Werner Herzog’s new documentary concerns capital punishment, and specifically two men on death row. I haven’t seen it yet — and passed up an opportunity Saturday night to see a screening of it followed by a Q&A with Herzog because I’m hoping to see the film with my son this weekend while I’m in San Francisco — but I’m eager to. Patrick Goldstein gives us a profile of Herzog and this new film. Best quote from it:

Being a journalist myself, I wanted to better understand Herzog’s own very public refusal to embrace capital punishment. He has repeatedly said that, as much as he loves living in America, he will not become a U.S. citizen as long as the country puts people to death.

“It is not a statement just about America,” he reminds me. “I cannot become a Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Egyptian citizen either, since they practice capital punishment too. I am from Germany, a country, in the time of the Nazis, that conducted an enormous campaign of capital punishment against its own citizens, and on top of that, carried out genocide against 6 million Jews. So from my standpoint, no state should be allowed to kill its citizens.”

I saw the new “Planet of the Apes” movie last night (“Rise of the…”) and absolutely loved it. (But then, I love all the “Apes” movies… with the exception of the execrable Tim Burton version.) One of the many delights of the movie were all the references to the classic film series, which many members of this Los Angeles cinema audience got. (When one of the characters cried out “Take your stinkin’ paw off me you damn dirty ape!” the audience broke out in applause.) The LA Times has helpfully compiled a list of all the new movie’s tips-of-the-hat  to its forebears. Here it is.

 I’m an admirer of Herzog’s films (see here and here and many other posts on this blog), and his documentaries are special treats. Like the Bush administration, Herzog never allows himself to be held back by the facts:  every insight is a product of his distinct imagination, delivered in his doomy Deutschland monotone. Herzog can imagine things we can’t; in his vision, nature is chaotic and insane, and to look animals in the eye is to address our continual war with them. (He also seems to think they are winning, or will win.)

For those interested in Herzog’s dystopian view and its mordant delivery, Slate has done us all a favor. They’ve compiled some of the choicest great moments in Werner Herzog voiceovers. (Although I’m sad that they couldn’t find a place for “Lessons of Darkness,” Herzog’s extraterrestrial look at the Kuwaiti oil fires set by Saddam Hussein, a film that’s an enormous shudder-inducing accomplishment.) But if you’re looking for a primer into the Herzog documentary method, Slate’s overview fills that function nicely.

Last Saturday, my friend Larry and I went to Silent Movie for an evening of the month-long John Cassavetes film fest. (The Silent Movie Theatre is still called Silent Movie, but it’s programmed by a group called The Cinefamily. They run Silents on Wednesdays and occasional other nights, and special programming the rest of the time.) I’m not a great fan of John Cassavetes’ work, but I was willing to see “Husbands,” starring Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara, if it afforded me the opportunity to see Gazzara live in person for a Q&A beforehand. I’ve always enjoyed Gazzara’s work, especially in “Buffalo ’66” and “Tales of Ordinary Madness.”

I was glad to have bought tickets in advance, because the event was sold out. Waiting in line in front of me was Danger Mouse, this generation’s answer to Brian Eno. My feeling is this:  You know you’re at a cool event when Danger Mouse is there too. And sitting next to me in the house was an actor from”Fringe” (who lit up when I told him, after I heard him bring up the Jersey Devil, that the creature was my distant cousin). One of the delights of living in Los Angeles is such memorable unexpected encounters.

Ben Gazzara was  terrific. I would say his advancing years have freed him to say anything, but I suspect he never censored himself much anyway. At age 80, his gruff macho persona is intact. When asked about shooting “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” which was derived from Charles Bukowski’s writing, he said Bukowski was “a pussy. The whole movie, I’m drinking Thunderbird, and he shows up with French wine.” He also impatiently waved off any number of the poor interviewer’s questions, making sour faces over the titles of various projects he clearly did just for the money and didn’t want to discuss. At other times, he just roared “No, no, you got it wrong.” The crowd loved him, but Gazzara also knows how to work a crowd, and how to get a laugh. After more than an hour, he said, “Awright, that’s enough,” and got up to go. Another example of good timing.

Unfortunately, what followed this was the movie. I’ve tried to like these Cassavetes films that have so many film-school acolytes, but I’m always left thinking they must think they have to like them, and therefore decide to like them, because there isn’t much in them to recommend them. My old playwriting teacher David Scott Milton (who, coincidentally, wrote a one-man show on Broadway that earned Ben Gazzara a Tony Award) knew the Cassavetes crowd and said he felt the problem with the films was editing — they needed some. I agree with that. I also think they would benefit from stories. “Husbands” is two hours and 11 minutes of Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara gassing around — first in New York, then in London. Sometimes they stumble onto something amusing, but nothing builds, and for much of the movie we wait while they search for inspiration. One extended near-rape scene in a London hotel is indicative of the problem:  Cassavetes’ character has picked up a blonde and they’re tussling around on the bed; it’s unclear whether she’s enjoying it or not — it seems mostly not — and the actress, unsure what she’s playing, winds up playing nothing, swinging between tears and laughter, playfulness and panic. Like the rest of the movie, there’s nothing we can make of it. Finally, and not one minute too soon, the movie ends with Cassavetes and Falk returning home, Gazzara’s character having decided to abandon his family to stay in London. I think it would’ve been good to see the scene where he struggles over that decision, or at least informs his friends of it. Instead, we find out when the two men get out of a taxi, without him, and discuss it. It’s always nice to miss the conflict.

I’ve seen most of the movies John Cassavetes wrote and directed, and really, only one is worth seeing: “Gloria.” Yes, Gena Rowlands plays the hell out of that role. But, importantly, there’s a story:  Rowlands plays the former mistress of a mobster, who now must shield an orphaned little boy from the mob that wants to kill him because of what he knows. It’s got one great scene after another, made great by the high stakes. Nobody has any time to gas around.  “Husbands” is all gas. Further proof that Danger Mouse is a genius:  He left before the movie started. Wish I had thought of that.

This Sunday at the much-loved (and rightly so) Steve Allen Theatre:  The Club Foot Orchestra plays live accompaniment to two silent-film masterpieces:  Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” and the classic German Expressionist tale “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

About 15 years ago, I saw The Club Foot Orchestra perform their own score to that very same Keaton film — my favorite Keaton film, the one of which I have a framed poster facing me right this very minute — and they were fantastic. It was great, enormous fun, and I bought their CD. They also played alongside some “Felix the Cat” shorts — just as they promise to do this Sunday. I haven’t heard their score to “Caligari” — but I will on Sunday. I snapped up four tickets the moment this was announced. If you’d like to do the same, here’s the link.

A friend emailed me tonight to let me know that the television show “Rubicon” had been canceled. He said he knew it seemed silly, but he was a little down about it, as though he’d lost a friend. Why did he email me? Because he knew I’d feel the same way. We were the only two people we knew who were watching it.

“Rubicon” dealt with a group of government analysts tasked with sifting through reams of data, usually in the form of stacks of reports, to find clues about terrorist strikes. Ultimately, the team finds the source of terrorism against the U.S. — and it turns out to be their own organization. The first (and now last) season ended with the group having perpetrated a terrorist attack of enormous proportions, scuttling U.S. access to oil from the Gulf of Mexico and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. What would have happened next, we’ll never know.

What drew me to the show was its deliberate pacing, and its layers of meaning and characterization. In an age where it’s expected that everyone will be distracted at all times, “Rubicon” insisted that you pay attention. Midway through the season it occurred to me that some of the characters’ odd names must have been anagrams, or clues — and, indeed, I unscrambled “Kale Ingram” into Leak Margin — because he was a leak, and he played the margins. That sort of exploration provided superficial fun; what was more exciting was deciding that Mr. Ingram, who by all evidence could not be trusted, needed to be trusted by the main character, Will Travers, because Travers had nowhere else to turn. And so we were vicariously put into the position of all the characters — making alliances with unfit allies, just as players on the world stage do every day.

I did my bit advocating for the show, and I did manage to get one new person to watch it. “Rubicon”‘s finale claimed just over one million viewers. “Mad Men,” a show that has descended into ludicrousness, netted two-and-a-half million people for its own season finale. In a nation of 300 million people, that’s not that great a difference. While “Mad Men,” somehow, is in the zeitgeist, it didn’t start there; most people climbed onto the show via DVD prior to the second season. I think something similar would have, or could have, happened with “Rubicon.” At the least, I wish AMC had invested in one more season to find out.

I’m not the only one who will miss the show. (Here is Vanity Fair’s Mike Ryan bemoaning the show’s demise.) “Rubicon” was the only show I ever wanted to have a water-cooler conversation about. The problem was that no one else was at the water cooler yet.

Werner Herzog has a new movie out, “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” Here’s Roger Ebert’s review. He likes it enormously — and makes it sound similar in tone and style to Herzog’s smashing (to me!) film of last year, “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.” (Or however that’s punctuated.) Which means I’ll be seeing this movie too. Eagerly. Ebert’s lede about the new film provides a thrilling reminder of why I adored the previous one:

Werner Herzog’s “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done” is a splendid example of a movie not on autopilot. I bore my readers by complaining about how bored I am by formula movies that recycle the same moronic elements. Now here is a film where Udo Kier’s eyeglasses are snatched from his pocket by an ostrich, has them yanked from the ostrich’s throat by a farmhand, gets them back all covered with ostrich mucus, and tells the ostrich, “Don’t you do that again!”

I too am tired of formula, and cheer Herzog for violating it. Or ignoring it. Or misunderstanding it. Or all three.

Earlier in the week, Ebert also supplied this sublime appreciation of Herzog and, specifically, “Aguirre, Wrath of God.” And it now occurs to me that it was watching Siskel & Ebert, 28 years ago, that turned me onto “Fitzcarraldo,” and therefore Werner Herzog. Siskel didn’t like it, but Ebert’s passion for it, accompanied by the sort of strange but compelling clip so typical of Herzog,  compelled me to see it. I owe Mr. Ebert a debt of gratitude.

Watch this, and then just try to take the Academy Awards seriously. I’ll be outside somewhere.

Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

Mark Evanier applies common sense to defending Jay Leno. I’m one of those who don’t find Leno funny, but I don’t understand this backlash against him either. It’s not like he’s denying millions of people health insurance or something.