Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fitzearruldo (Klaus Kinski) is the Indians name for Brian Sweency Fazgerald, a half-crazed, half-Irish failed enterpreneur who is driven by an extraordinary obsession with opera. He hits upon the grand scheme of building an aperu house in the middle of the Peruviam Amazon jungle--a shrine to his god Caruso. To finance his brainechild, Fitzearruldo attempts to claims a large expanse of unexplored territory and cash in on the huge rubber free crop. In order to reach the area, however, he must unvigute up one river and cross over a ridge of land to another river--drugging...
...hand up into the old Heart of Darkness. Unfortuantely, this potentialty interesting irony is crushed by the film's mass. P>Early in journey upstream. Herzog achieves one scene of considerable,, if fleeting, power,. As the Molly-Aida slowly slices through the water, a low drumming echoes through the Amazon darkness. For almost 10 munutes, Fitzearruldo and his crew stand silently enthralled by the hypnotic tattoo. But Herzog loosens the straglehold of the dialogue only for a moment. The drums recede, day breaks and Kinski and his cre begin babbling and gesticulating again...
Werner Herzog is in love with the impossible. It seduces, challenges, obsesses him. It lures him to forbidden kingdoms, from the Sahara to the Amazon, where holy misfits are given the chance to realize or cheat their destinies. The risks this German film maker takes - with his subject matter, with his and his company's safety, with an audience's willingness to accede to his demons - make a reckless ad venturer like Francis Coppola seem stodgy by comparison. For Heart of Glass Herzog hypnotized his actors, and on the receptive viewer his films have a similar effect: their...
...contrast with these soul struggles, Fitzcarraldo must have seemed like a shaman's summer vacation when Herzog conceived of it five years ago. He would return to the Peruvian Amazon, not too far from where he had filmed Aguirre, to shoot a sunnier version of that pathetic tale. At the end of the last century, an entrepreneur named Fitzcarrald dreamed of bringing his passion, grand opera, to the savage Indians upriver; to fulfill his dream, and with the Indians' help, he lugged a small riverboat across a narrow strip of land that separated two tributaries of the Amazon...
Aunt Julia is set in that same period of the 1950s, though Odria and his political procurers are not in sight. Instead, Vargas Llosa's Lima is a bright tangle of characters: Indians from the mountains and the edge of the Amazon busy filling up new slums; a middle class trying to keep its balance in an unstable economy; and the rich preserving the good life and marrying off their daughters in style. There are shocks and bizarre surprises, but the prevailing atmosphere of the novel is a melancholy gaiety...