Have a Herz(og)

Werner Herzog, most recently of Grizzly Man fame, has made his next project in the wasteland of the South Pole -- not shocking that he describes the town he films as an "ugly mining town" and claims he went to find something other than "fluffy penguins."

In terms of hope-in-humanity, Herzog's documentaries make Kristof Kieslowski's Soviet-era films seem like nursery rhymes. If Herzog had filmed The Mission instead of Aguirre Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, Robert De Niro would've fallen off the cliff just as he reached the point of redemption; if he'd directed March of the Penguins, the focus would have been on a particular seal that ate seventeen penguins before being chomped in half by a killer whale. On camera.

So it was with interest that I began to read the interview done by the Associated Press, printed in our local paper.

Herzog predictably laments the lack of adventure in everday life:

AP: You wouldn't characterize anything you've done as an adventure?

Herzog: No, I'm a professional person. Adventure belongs to a different age. It died out in the early or mid-19th century, and that was a time where men would meet in pistol duels at dawn and where damsels would faint on a couch.

I wish I could tell you how the rest of the interview went, but as soon as I read the last sentence -- in which men adventuring would have pistol duels and women would pass out on couches -- I stopped reading it.

Seriously?

The women's version of "adventure" is fainting??

I'm beginning to think feminism is a myth.