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Movie # 98: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Manly Footwear: my complaint about Blowup’s main character being an asshole and thus ruining the movie watching experience for me might need a bit of refining, since I love Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and the main character is an insane, murderous colonizer who soothes himself with visions of the incestuous empire he will found with his daughter. But Klaus Kinski’s Aguirre is not an asshole, he is evil, and evil is fascinating, whereas assholism is dull, not the least because assholes have neither the creativity nor the will to go all the way to the dark side. If Kinski’s Aguirre found a corpse in the park, as Thomas the photographer does in Blowup, he’d probably strip it naked and set it on fire so he could roast a lemur. That Kinski overacts almost goes without saying: he never stands up straight once during the film, swaggering around like his spine had a pivot joint at its base, preventing his shoulders from ever coming full center, and he does so, for most of the movie, on a raft drifting down river. Even when he sits and broods, which he does a lot, he manages to overdo it, but it just makes sense, with regards…
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