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Domino (2005)
Terrible film
I like nonlinear films and films that need to be worked out, but this wasn't that type of film. This was an empty exercise in style. But it's all stylistic stuff that has been seen better elsewhere. Keira is completely miscast. I know she says she did this film because she doesn't want to spend the rest of her life in a corset, but the fact is she's suited towards those historic roles and she certainly is NOT suited in any way whatsoever to portraying some ridiculous tough-girl character. She struggled with the character in "The Jacket" and that film was actually fairly well written. Here, the script is awful. Tony Scott, who unfortunately has none of the ability of his brother, keeps tossing in little gimmicks to try to jazz up this film, but despite the best efforts of Delroy Lindo, Chris Walken and Tom Waits (in a totally silly and sad cameo near the end), nothing can save this film. We have no idea why Domino becomes a bounty hunter (we're treated to a scene of Keira in a silly wig playing by herself with non-chucks at school, I guess that antisocial moment constitutes the explanation). Her career as a bounty hunter is totally telescoped; one minute she's a bounty hunter, the next minute she's negotiating a TV show. 10 years went somewhere rather quickly. The 90210 thing is yet another gimmick that just does not work and seems completely tacked on. The love scene in the desert -- talk about a wasted, junked opportunity.
If you want to see a film about a tough girl, stick with Kill Bill. Keira should start paying attention a little more to her role choices. This followed by two dumb Pirates of the Caribbean sequels? That's not the way to catch Scarlett Johanssen.
Glaube und Währung - Dr. Gene Scott, Fernsehprediger (1981)
An Early Herzog Documentary Mainly Worthwhile for its Subject Matter
This probably isn't one of Herzog's best films -- and it certainly doesn't compare to some of his other documentaries, including "My Best Fiend," "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," "Lessons of Darkness" or even "Gesualdo." However, the subject matter is fascinating. I won't attempt to explain the late Dr. Gene Scott -- he needed to be experienced to be understood. For a while I was privileged to live where I could hear Dr. Scott on the radio 24 hours a day, and I have to confess that I found him compulsively listenable. Sure, he was a preacher, but in my experience he rarely really talked about religion. When he did, he preached strictly to the choir. The upshot is that Scott never really seemed to be trying to communicate with anyone, but carrying on a tortured inner dialog in a kind of code. The many flashes of paranoia and anger (usually directed at the government and his audience) and his borderline-abuse of his co-workers (constantly ordering his music director -- what was his name again -- to play the same song for the umpteenth time) further suggested that we were just watching or listening to a man struggling with himself.
The problem is that the best and most unbelievable Scott documentary would simply be to present a 90 minute segment of him doing his usual show -- I don't think even Herzog would dispute that. Here, we get a bit of Scott doing that, but also a lot of time is spent watching his volunteers answer phones, hearing from his parents and hearing Scott talking, very lucidly, in the back of a car. Scott also modestly described himself as just an employee-at-will reporting to some unseen church board of directors (likely only in the sense that Hank Greenberg was one). While it was interesting to hear where his anti-government diatribes came from, the movie was very tame and restrained compared to the man himself.
Still, anyone who had the longevity Scott had (yes, he's still on the air, albeit posthumously, and you can hear him streaming over the internet 24/7) can't really be a raving lunatic, and Scott was far from one. This comes across strongly in the documentary. What Herzog succeeds in showing us is not so much anger as extreme isolation and detachment. Scott was a brilliant man (we're reminded of his Stanford pedigree a couple of times) whose disdain for the world the rest of us live in caused him to build and occupy a startlingly persistent mirage. In this sense, the film is of a piece with Herzog's other documentaries that explore the many points of articulation between sanity and madness, reality and dream.