filmenthusiast: Hey, can we all sit down and agree not to pretend that Werner Herzog is anything more than a competent, if pretentious curiouso documentarian circa 2005?
clarencecarter: Please, yes. It all needs to end.
filmenthusiast: Srsly. TIME magazine gave Herzog docs Movie of the Year nods.
clarencecarter: Well, you know those guys... was it Schickel who found the "complexity" of Syriana so exciting? Give that guy a couple of ideas to juggle and he’s toast.
filmenthusiast: Everybody just came late to the Herzog party (by about 40 years), and are overcompensating like mad.
clarencecarter: Did everyone forget he dropped a steaming loaf called Invincible just four years ago?
filmenthusiast: It's conveniently overlooked.
clarencecarter: Grizzly's won almost all the regional critic doc awards. Thankfully 39 lbs. of Love won't have to face off against it for the Academy Award. A relief.
filmenthusiast: 39 Lbs. of Oscar Gold.
clarencecarter: There are all sorts of bad bear-feasting-on-small-Israeli jokes that might be (in)appropriate here. You wanna take a crack?
filmenthusiast: Werner Herzog was in What Dreams May Come and Julien Donkey-Boy.
clarencecarter: No way. I knew about Julien, but WDMC really catches me off-guard. Kinda hurts a little.
filmenthusiast: Robin Williams steps on his face.
clarencecarter: Telling.

I have to admit I'm more than a tad sick of the endless admiration for Grizzly Man, which seemed to me like a very competent series of spliced found footage overlaid with a rather intrusive, often irritating Herzog DVD commentary track. Timothy Treadwell, the doofus, was eaten alive by a goddamned bear and Herzog can't even let the poor guy extol the virtues of what was once his deluded paradise without chiming in and telling him that he "disagrees! The world is chaos!" Not that there's anything wrong with that per se...but what exactly is the revelation of the perfectly ok Grizzly Man?