Walter Saxer Movies

In this somewhat experimental satirical black comedy, a renowned and sensitive poet and writer is fed up with the crudenesses of his native Bavaria and, in a well-publicized move, says he refuses even to die there. Instead, followed by reporters, he retires to Greenland. There, he has a reunion with his girlfriend, and gains some idea of the current situation of his wife before he dies. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Documentarian Les Blank, who filmed Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, trained his cameras on Herzog again, as the eccentric German filmmaker made his epic, Fitzcarraldo, in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. Herzog's production is in trouble right from the start. He begins filming with Jason Robards playing the title role, and Mick Jagger playing Fitzcarraldo's sidekick, Wilbur. With 40 percent of the film shot, Robards becomes ill and goes back to the states, where his doctor will not let him return. Because of the delay, Jagger, with album and tour commitments, is forced to quit the production. Thinking no one can fill the rock star's shoes, Herzog jettisons Jagger's role. He eventually casts his frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo and begins shooting again. Violent tribal disputes and unpredictable weather hinder the shoot, but the biggest obstacle is Herzog's own quixotic and dangerous determination to film one antique boat smashing down the Amazonian rapids, and the dragging of an identical boat over a mountain from one river to another. Blank interviews members of the cast and crew, including the impoverished Indian extras, and captures the troubles of the seemingly cursed production, but his interviews with Herzog are the focal point of the film. "If I abandon this project," Herzog explains at one point, "I would be a man without dreams, and I never want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project." Herzog later made his own documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend, which adds to the lore of this infamously difficult shoot. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Director Werner Herzog, as usual, has spared no one -- especially himself -- in bringing this story of 19th-century African slave trading to the screen. Klaus Kinski plays an enterprising young Brazilian who after impregnating the three daughters of his plantation-owning employer, is sent to West Africa to round up slaves. Kinski goes to great lengths to befriend the very people he hopes to enslave and he eventually manages to overthrow a mad monarch and set himself up as king. As the years pass, Kinski grows wealthy -- and careless. However, despite enslaving the tribe, he does show some signs of humanitarian benevolence. This fifth and final collaboration between director Herzog and Kinski is considered the weakest of the five features. Though the title translates literally as Green Cobra, Cobra Verde was released in the U.S. as Slave Coast. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Werner Herzog's cinema of obsession (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) has always owed some of its emotional expressionism to the post-World War I genre of German mountain films (The Blue Light, The White Hell of Pitz-Palu), in which German mountain climbers are compelled to scale the heights of dangerous mountain peaks, achieving a form of purification and superiority. It was inevitable that at some point Herzog would tackle a mountain. Finally, with Cerro Torre: Schrei Aus Stein, he does. Donald Sutherland stars as Ivan, a journalist who instigates a rivalry between Roccia (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), a professional mountain climber who has braved the highest mountain peaks in the world, and Martin (Stefan Glowacz), a champion athlete of indoor climbing walls. But Roccia doesn't need a reporter to fuel a rivalry between the two, since Katharina (Mathilda May), Roccia's lover, is attracted to Martin. Ivan arranges for a TV special chronicling the efforts of Roccia, Martin, Katharina, and Ivan to conquer the peak of the unconquered Cerro Torre granite tower in Chile. Roccia keeps postponing the climb until finally Martin heads off to climb Cerro Torre by himself, accompanied only by a television crew. But the result of that journey causes Roccia to avoid the press, while Martin is greeted with skepticism. This unhappy response to their initial attempt causes Ivan, Roccia, Martin, and Katharina to confront the formidable peak again for a final confrontation with the silent mountain. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Seven internationally respected filmmakers offer different perspectives on time and fate -- some witty, some somber -- in this omnibus film, with the stories linked by performances from jazz great Hugh Masekela. Dogs Have No Hell by Aki Kaurismaki follows one man's unusual journey as he celebrates getting out of jail by travelling to Siberia in search of a wife. Victor Erice directed the impressionistic Lifeline, in which a family of Spanish farmers try to help an infant who has fallen ill. Werner Herzog visits the Uru Eus tribe of South America -- believed to have been the last unknown indigenous people on earth prior to their discover in 1981 -- and explores the often sad toll their discovery has taken upon them in Ten Thousand Years Older. Chloe Sevigny plays an film actress waiting out a ten-minute break in her trailer in Int. Trailer. Night, directed by Jim Jarmusch. Wim Wedners contributes Twelve Miles to Trona, in which a young man, dazed and ill, tries to drive himself to a doctor through a barren desert. Spike Lee looks into the Florida vote-counting scandal, and how Al Gore's assistants and supporters reacted to it, in the short documentary We Wuz Robbed. And in 100 Flowers Hidden Deep, directed by Chen Kaige, a delusional elderly man is convinced his furniture still stands in the vacant lot where his home used to be, and he persuades workers to help him move it away to safety. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide