More films watched. That means more films to review.

The first is Klaus Kinski: My Best Friend, which is, as the title suggests, about the actor and madman Klaus Kinski. It is mostly told by Werner Herzog, who directed him in several memorable films. If you haven't seen Aguirre: The Wrath of God or Fitzcaraldo, you don't really appreciate Kinski, but to summarize his persona, he's a really intense actor from Germany. He had a few hit movies, then he went on a kind of speaking tour, claiming to be Jesus Christ. Audiences would challenge this assertion and he would shriek at them. Footage of one of these rallys opens the film and sets the tone. Kinski, who sort of looks like the Heat Miser, has a kind of mesmerizing, raging, bizarre charisma and the messianic connection is not hard to make.

Making Aguirre was totally insane, requiring a 1,000 extras and 850 actors. It was shot in the Michu Pichu forest of Peru, and nature was cruel. And through it all Kinski was berserk. By the time of Fitzcaraldo, which was also in the jungle, with the added difficulty of hauling a 200 foot steamship up a waterfall with steel cables, Kinski was completely unhinged. He was still acting, but he would do things after the camera stopped rolling, like stab people with his sword, and, in one case, shoot his gun at the extras, wounding three and shooting off the finger of one. The man whose head got cut didn't seem to hold a grudge.

The other film I watched, Light is My Friend, is a documentary about the Swedish cinematographer, Sven Nyquist. He did a lot of the camera work for Ingmar Bergman, which is what made him famous, though he also has worked on about 100 more films with various famous directors. The movie is essentially those directors, plus a few actors, all sitting around talking about how great Sven is, intercut with Sven talking about how light is his friend. Most of the movie is in Swedish with subtitles. He was also a bit of a ladies man and ditched his wife and kids, though that topic is sort of soft balled. Sven is very dulcet toned and peaceful, which was a stark contrast to Kinski who was boiling with fury in every frame of film, plus he had a wild shock of hair standing up straight on his head. Kinski liked to run around naked to shock people. Sven hardly spoke and liked to work on film sets where even the director didn't yell. But besides them being two northern European foreigners (Kinski is German) who worked in film, there isn't much in the way of similarity between them. Probably because of his Swedishness, Sven was really into black and white.

I guess there wasn't really much of a connection between the two films, if you look closely. Also they both made my honey fall asleep. So I guess that is also a sort of review.