Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Week’s Featured Flick
Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, on Netflix.
NETFLIX DESCRIPTION
Werner Herzog chronicles the tragic death of Timothy Treadwell, who devoted his life to studying grizzly bears — only to be brutally mauled by one.
For anyone unfamiliar with Werner Herzog, he’s essentially the yin to Terrence Malick’s yang. While Malick is all about cosmic connectivity Herzog ascribes to a theory of cosmic chaos. Watch this 2 1/2 minute clip from Burden of Breams, and you’ll see what I mean.
Grizzly Man is the very first Werner Herzog film I ever saw, and in a lot of ways it is a perfect crash course in how he frames the world. It shows what happened to a man who got too comfortable with nature. Nature happened. Nature did what it has always done and always will do. Herzog doesn’t attempt to present an objective story, nor does he try remove himself from the documentary. Narrating in his methodical German accent he lays his cards out on the table, at times almost mocking Treadwell’s terrifyingly optimistic plan to live summer after summer with wild grizzly bears in Alaska.