's my plan:  nothing.  I am going to do nothing.  And it is going to be so fucking glorious.  I am going to nothing so hard that it might permanently alter the balance of entropy.

Anyway, Aguirre.

In the late 1500s, Gonzalo Pizzaro (Alejandro Repullés) dispatches a team of conquistadores into the Amazonian jungle to search for El Dorado.  Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), the second-in-command, stages a coup when the leader (Ruy Guerra) wants to turn back to rejoin Pizarro.  Aguirre leads the increasingly desperate party deeper and deeper into the jungle on a megalomaniacal quest to dethrone the Spanish empire and conquer the New World.

This is directed by Werner Herzog and apparently suffered from a host of backstage dramas and intrigues.  Like, the guy Herzog paid for the sound recording just took the money and ran, leaving the film to rerecord all the dialogue in post.  Kinski apparently refused to read his lines unless he got a boatload more money, so it's not his voice in the final film.  Herzog and Kinski had screaming fights on set just so Kinski didn't play the character like a total scenery-chewing cartoon villain.  They filmed it in the actual Amazon, with all the attendant issues there.  Oh, and my favorite, Herzog had paid a guy a bunch of money for crates of monkeys but the guy had double-sold them and was going to rip Herzog off, so Herzog pretended to be a vet and told the guy the monkeys were sick and needed to be quarantined, then just took them.

Those stories are actually way more entertaining than the film itself, which is mostly a depressing slog of colonialism and mania.  Herzog is clearly not on the side of the colonizers, which is nice, but that's mostly because he's more interested in seeing people implode and destroy themselves.  If you do decide to watch it, get ready for long takes of nothing much happening interspersed with Kinski being weird and moments of the bleakest humor you can imagine.  I had to stop and take a nap halfway through.  Still, it's a classic...?