SnoopyStyle Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Peña) are called to a crime scene. Mrs. McCullam has been stabbed to death. Her son Brad McCullam (Michael Shannon) is the prime suspect and he has taken hostages in the house across the street. The police interviews his fiancé Ingrid Gudmundson (Chloë Sevigny) and director Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) who reveal past incidents and his mental deterioration.This is Werner Herzog and therefore it must be a masterpiece. He is taking the familiar cop crime drama and mixing it with a character study of a disturb mind. He has created his own language and a wonderful new form of cinema. What if this is not Werner Herzog? Then this would be a confusing, boring piece of crap. The constant reliance on flashbacks drains any immediacy and tension from the movie. These are great actors. The structure of the movie really let the whole thing down. Instead of his voice, his vision is a mess of the traditional genre.

willson_x It's not everyday I venture out of my comfort zone when it comes to film- I'm happy watching The Wedding Singer, a good psychological thriller, a cop thriller, the sort of thing Harrison ford would've appeared in in the 90s, you know, standard movie-going fare- but once in a while you come across a peculiar film that you just stumble across and you give it your full attention, and if you hang on, there is a reward at the end. I've read the other reviews for this film on this website, and they say things like it's "hypnotic" or "surreal", the bad reviews are mainly by pretentious types that use musty words like "Lynchian", or say "I wish I could give this a zero!" words that should end up on a tissue, but somehow end up here. The point is, I gave it a go, and I can safely say its a belter, the "hypnotic" and "surreal" quotes definitely apply. Firstly, is it entertaining?: Yes, that would definitely be a yes. It's got a shed-load of big actors on board doing unconventional performances, there many quirky, messed up moments, a lot of dark humour and a floaty script that fleshes out a distinct dreamy, lost atmosphere, accentuated by the incredible cinematography and music choices that are not typical of any film I've ever seen.Secondly, the cultural merit: It starts off like a pragmatic cop drama, you get Willem Dafoe and his understudy, chatting chit, doing what cops in films do, shooting the breeze and driving to the crime scene like any other day on the job, but then they arrive and the mystery starts to unravel and the story's told in a series of flashbacks told by witnesses, and cutbacks to the "present" where the police are negotiating Michael Shannon's surrender. Like Sherlock Holmes said "Everything becomes commonplace by explanation", and though I've laid out the formula, and reading my own explanation back to myself, I make it sound like an episode of Columbo, the truth is, it's closer to something Rod Serling would've come up with, and then some. What's interesting about this film is that unlike a lot of other killer/cop dramas, they don't really try and make sense of the crime, the crime itself is solved within the first 5 minutes, what this film does is try and legitimately explain *WHY* this guy committed a murder, and then through secondary storytelling methods, the Killer's clouded mind becomes the primary focus of the whole thing, and the voices of his friends and family kind of become ghostly and fading as you start to understand more about the fantasy he lives in and how certain events drove him to do it. The mystery is an unsolvable one, but granted by the end of the film you will have some sort of self-made answer, and I think, lame as it sounds, that's the joy of this film- The sun bleached camera, the hazy L.A. suburban Americana, the unique characters and mini- stories all come together and it just sort of washes over you. It's a quirky indie film like you've never seen, not quite as good as "Paris, Texas", or "Romeo is Bleeding", but it's in the same vein, and whatever it tries to do, whatever that is, it succeeds on all fronts. It's worth a watch, it's sharp, it's clever in the right places, and stupid in others, but that absurdity gives it genuine character, which is rare in films with such big Hollywood actors involved. Really, when a film like this comes out, and it's the closest thing to art you've seen for a long time in modern cinema, believe me when I say it's worth a watch. Don't take my word for it, read up on the true story, it's based on a real case, 1979, murder by sword, Oedipus and all that good stuff, The calibre of actors speak for itself, and the collective interpretation of all involved is worth the price of admission alone. I read somewhere that this was supposed to be a "horror" story, well it's not quite that, and it's not quite a psychological drama, it's definitely speculative fiction, and lies somewhere on the periphery of explanation, between all those genres, a little to the left and then up a bit, then forward a bit more, then left again, then right, then left....

arfdawg-1 The Plot.The police are called to a murder scene and quickly discover that the murderer, the victim's son, is holed up in his house with two hostages. Through a series of interviews with both the murderer's fiancée and his theatre director the police piece together a picture of a man losing touch with reality. Hmmm.Big fan of lynch. Big fan of Herzog. Big fan of most of this cast.Not such a big fan of this movie.It's eighty some minutes and feels like 6 hours.You really, really, really, really really, really have to suspend disbelief to get into this film. The police would never ever act like this.The situation would be over in 5 minutes.But you have to sit there for a lot longer. Midway Brad Douriff of Chucky fame comes in and he sucks. Wow so bad it's beyond belief.It gets worse. Drones on and on and on and on and on and on.I SO wanted to like this movie.It's not so good.

tieman64 "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?" stars Michael Shannon as Brad Macallum, who, as the movie opens, has just killed his widowed mother and is holed up in their flamingo-themed home, allegedly with two hostages. Outside, Detective Hank Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) awaits the arrival of a SWAT team. "Son" is based on an event which occurred on June 10th, 1979, in which Mark Yavorsky, a San Diego grad student who had been cast as the matricidal lead in Orestes (a Greek tragedy), murdered his own mother with an antique sword. This is interesting material, but "Son" was directed by Werner Herzog, a director who habitually uses "true stories" to construct his own personal little fables.And so here we have the tale of a man who, in typical Herzog fashion, ventures off into the jungles of Peru. He's on a spiritual quest, but is left petrified when confronted by a Nature deemed wild, lawless and malevolent. Brad thus returns to America a broken man, a humbling encounter with a river – a Schopenhaueren God which forces him to confront, not only his mortality but his own insignificance – having deeply scarred him. This is a common Herzog theme: when their support structures, Gods and Master Signifiers collapse into dust, Herzog's heroes all go mad. Brad though, also develops a new-found sense of Godhood. If he is nothing he will become everything! And so Brad, like Herzog, sets off to tame the wild. Problem is, Brad's a bit of a loser, perpetually at the mercy of countless lesser Gods, none of whom he can surmount. Herzog thus stresses Brad's impotency: he can't afford a house, lives with his mom, can't hold a job, cannot perform sexually or musically, is kicked off a stage-play and is belittled by everyone.But Brad is determined to fight back! Soon his quietly domineering mother becomes a tin of Quaker Oats, a domestic dictator whom he will later cast out of his home, her body rolling out into the streets. "Razzle dazzle!" Brad chants, shaking a coffee cup triumphantly. He thinks his spectacle has elevated him above man, but Herzog undercuts the scene with the story of a police detective who drove cross-country holding a coffee cup in one hand. Brad's path to Godhood is a path civilised men routinely drive.Throughout the film, Brad is linked with homosexuality, femininity and the colour pink; a castrated man in a theatre company of only women. "A Greek play?" Brad's uncle mocks, foreshadowing the film's ball-laden last shot. "The only thing Greeks know is how to play with their balls!" Herzog loves using birds. Here he has Brad detest the pink flamingos ("Pink Flamingos": a 1972 film with homosexual man-servants) of his home, all of which point to an ingrained sense of ineffectuality. And so Brad takes the birds hostage and begins to imagine himself as a mighty ostrich, whom his bigoted uncle calls "the last dinosaurs". Like the ostrich, Brad's head may now be underground, ignored by all, but, as he says, the "time will come when the ostrich rises again and its wings scorneth all!" By the film's end, Brad's Western rise and fall ("Pity the sun rises in the East"), his egoism, is contrasted with a more eastern holism.Before this, one ostrich, Brad's surrogate, defiantly steals the spectacles of a theatre director ("I'm the director, you do what I tell you!"). Later Herzog will link a circle of illuminated prescription spectacles to both heaven (see Herzog's "Heart of Glass") and Brad's own warped, "divine" perspective. Brad believes himself to be a prophet ("I have taken a new vocation as a righteous merchant!"), destined to claim The Glass, to bring heaven itself back down to earth. Arrogantly, he changes his name to Farouk, Arabic for "all knowing".Of course, to the theatre director, Brad's a nutcase. "It's not the right kind of sword," the snivelling God complains, throwing Brad out of his stage play. But from the sidelines, Brad gets an idea. In the play, Tantalus challenges the gods, constructing a test to determine whether they are real. Brad thinks: I will razzle dazzle the gods, test them, measure my performance against their shoulders!More surrealism follows: an ornamental flamingo slamming into a tree mirrors a sequence in which a dwarf, though himself dwarfed by a tree, dwarfs two men. Brad wants to be this dwarf, caught below a looming Nature, but towering above man. Brad thus goes in search of this still point, this limbo between Tree and Man. He recounts a basketball story in which he seemingly hovered in the air, and later walks against the flow of an escalator, suspended as infinity stretches to beyond before him. Herzog's usual message – magnificently rage and fail before Nature – changes: to fight balance is suicide.Last act: Brad mimics Christ. He gives away his possessions and attempts to heal the sick, but to no avail. Finally, be places a basketball in a tree. It's this gesture which Herzog perhaps advocates, humility in the face of both Nature and oneself. The film's final shot, in which a ball is perched in a tree, on a hill above a city, not only recalls several symbols littered throughout the film (the tree, the ball, suspension, balance, the hill), but mirrors its first shot, in which we watch from below as cargo trains thunder across a hill. Brad's achieved some measure of transcendence, some height, not by scaling the tree, but by nestling within it. Still, he dreams of being more, visions of ostrich armies emblazoned on his brain, racing across deserts like fleets of tanks.8/10 – With Lynch AWOL, Herzog's now our go-to man for madcap hilarity. Note: this film is not channelling Lynch. Herzog 'invented' almost everything Lynch does. Worth two viewings.