Summary
We've become so comfy, in our air-conditioned living rooms, that TV reality shows have had to remind us how much worse things could be. But [Werner Herzog], who's devoted his entire career to cracking the thin veneer of ice we call civilization, doesn't just remind us, he plops us down in the middle of the jungle, with nothing but our wits to help us find our way back out. It's only later that you realize he's used crane shots and background music, for Rescue Dawn feels like the real thing, thanks in part to the lush terrain, which closes in on you like a python's jaws, and also to Christian Bale's strangely buoyant performance. Indulging in another of his weight-loss routines (in The Machinist, he got down to nothing), Bale may run the risk of confusing acting with dieting, but he totally captures that weird quality that goes by the name of heroism.
Herzog's already made one movie about [Dieter Dengler], a documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and if you think Bale is strangely buoyant, try Little Dieter. Recalling what happened to him from the vantage point of three decades later, he makes it all sound like a boy's own adventure, complete with rafts over waterfalls and bonfires to capture the attention of choppers passing overhead. But Dengler's journey to Southeast Asia was so much more torturous than that, including lots of torture. And so it's all the more amazing when he describes those days as if he were talking about someone else - Rambo, perhaps. And even more amazing when Herzog shows a film clip of Dengler meeting with the press, soon after his rescue, and he's all smiles, in his freshly pressed Navy whites. What is it with people like this? Don't they ever say die?After his sojourns in Rwanda and Darfur, Don Cheadle must have been looking around for a movie that didn't also serve as a humanitarian mission. And he's found one in Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons' jive-talkin' biopic of Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, the flamboyant ex-con whose morning radio show on KWOL put the funk in Washington D.C.'s trunk back in the late '60s and early '70s. Keeping it real long before keeping it real became a sketch premise on The Chappelle Show, Greene said all the things Richard Pryor was about to say, and we can only imagine what Talk to Me would have been like if the young, hungry Pryor had gotten hold of the rola But Cheadle gives it his best, nudging his rather reserved demeanor past the boundaries of taste and decorum. "Wake up, goddammit!" he shouts into the mike, kicking off another show.See the full content of this document
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Die (Very) Hard
Die (very) hard
Rescue Dawn tells an extraordinary tale of survival"Death didn't want me," Dieter Dengler used to say about the incredible ordeal he endured during the early days of our involvement in Vietnam. A German-born U.S. Navy pilot, Dengler was shot down somewhere over Laos on a secret bombing mission in 1966, and the following six months, thanks to Werner Herzog, have become one of our great tales ...See the full content of this document
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