My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

Too much of everything

Just perfect...

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Beautiful combination of mesmerizing Herzog's eye, the poetic, alienating protagonist, inducing the dark subconscious intensity akin to Lynch's movies, and Ernst Reijseger's inimitable music, projecting the whole story to a purely aesthetical shape, like some scenes that end with a long awkward pause in a few seconds load with musical grace and turn harmonious and illusory.The film is a sequence of Brad's madness manifestations, starting with an obsession with his stage image, an ancient Greek seeking catharsis in his Mother's murder.I re-watch it with constant awe.

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.

Less a film and more a test of your patience, this is one of those willfully, calculatingly offbeat productions that baffle you with their existence. None of the folks involved could possibly have thought this would ever make any money or appeal to any significant amount of viewers. The cast doesn't get the chance to do any interesting, let alone exceptional, acting. Most of the dialog sounds like it was excerpted from random fortune cookies. The direction appears to have been inspired by the "awkward pause" segment on The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is made with a high level of craft but to no good purpose.Let me be clear, this isn't one of those genuinely weird movies. Those are attempts at conventional motion pictures that just come out weird because they're made by genuinely weird filmmakers or ones inspired by the muses of oddity. This is a case of people who know convention and decide to demonstrate their cleverness by defying it. These films are like pretentious challenges to the audience, daring them to construct some justification or rationalization for what happens on screen. The meta-concept being that you don't enjoy the film, you enjoy explaining the film to yourself and others.I will freely admit that this production may work on some arty level I don't understand. Here's the thing, though. Great art works on more than one level. It engages the audience on more than one level. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done doesn't work on any level of which I can conceive. Not logically, not narratively, not thematically, not metaphorically, not stylistically, not as entertainment nor instruction nor inspiration. Stuff like this is what creates the impression there's something fraudulent about art house cinema, that it's kind of a scam that serves only as a delineation between the bourgeoisie and a self-selected elite of the supposedly enlightened. You like this rubbish not because it's good but to signify to yourself and others that you're a certain sort of person.Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is a glaringly disturbed man who kills his mother with a sword one morning. The police arrive and surround Brad in his mother's home, where he lives, and the rest of the movie is a series of flashbacks that take us through Brad's "alone in a crowd" existence right up until the killing. It's all contrived strangeness and slow camera movement. The only honest element is the unacknowledged denial every other character is in about Brad's mental problems.Let me stress that no actor gets a chance to shine, no line of dialog rings true or will stay with you, nothing looks all that great and the grinding string music of the score sounds like something you'd play outside a convenience store to drive away loitering teenagers and small animals. It took sheer force of will to sit through the last hour and if I wasn't specifically watching it in order to write this review, I would never have made it. If some crazy person offered me $1,000 to watch this again, I wouldn't.My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done should only be viewed by those who think that doing so will impress their friends. If that's the case, however, you really need new friends.

The credits haven't finished rolling, and I find myself racing to my laptop to warn moviegoers to avoid this colossal ostrich egg.Werner Herzog, once my favourite director of all time, has for the last 20 years been slowly piling the dirt on his own grave. Let's face it, without Klaus Kinski's feverish madness to balance Herzog's drowsy nihilism, his films miss the mark by miles.MYMYWHYD is no exception. We begin with a compelling plot and a potentially riveting storyline with potentially profound themes: A woman is found dead, apparently run through by a sword wielded by her mentally unbalanced son. It is slowly revealed that the son had been suffering some sort of stage-based psychosis, fancying himself the center of a Greek tragedy. Reading the DVD box, I was thinking to myself, "How could this not be awesome?!"I'll tell you how. Despite its promising beginning, the film quickly devolves into one passionless ramble after another, punctuated inexplicably by Werner Herzog's vacation movies to South America. Apparently we are to surmise that something in South America drove the young man mad, but aside from that there is no substance. It's as if European/American audiences are supposed to be dazzled by the mountains, clouds and unfamiliar native faces into thinking something significant happened.Kinski would've been able to pull this off, and he certainly has. This is precisely the same recipe used in "Aguierre the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo", two of my top films. A man tangles with the crushing power of untamed nature and loses his mind. I repeat, Klaus Kinski was da man. But how long can Herzog try to milk this same formula with sub-par talent? It's like your favourite 70s rock band (Genesis, Foreigner, Journey, etc) having lost its passionate frontman and trying to carry on for 20+ years with some new weakling in the saddle every album. At some point you have to accept that the band is dead. Or at least they should move on to a new sound altogether (like Toto. Now that band has released some kickass stuff in recent years!).Enough of Klaus Kinski & classic rock. I was just trying to make a point that Herzog's latest efforts are falling flat due to his obsession with the old Kinskian themes that made him once great. Mr. Herzog should change the act altogether. Despite my utter disappointment in Herzog, I will continue to watch his films hoping one day he'll either find his new Kinski or move on. Just like I keep buying the new Genesis albums. Unless you're stupid like me, you should probably avoid both.