ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

evanston_dad "Stroszek" will potentially depress the hell out of you unless you happen to find Werner Herzog's brand of off-beat filmmaking amusing. I do mostly, and therefore wasn't tempted to jump off a bridge at the end of this movie, but I don't know that I'd go as far as to say it's "riotously funny," as its marketing poster suggests."Stroszek" tells the fictional story of a real man named Bruno Stroszek. In other words, Stroszek plays himself in this eccentric film about a man who's released from prison, meets back up with his girlfriend and elderly buddy, and takes off for the fabled lands of....Wisconsin....to pursue the American dream. Anyone who's actually been to Wisconsin can probably guess how things play out for three immigrants with about three dollars between them. What follows is a series of vignettes that place Bruno in increasingly desperate straits and ends in an ambiguous finale that involves a ski lift and dancing chickens.Welcome to the world of Werner Herzog, folks. "Stroszek" is not as compelling as some of Herzog's best, but it does inspire a sort of morbid fascination, if only because we take comfort that our situation isn't as bad as the one our characters find themselves in. But lest you are tempted to feel too sorry for Stroszek, he, like many of Herzog's protagonists, staunchly refuses to beg for sympathy, and faces one hardship after another with the dogged determination of a man who never fully understands how humble is his lot.Grade: A-

avik-basu1889 The quintessential premise of a Werner Herzog film involves an ambitious protagonist trying(misguidedly, on most occasions) to beat all the odds and overcome the obstacles and the obstacles generally involve nature's merciless wrath. Herzog has made a career out of capturing the struggle of 'Man vs Nature' where nature is beautiful, but at the same time unforgiving and vicious. 'Stroszek' however does not involve a protagonist trying to conquer nature. It involves a group of social outcasts trying to overcome something else. It's about the trio of Bruno, Eva and Scheitz trying to overcome social injustice cum marginalisation and financial insufficiency. This struggle forces them to leave Berlin and head towards America which leads to the prospect of having to overcome further barriers in the form of cultural traditions and of course above all, the language.'Stroszek' is widely regarded as one of Herzog's best films, however from a personal standpoint I have to admit that on this first viewing, I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed as I admired the film more than actually loving/liking it. Interestingly, the film contains quite a few of the trademark Herzog elements that I love and adore in his other films like his unique brand of absurdist humour, his alacrity to capture moments that have very little to do with the overall plot, beautiful use of trance-inducing music to set a specific tone,etc. I also like Herzog's underlining of the fragility of the so-called 'American Dream' and the philosophical message that marginalisation and despair exists in all societies and countries transcending geographical borders. However in spite of these elements working well, the sum of its parts felt inferior to the respective parts. This might be because I never really felt any emotional connection during the film which is necessary for a story that shows characters being beaten down by society and poverty. Maybe this emotional detachment is intentional in the sense that Herzog possibly wants the viewer to feel the detachment and disillusionment of his characters and such an approach of preventing the viewer from getting emotionally overwhelmed has been successfully used by various directors. But somehow the emotional distance in 'Stroszek' prevented me from fully loving the film. However my impression and view changing radically after another viewing is not beyond the realms of possibility as one thing the film made me want to do despite not completely impressing me, is watching it again.

Martin Bradley "Stroszek" may be Werner Herzog's greatest masterpiece. it's certainly his most humane picture and in casting non-actor Bruno S in the title role he gets so close to the feeling of raw truth we may as well be watching a picture of Bruno S's life, (something he also achieved in "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" where Bruno S's performance as Hauser totally transcended acting to become the character). Here he simply becomes Stroszek just as Eva Mattes becomes Eva and Clemens Scheitz becomes Scheitz. Herzog transports them from Germany to America where Stroszek gets a dead-end job in the garage of Scheitz's nephew and Eva becomes a waitress, (in Berlin she turned tricks to earn the money for their trip and doesn't appear too anxious to give up that line of work).Nothing conventional happens but seldom on film has the mundane existence of ordinary people seemed so fascinating, (and Herzog's use of non-actors throughout only enhances this feeling of reality). Of course, these characters are misfits; they don't fit in and they lead lives of mostly unrelieved misery and this has lead to accusations that Herzog is nothing more than a misanthrope and that, at best, he patronizes his characters. His continual casting of actors like Bruno S and Klaus Kinski has lead to a kind of alienation though, in Herzog's case, madness, like beauty may be only in the eye of the beholder with Stroszek no more to be pitied than Cool Hand Luke. If "Stroszek" is a tragedy, it is a comic one and immediately identifiable as the work of its director: you don't mistake a Herzog movie set in America as a Bob Rafelson movie. And yes, before you ask, it's visually superb and with a great soundtrack, too. Essential.

Robert J. Maxwell At the climax of this somewhat tragic tale, Bruno, a German immigrant whose quest for happiness in America has failed, goes on an amateur, what-the-hell crime spree, turns on all the exhibits in a barren mid-winter Indian tourist trap, and climbs aboard a cable car for a final trip to the mountain top, carrying a shotgun and a frozen turkey. One of the exhibits he activates is a piano-playing chicken who hammers out an impeccable version of Schubert's Scherzo in B Minor. Another is a dancing chicken. The chicken walks out into a glass case, plucks a piece of string, and begins scratching atop a slowly revolving round table the size of an old record player. The Tribal Police arrive and examine the scene of the crime, which includes a burning truck and a recently robbed grocery store. One of the cops is on the squad car's radio. "We got a single passenger on the lift and an electrician's on his way out. Somebody turned on the electricity and we can't stop the dancing chicken." The director, Werner Herzog, lingers on that chicken, scratching away over and over on a revolving platter, his head completely empty of thought. What are we to make of all this? Except that we are all dancing chickens manipulated by some deranged outer force.If it isn't that, then I'm lost.A good case could be made that this movie is utterly pointless. Bruno, a shabby caricature of a man, is released from an institution and returns to his apartment in Berlin, where he has two friends. One is an elderly eccentric and the other an abused whore. The pixy-like old man carries on about how easy it is to get rich and live happily in America. The whore saves up her money and the three of them travel to a truck stop in Wisconsin. They buy a mobile home and a television set and things look bright for a while, until they fall behind in their mortgage payments.Sick of it all and desperate, the hooker takes off in one of the trucks for Canada. The old man goes bonkers and believes it's all a conspiracy, so he and the not-too-bright Bruno hold up a barber shop, run across the street, and begin buying groceries. The old man is arrested for armed robbery, Bruno steals a truck, takes off on his own, and finally runs out of money and gas at the Indian tourist trap.My old German grandpappy had a saying: "Ein Mann hat das Bodel und ein Mann hat das Gelt." Some people have money and others wind up with the bag. Bruno and his friends -- and even his enemies -- are losers from beginning to end. It's a long, slow story of social suicide. All three end up worse than they began, as bad as that was.And when I say "long", I mean "long." Herzog -- here as elsewhere -- has a tendency to hold on stylized shots for a long long long time. The camera is placed behind and above Bruno as a huge truck pulls his forfeited mobile home away. The camera remains static as the mobile home sluggishly departs to the right. The camera stays in the same place and so does Bruno, who is now staring at the empty space that his mobile home had occupied. He continues to stare as the seconds tick by and a scratchy old record plays a tune called "Silver Bells." If you're patient, and if you're sensitive to mood and character and composition, you'll get much more out of this movie than if you're expecting some plot-driven dynamo.I'd like to compare this to Robert Altman's exercises in improvisation but I can't. One senses an intentionality behind Herzog's stuff that's absent from Altman's movies. What I mean is, Herzog seems to have something in mind behind the apparent non sequiturs and stylized shots. Herzog has a goal, whereas many of Altman's movies seemed designed for nothing more than seeing what happened next. In a sense, Altman stays with the dancing chicken because that's all there is, while Herzog believes that there is somebody turning the machine on and off.