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Coming November 14th from Subversive Cinema. There's a trailer on their website.

Finally! It would be great if we got a Herzog commentary, too.

It does indeed have what I think is Werner's best commentary to date (he was very impassioned about the film) along with Brad Dourif and myself.

We will also be playing at the Lincoln Center the first week of November. Brad and myself will be there.

Norm Hill

Subversive Cinema

Welcome to the forum Norm.

I created a thread for your company in the boutique labels section of the forum. I would love to be kept up to date with what your company is doing.

That trailer is fantastic, even in a tiny window on a computer screen.

"Starring Brad Dourif as The Alien" just might be the best credit ever.

To appreciate the sheer eccentricity and artistry of "The Wild Blue Yonder" is to understand German auteur Werner Herzog. Here is a clever and subversive work from someone who has consistently challenged film form and content; Herzog who is dead serious about filmmaking lacks the bloated pretense of so-called serious filmmakers. This rare trait has won him much favour with audiences. "The Wild Blue Yonder" is one of his strangest, most puzzling works.

It is an audacious pseudo-documentary that mixes real NASA footage with fiction; a worthy entry in the Herzog canon. The film's narrator is played by a hyperventilating Brad Dourif who tells us right away that is an alien from a far away galaxy: "My great, great, great grandfathers were fine scientists. But their journey to Earth was long and boring. It took them hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of years to get here. Those that finally made it just sucked. Look! We're all failures!" Dourif guides us through a freewheeling narrative that weaves an intentionally absurd story about a couple of astronauts sent on a mission to discover a habitable planet because Earth has been infected by alien microbes during a botched attempt to exhume the Roswell crash remains. (Yes, Roswell.) Sometimes in the middle of his narration, he makes pit stops to comment on human cultural history with such memorable outbursts: "(for men to) breed pigs was a sin!"

The film has drawn comparisons to Kubrick's "2001" especially in the way it is structured: a loose plotline; heavy emphasis on visual stylisation; and a formal sensibility through use of classical music (Herzog uses avant-garde cellist Ernst Reijsiger to fuse the music score with the dazzling underwater imagery of "the frozen sky;" one of the best scores ever produced). "The Wild Blue Yonder" shares much of aesthetic complexity of the Kubrick classic but it makes clear that it wants none of its high-mindedness. There a scene in which our hero astronauts are shown going about their daily routine suspended in zero gravity: unlike "2001," here they eat out of shiny packets, clumsily brush their teeth and - what else - sweat it out, work the treadmill. A bold, amusing, strangely beautiful conceptual experiment about the need to protect Earth and the search for intelligent life beyond. 3.5 out of 4

I was pretty much disappointed by The Wild Blue Yonder. Herzog is at his best when he deals with eccentric personalities, and this time, he tries to convey a message.

I enjoyed WBY. I like the way Herzog took found footage (space shuttle astronauts, Antarctic diving) and creates a quirky sci-fi storyline around them. It's somewhat of a slight film, but worthwhile. And the soundtrack is fairly unique and pretty incredible.

DVD Savant isn't impressed

Now I haven't seen WBY but I don't think my reaction would be far from his. I just saw The White Diamond and was disappointed by the film's attempts to dramatize what was happening, and in someway fit the mold of a standard narrative with beginning and end, which didn't seem appropriate. It gave the impression that Herzog was desperate in not only having enough footage but getting the people involved to 'perform'-- especially whenever he let the camera go idle on Dorrington. I'm not saying it's a bad film but its deceptiveness kept me from being engaged--I hope the trend hasn't continued with WBY but the review above is pointing in that direction.