Encounters at the End of the World ***

Director: Werner Herzog

Year: 2007

I really enjoyed this film as a way to unwind. Listening to Herzog narrate is like listening to your father read you a bed time story when you were a kid, or my wife running her fingers through my hair as I drift asleep on the couch. I just soak in his random way of following whatever catches his interest, philosophising always on the smallness of man in the giant universe, and the incredible odds stacked against us which must someday lead to our doom. Yet Herzog doesn't depress me. He lifts my spirit in a way that quiet meditation does. I think it is good for us to realize now and then how small and how helpless we are in the violent, powerful, mystifying, and infinite universe. It is good for us because it makes you cherish the magic of the fact that we even exist at all.

That said, its a sloppy little documentary, and highly personal. It's like the film is a page from Herzog's private journal of musings. It will either touch you or completely bore you. Or maybe alternate between the two.

All About My Mother ****

Writer/Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Year: 1999

Cinematographer: Affonso Beato

Another great little melodrama from Almodóvar.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ***

Writer/Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Year: 1943

Cinematographer: Georges Périnal

I wasn't in the right mood for this. I was in the mood for a comedy and I thought it would be more comedic. There are comedic elements, but its really a thoughtful film. I will re-watch it someday and appreciate it more, I am sure. The idea certainly is interesting in a way that Hollywood wouldn't approach now days, considering it boring. To judge an old man as foolish in the first scene, then to go back in time with him, seeing how he was as a young man... explaining why he is how he is now, so that the audience by the end has changed perspective. We start out the film against him, and by the end, we love him. I think Tom Hardy could play Roger Livesey's role in a remake. I would pay to see that.