Tederick Tumbles

My “Watched” column disappeared after December 5th; I was trying to cram together all my year-end viewing and coverage, plus I started writing reviews of new films for the Substream, and my available time for “catalog viewing” all but disappeared. Here’s a couple of things I watched, plus some notes on a new scheme:

When Black Dog Video announced their closing last month, and that they were selling off all their stock, I rushed down on a Saturday night to see if I could snag a DVD copy of Werner Herzog’s Bells from the Deep, which is impossibly hard to find on disc (it only appeared in an out-of-print boxed set, and on specialty discs available from his web site) and is also, perhaps unfortunately for me, my favourite (thus far) of his films. No such luck for me at Black Dog, but they were selling copies of The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder, neither of which I’ve seen, but was happy to pick up on spec.

We watched The White Diamond a few weeks ago under the light of our now-defunct Christmas tree, and it was transcendent. The film itself, I learn, came out roughly concurrent with Grizzly Man and was thereby swallowed up – but it is just as strong a film, nearly stronger, than the other. I simply don’t know how he does it. That a director, and particularly a director of documentaries, can find unique and interesting subject matter in the world is no small feat, but is an understandable feat – here is a story of a man who is building an airship to float over the canopy of the South American rain forest, and yeah, if I heard that, I’d probably think “boy that could be a movie.”

But with that as your starting condition… how does Herzog always find himself in situations where, in addition to the overexcited Prometheus at the center of his movie, there is also a laid-back penny philosopher helping out with the airship project, whose family migrated to Europe when he was much younger, and hopes that the film Herzog is making might bring him back in contact with them? How does Herzog find himself at the mouth of a great waterfall, the caverns beyond which have never been filmed, and with access to a camp physician who just happens – of course – to be an expert mountain climber who wants to get into those caves? How does Herzog always find a creature (in this case, it’s a rooster) who somehow, in his association with man, suggests something greater, more profound, more vague, than any of the conversation in the film could unearth? The White Diamond is sublime. All of Herzog’s films are sublime, to relative degrees. This one, more so than most.

I also watched Robert Wise’s The Set Up, and for quite a bit of its running time found myself wondering if Wise had made a perfect film? Not a descriptor I hand around easily, and I suspect The Set Up misses the mark in the final analysis, but I was quite convinced for the majority of the first half – the film was compulsively interesting. It’s a film only an editor could make: it meticulously creates itself, piece by brick-like piece, winding up for precisely its first half (the reel change took place just as the bell sounded at the start of the fight), and then paying off the tension for the remainder of the film. Wise knows exactly where the camera wants to be, and puts it there; he pulls face after face after face out of the crowd, out of the ecosystem of the arena, both in the stands and behind the scenes. Every face a character. Every character a story. A densely populated, viciously efficient feat of creating a character-driven genre story and a world to put it in.

Here’s a new scheme. I’ve been trying to be more meticulous about my reading - not the fifty-book challenge or whatever, but just trying to clear through the pile of books I’ve had for a while and not gotten around to, supplementing with significant books I haven’t read yet (finally tore off The Great Gatsby in December; it was grand). So I have my little notebook, and in my notebook, I’ve listed out the books I’ll read in the order I’ll read them - and I’ve found that process rather exciting, not just for whatever book I’m reading now, but for the anticipation of where I’ll be going next.

So naturally, I’ve done the same for all the DVDs in my collection that have yet gone unwatched, with the hope of clearing the whole of the list away by midsummer. That, plus the batshit wonderful programming happening at the Lightbox in the next few months, should keep me in clean piss till after Ebertfest and Hot Docs at least, and maybe all the way to TIFF. Time flies.

Watched is a regular blog series catch-all of non-reviews of films I see in any given week. It posts on Mondays, though not every Monday, and certainly not this Monday, being as that today is, in fact, a Tuesday. This is because of the New Year’s statutory holiday. Any date discrepancies will be corrected by Leap Day.