A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, and Chloë Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Ye Done

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie, Brad Dourif, Irma P. Hall, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Danny Caldwell. Film editing: Joe Bini, Omar Daher. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

It took Werner Herzog a long time to get the backing for this odd duck of a film before the exactly right producer, David Lynch, took it on. It's a "true crime" story filtered through Greek myth and the Herzogian imagination with a touch of the Lynchian sensibility, so that it becomes a darkly comic mock tragedy, with Michael Shannon as Orestes and Grace Zabriskie as Electra. There are pet flamingos in the mix, with Brad Dourif in a cameo as a racist and homophobic ostrich farmer and a deadpan performance by Willem Dafoe as the detective trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, though fascinating in concept, it gets a little slow in delivery and might easily be dismissed as quirk for quirk's sake. 

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