My MSN DVD column has yet to go up, so instead I’ll offer you a link to this excellent Scenic Routes piece on the AV Club, in which Mike D’Angelo demonstrates the brilliance of Werner Herzog’s documentary strategy with a single example from 2006’s “Grizzly Man”.
As always with AV Club stuff, make sure you read the comments as well as the story. Especially for this one, actually; they’re kind of brilliant.
Grizzly Man is one of my favorite recent documentaries, but, as the article points out so well, ripe for parody, both Herzog’s intensely serious narration and Treadwell’s intensely insane…well…everything. A friend of mine who also watched it with the same quiet horror punctuated by shouting at the (TV) screen “That guy’s NUTS!” that I did, showed it to some family members who actually thought it WAS a parody made along the lines of Waiting for Guffman or A Mighty Wind.
And, of course, now I’ll never be able to watch a Peanuts special in quite the same way again.
As per some of the comments, the rest of my day will be narrated by Herzog. Thanks. You always link to the best stuff!