Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2019, Werner Herzog) (+ some more W/Os) (Patreon)

53/100

"I'm not the protagonist," Herzog sheepishly insists more than once, trying to steer the conversation back to Chatwin. In truth, though, Nomad is less memorable for its portraiture than as a filmmaker's belated requiem for his friend, and it's Herzog's atypical emotional candor that's likely to stick with me, much more than anything I learned about the film's ostensible subject (as formidable an intellect as he seems). Can't honestly say that I fully understand what a "songline" is, despite attempted exposition from both a talking head and the voiceover narration...though, to be fair, I don't understand Kate Bush's "The Dreaming," either, so Aboriginal mythology may just confound me in general. In any case, Chatwin's work, as described (and sometimes read aloud), felt remote to me compared to Herzog's account of sitting on Chatwin's rucksack throughout the 55 hours he spent trapped in a tiny cave during a blizzard (even as he hastens to point out that others who endured that experience beside him survived sitting directly on the ice). Footage from a couple of Herzog features I've never seen—Signs of Life and Scream of Stone—made me wish I were watching one of those instead. And while the conceit of traveling to far-flung places Chatwin had visited echoes My Best Fiend, in which Herzog revisits shooting locations for the five films he made with Klaus Kinski, watching those two docs in fairly quick succession, as I did, really brings home the serene banality of drone footage—the visuals here are at once more conventionally "impressive" and far less compelling. Still of interest to fans who want to see an unaccustomed side of a fairly stoic figure.

HASTY BONUS THOUGHTS ON OTHER FILMS I DIDN'T FINISH

By special request! (Though I was gonna do so anyway.) As ever, my bailing doesn't signify that a film is terrible or anything; I just give myself permission to move on when I've never seen a previous feature by that director and nothing in the first third of this one has piqued my interest. 

The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul): Was actively dreading this, based on everything I'd read, and it is indeed just relentlessly horrific right from the jump. Watching the innocent suffer isn't something I find either entertaining or edifying— at least not in a realistic (rather than highly abstract) context—so a movie in which handing someone his gouged-out eyeballs qualifies as a tender moment probably isn't gonna be my thing. And I kinda hate the anecdote that gives Kosinski's novel its title. Makes the whole thing a punishing parable.

She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz): A big mood, as the kids say. (The darndest things!) Here's a case where it's possible that my W/O policy failed me, in the sense that what seems potentially intriguing about the film (now that I've read some reviews) hadn't even kicked in yet when I ejected the disc. On the other hand, I submit that if you're still getting around to your premise nearly half an hour into a movie that runs just 84 minutes, you done fucked up. Maybe the baton-relay aspect makes this an exception to the rule, but Kate Lyn Sheil's depressive, pseudo-psychedelic opening leg struck me as pretentious rather than uncanny. 

Cut Throat City (The RZA): T.I. makes an excellent villain and should act more. (Or, rather, he should act in more films that I'd want to see.) In every other respect, this is a totally generic in-over-their-heads crime caper, trading on Katrina outrage and notable primarily for an initial casino heist that's laughably nonsensical both in conception (why would these kids, who just want to sell drugs, agree to be Ocean's Four?) and execution (it's as if Casey Affleck and Scott Caan's characters had planned everything). How this got raves from the likes of Matt Zoller Seitz and Glenn Kenny, I have no idea.

The Forty-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank): Speaking of actors I'd like to see more of, Blank's performance here is a marvel of self-deprecating weariness liberally spiced with acerbic defiance. I just wish she hadn't chosen, as a vehicle for it, such a cutesy quasi-autobiographical story—one that plays (at least in the third I saw) like a more serious version of Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here stunt. Too many unfunny caricatures, too much suspiciously earnest rapping. I almost stuck with it, though, just because there are so few good roles for women like Blank and I wanted to throw her some Skandies points.