"Wild Blue Yonder"; "Flannel Pajamas"

By Max Goldberg

SF360.org introduces a new Tuesday feature: weekly reviews of films playing Bay Area theaters.

Bouts of prophesy in Herzog’s “The Wild Blue Yonder”

The latest transmission from planet Herzog, “The Wild Blue Yonder” is probably the closest the German iconoclast will come to making a “Nova” special. Still coasting on the improbable success “Grizzly Man,” Werner Herzog again works his own subgenre (idiosyncratic nature film?) with this, his foray into the alien worlds of deep space and sea. Introduced as “a science fiction fantasy,” “The Wild Blue Yonder” frames frequently surreal footage appropriated from NASA missions and Antarctica explorations (led by Bay Area guitarist Henry Kaiser) with a cracked narration courtesy of character actor Brad Dourif. Dourif introduces himself as an alien from the far reaches of Andromeda, and over the course of 77-minutes reimagines the space program as an elaborate plot to colonize his home planet. Like most Herzog characters real or imagined, he is fond of conspiracy and prone to fitful bouts of prophecy.

Although thick-browed Dourif is a good fit in the role, the Alien character is inescapably a device: in this case, for Herzog uses to scramble and recover the strange beauty of the expedition footage. Several times throughout the film, Dourif’s narration halts, and we watch as astronauts drift through their ship (1989’s Galileo for those keeping score) and squalls of gas bubble up towards the surface of the polar sea — in the wild blue yonder, everything, including the camera, floats. Herzog never entirely lets the story off the hook, but the film mostly plays as a heady tribute to what the director calls NASA’s “sense of poetry.” Some will decry Herzog’s blunt, almost casual mix of original and archival footage, of false words with “true” images, but though his authorial passion may at times be overbearing, it seems a small price to pay for the moments of feral beauty he wrests from his material.

“The Wild Blue Yonder” plays the Red Vic Movie House beginning Sun/4.

A disintegrating marriage gets into its “Flannel Pajamas”

Dysfunctional families are indie cinema’s bread and butter, but “Flannel Pajamas

01.30.2007