Kidman of Arabia (really)

Werner Herzog directs Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert, a sparkless historical epic.

Werner Herzog isn't David Lean, and Nicole Kidman is no Peter O'Toole. I don't mean that as a slam on either Herzog or Kidman, the talented director and fine actress who have teamed for Queen of the Desert, an historical epic about Gertrude Lowthian Bell. Bell, a woman who probably will be unknown to most audiences, was a writer and adventurer who helped Winston Churchill draw the lines that carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Herzog fans immediately will be struck by the movie's surprisingly conventional style, which (alas) relies heavily on images of Kidman riding camels, on two somewhat listless romances and on the less-than-exciting intricacies of tribal politics among the Arab populations of the empire once controlled by the Turks.

A miscast James Franco portrays Henry Cadogan, Bell's first love. As he whispers his way through a British accent, it's difficult to take Franco seriously. Robert Pattinson, who shows up as T.E. Lawrence at least uses his crooked half-smile to suggest Lawrence's mischievousness.

Damian Lewis plays the third man in Belle's life, Maj. Charles Doughty-Wylie; Bell writes to Doughty-Wylie as she wanders across the desert. Periodically, we hear Kidman reading these letters in hushed tones.

Kidman captures Bell's courage, her confusion when it comes to romance and her determination not to be limited by gender. But Herzog relies on far too many glamor shots of Kidman, who manages to look beautiful even in extreme circumstances of desert heat and dust, not to mention the threat of hostile Arabs, most of whom ultimately are charmed by Bell's tenacity.

Herzog can't be accused of skimping on scenery; many of the desert images are steeped in grandeur, but the movie's swelling musical score feels like something lifted from another era.

Bell supposedly drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq, a skill that may have inspired Herzog to use on-screen maps to follow Bell's progress around the region, an old-fashioned technique that he presents without any trace of irony. Same goes for some of the cornball dialogue in which Bell talks about giving her heart to the desert.

Aside from telling us that Bell -- one of the first women to attend Oxford -- was an early example of feminine assertion, it's not exactly clear what Herzog hoped to say. Such is the price of reigning in idiosyncrasy: Herzog seldom has made a movie this sparkless and generic in its feel.

Herzog probes the mysteries of the Internet and a look at the work of Richard Linklater

Werner Herzog's latest documentary, Lo and Behold, isn't really a documentary at all. For me, it makes more sense to think of Herzog's exploration of the mysteries of the Internet as a cinematic essay, a wide-ranging and sometimes disjointed look at the issues and people that seem to have captured the director's interest. Divided into chapters, the movie begins with the founding of the Internet, and moves steadily toward the darker side of global interconnection. Toward the end, Lo and Behold becomes an ominous cautionary tale about the havoc that would befall the world if a major solar flare wiped out all interconnectivity. Pay attention to the movie's subtitle -- Reveries of the Connected World. It provides a clue about the movie's structure and fascinations. Herzog being Herzog, you probably won't be surprised that Lo and Behold sometimes strives for mind-bending kick. An example: Herzog asks one expert whether the Internet can dream? It's impossible to watch any Herzog film without being stimulated and provoked and Lo and Behold fills that bill, even if it's successes arrive in piecemeal fashion.

RICHARD LINKLATER, PRAISED AND ADMIRED

Director Richard Linklater (Slackers) qualifies as a true pioneer of Indie cinema, although the director occasionally swims in mainstream waters (School of Rock). Richard Linklater: The Dream is Destiny examines what now has become a fairly prolific career. Director Louis Black (a co-founder of the Austin Chronicle and of SXSW) makes little attempt to conceal his admiration as he interviews Linklater about his work. Black supplements the director's comments with interviews from such Linklater stalwarts as Ethan Hawke, Matthew McConaughey and Julie Delpy. If you're a Linklater fan, Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny also serves as a review of the director's body of work -- from Slackers to Before Sunrise to Boyhood to Everybody Wants Some. There's plenty to be learned about filmmaking in the '90s, about working outside of Hollywood in Austin and about Linklater's approach to material. The movie notes some of Linklater's less-well-received works (The Newton Boys, for example), but it's mostly an appreciation. Wherever the movies have been or wherever they may be headed, we're lucky that Linklater is around to make his contribution. If you needed reminding of that, Dream is Destiny will do the job.

Another loner, another show

Tom Cruise fights his way to justice as Jack Reacher.

Somewhere along the line, it became mandatory for a certain kind of male hero to display as little emotion as possible, to become an icon of don't-mess-with-me toughness. As played by Tom Cruise, former soldier Jack Reacher -- the main character in a series of popular books by British novelist Lee Child and the title character in Cruise's new movie -- is one such man: decisive, physically fit, brutal when necessary and unencumbered by possessions. Reacher has only one shirt to his name, travels by bus and always seems to keep moving.

Jack Reacher, a new movie adapted from Child's 2005 novel, One Shot, takes place in in Pittsburgh and kicks off with a harrowing shooting. Positioned in a parking garage, a sniper picks off five people in what appear to be random acts of senseless murder.

The sniper (Joseph Sikora) is quickly arrested. Evidence against him seems overwhelming and irrefutable. Of course, in movies, a scenario such as this only can mean one thing: The guy didn't do it. It doesn't take long for the shooter's attorney (Rosamund Pike) to become embroiled in an attempt to discover why Sikora's character has been made into a patsy.

She has help. Just before slipping into a coma, Sikora's character scrawled one sentence on a legal pad, "Get Jack Reacher."

Pike's Helen hires Reacher, who turns up in Pittsburgh for reasons of his own, to help figure things out, a task for which he's well-suited because he's a former military policeman known for his brilliant investigatory powers. You know the drill: Reacher's the kind of guy who can visit a crime scene and notice things that the police always seem to overlook.

The cast of characters drawn together by the murders includes the Pittsburgh District Attorney (Richard Jenkins), who happens to be Helen's father, a man with whom she has long-standing but ill-defined tensions. David Oyelowo plays the lead detective on the case. Neither the DA nor the cop can understand why Helen insists on wasting time on such an unambiguous situation.

Looking a little gaunt in the face, Cruise does his version of the tough, mysterious loner, and the rest of the actors do little to compete with him. How tough is Reacher? He can take out five guys in a fight outside a bar.

The villains in Jack Reacher offer the only hints of personality. They're led by Werner Herzog, a director who spends most of his time behind the camera. Herzog brings just the right amount of sadistic intensity to the proceedings. He's not playing a villain, but Robert Duvall -- in a late-picture appearance as the owner of a shooting range -- adds life to a story that's not without a few dull spots.

The mystery at the heart of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay isn't especially compelling, and Jack Reacher builds toward a shoot-out at a construction site that doesn't exactly represent a high point in the history of imaginatively presented action.

McQuarrie, who wrote the screenplay for Cruise's Valkyrie, receives a major assist from cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gives Pittsburgh an appropriately noirish sheen, and who has fun with a woozy car chase, the movie's best action set piece.

But there's something tired and lame at the core of Jack Reacher, which doesn't exactly break fresh cinematic ground.

I know there's nothing new under the sun, so there's no shame in telling a story about another tough guy who'll let nothing stop him from exercising his own brand of justice. But unlike the best of Cruise's Mission Impossible movies, Jack Reacher isn't enough fun to make you overlook its flaws. And you can't take it all that seriously, either.

A look at some of the world's oldest art

It's no gallery, but the art is first rate.

In his 2006 book, The Cave Painters, author Gregory Curtis observes that the first thing everyone seems to notice about the cave paintings of the Paleolithic Era is their beauty. Curtis goes on to point out that cave images focused primarily on animals. For Curtis, this repetitive tendency suggests a brand of art that supported the social order of its time, which happens to have occurred some 32,000 years ago.

If you want to see the beauty (and amazing skill) of these early paintings, you'd do well to check out Werner Herzog's new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, although you may need to read Curtis' book for a fuller picture of the culture that produced this art. And, yes, I used the word "culture" advisedly.

Granted exclusive access to the Chauvet cave in France, Herzog and a small crew took 3-D cameras into the cave to photograph its paintings. Some of the folks with whom I saw Forgotten Dreams thought the 3-D was well used and that it added to their experience. I have to say that it left me feeling slightly woozy, even though I appreciated the sense of immediacy and presence it provided.

But on to the heart of the matter: The art we see is vibrant, sophisticated and accomplished. Paleolithic artists were able to suggest motion, and to make creative use of undulating cave surfaces. None of the work is marked by the crudeness that might have been ascribed to it by those of us who know little about Paleolithic life.

It's also fascinating to learn that humans did not inhabit the caves, but entered them to draw or to paint and possibly to conduct "religious" rituals. Herzog shows us a rock with a bear skull that has been placed on top of it. We may be looking at an early altar.

Those familiar with Herzog's work in documentaries such as Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man know that he tends to make room for heightened commentary, the kind of observations that allow him to spar with a universe he can find mysterious, indifferent and unyielding. Normally, I go along for almost any journey Herzog takes, but for me Herzog proved the most troublesome feature of Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I'm sure others will have precisely the opposite reaction, but this time I found Herzog's presence distracting.

Still, the fact that Herzog's camera has access to sights that none of us could see on our own makes the movie special. And, of course, the paintings are priceless. If you're intrigued by the idea that some of our earliest ancestors were interested in art, music (they played carved flutes) and spirituality, you can't help but be fascinated by what Herzog shows. When he allows his camera to survey the art in silence -- which happily he does -- the movie couldn't be better.

Herzog in the land of penguins

Anyone familiar with the work of Werner Herzog knows that the German-born director has a taste for extremes. Herzog makes features ("Rescue Dawn") and documentaries ("Grizzly Man"), and his filmography virtually brims with one eccentric dare after another. So if Herzog takes his camera to Antarctica, it's a safe bet that he's not coming home with something conventional. It's an even safer bet that Herzog's movie will reflect his vision, which in this case comes wrapped in a doom-laden, somber package.


"Encounters at the End of the World" is no Al Gorish warning about global warming. It's not an occasion for liberal hand wringing, either. Rather it's an ominous rumble of doom concocted by Herzog from ingredients that should be incompatible, but somehow aren't. Odd bursts of absurdity (an interview with a woman who drove across Africa in a garbage truck) mingle with prophetic pronouncements (interviews with scientists who look ahead to a time when all humanity resides in history's bone yard). To further up the ominous ante, Herzog accompanies his images with music that sounds as if it had been composed in some mysterious cavern where the cosmos retreats to ponder itself.


Could it all be some sort of monumental goof? I wondered. It's difficult not to laugh when Herzog asks a scientist whether penguins have been known to suffer from insanity. It's a purely Herzogian question, and it doesn't necessarily require an answer. Rather it reflects the director's view that all creatures probably suffer terrible deviations from normalcy. He also wants to know about "prostitution" among penguins, activities in which the females engage in deception and award sexual favors for gain. He chooses the word "prostitution," as if he's imagining female penguins of easy virtue standing provocatively on the corner of ice flows, whistling to prospective Johns. It's preposterous, of course, an imposition of a morally charged word on creatures that live beyond such conceptual judgment.

Upon arriving at the grim-looking McMurdo research station at the South Pole -- Herzog rightly compares it to an outpost on an alien planet -- the director unpacks a kit full of bleak lyricism: He interviews scientists and induces many of them to acknowledge that man's life on Earth may be drawing to a close. He also finds many kindred spirits, including a plumber who talks about his Aztec roots. He presents McMurdo as a repository of weirdness, the place at the bottom of the world to which brilliant misfits inevitably tumble, strange filings drawn to a powerful magnet. As attracted as he may be to these eccentrics, Herzog can't wait to get away from McMurdo, which carries what he regards as the taint of civilization, abominations such as an ATM machine and a yoga studio.

None of this is to say that Herzog can't be awestruck. He makes spectacular use of undersea footage, some of it shot by the film's producer Henry Kaiser, who also wrote the music. And his view of Antarctic tends to underscore its beautiful severity: One scientist describes the world under the ice -- i.e., the ocean -- as one of rampant hostility, an environment full of cruel, life-crushing jokes. One creature entraps its victims. The more they struggle, the more ensnared they become. So the movie is about impending doom, but also perhaps about the abundant horrors that go along with survival.

As for insanity among penguins...Herzog discovers that some penguins buck the tide. Instead of walking toward the ocean with his fellows, one penguin insists on waddling toward the mountains, a journey that will bring certain death. Isolated from his companions, he marches dutifully toward his demise. Is he a stand-in for Herzog? For all of humanity? What makes a creature -- any creature -- bring such inexorable will to his own self-destruction?

Herzog seems less interested in providing answers than in casting a grave spell with this documentary, one of his best, I think. Rather than inundate us with information, he travels across terrain so forbidding, it's clear that humans don't belong there. And he raises an awful question that rumbles through the entire movie: How long will it be before we don't belong anywhere?