You know that saying “There’s nothing playing that I want to see?” That’s pretty much how I feel about the new releases out right now, and judging by reports of box-office woes, I’m not the only one. Luckily, there’s always something screening around town that isn’t part of the mainstream.

Tomorrow night over at UCLA, the Bill Frisell Trio will be performing live original accompaniment to a trio of Buster Keaton films, the full-length “Go West” and the shorts “The High Sign” and “One Week.” (I’ve seen all three of these, naturally, but they warrant repeated and repeated — and repeated — viewings. And new live music will provide a different context.) The evening also includes the trio accompanying a screening of something or other by comic-book artist Jim Woodring (looking forward to that) and something that almost sounds like an April Fool’s Day Joke:  “a documentary made entirely of visuals of decomposing film.” And there’s some sort of reception sponsored by Los Angeles Magazine in conjunction with a vodka company and a tequila company, so I’m sure my friend and I will be checking that out too.

Over at Cinefamily — which many of us still think of as the Silent Movie Theatre — this weekend is devoted to the documentaries of Werner Herzog, with April 8th as a bonus night of sorts.  I was going to say that all of Herzog’s films are interesting, but I know that in almost all usages, especially in Los Angeles, “interesting” is code for “not interesting.” As in:  “What did you think of my screenplay?” “It was really interesting!”  Or:  “Hey, thanks for coming tonight to the show! What’d you think?”  “It was really interesting! You were great!” With “great” in this case meaning “not great.” So rather than call Herzog’s documentaries “interesting,” which I assure you they all are, and in the non-ironic meaning of the word, I’ll instead say “thrilling.” As a documentarian, Herzog isn’t interested in facts; if I were looking for someone to blow the lid on, say, corporate malfeasance, a Herzog film isn’t the place I would go. What Herzog is interested in is Herzog; we expect documentaries to carry a point of view, but most Herzog documentaries carry Herzog as well — as narrator and, often, as a guide who steps into the frame as well. Which results in films that give us a taste of what it must be like to be Werner Herzog:  someone who sees nature as a threat and man’s difficulties as irreconcilable, someone with an almost comically doomy perspective who leaches sharply observed humor from the bleakest situations. Only Herzog, when film the mysteries of the north pole or the deepest underwater, would find a man whose fingers are all the same length, or a penguin that resolutely marches off into the cold to die alone. Only Herzog has the wit to film firefighters putting out the raging oil-well conflagration started by Saddam Hussein from the perspective of an extraterrestrial visitor trying to understand the situation, thereby revealing the inexplicable madness at our core. As with the Keaton event above, I’ve seen most of these Herzog documentaries — and I believe I have most of them in the box set I own — and unfortunately I’m completely booked this weekend. But I weren’t, this is a festival I would be attending. From what I hear, it beats seeing “Sucker Punch.”

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