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"FacebookPinterest\n\n In recent years, Netflix has dumped thousands of movies and T.V. shows into their Watch Instantly section. Pay a monthly fee, and they can be streamed on your computer, Blu-Ray player, Wii, etc. This is a glorious thing. Problem: Quality control. With so many awful movies available\u2014looking at you, Titanic II\u2014you may feel like you're sifting through the $1 VHS bin from Hell. So, your intrepid correspondents at GQ have taken it upon themselves to pore over the offerings and select one film, every Friday, from the impenetrable thicket that is Watch Instantly (and other likeminded sites). Get to streaming.\n\n For our maiden voyage, a film about our favorite quixotic German auteur: Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's raw and illuminating portrait of Werner Herzog. For those who only know Herr Herzog from his documentary about a man who befriends\u2014and is eventually consumed by\u2014bears (2005's near-perfect Grizzly Man), it's worth exploring his entire catalogue, with few exceptions. And what better time? Check out GQ contributor Chris Heath's profile of the mad genius in our May issue, which recaps Herzog's career and discusses his first 3D (!) film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, hitting theaters today.\n\n Burden tracks the disastrous filming of Herzog's 1982 masterpiece Fitzcarraldo. Both films follow a similar trajectory: eccentric genius (Herzog in the former; Fitzgerald, played by Herzog's explosive on-screen avatar and frenemy Klaus Kinski, in the latter) treks deep into the Peruvian jungle, joined by a team whose well-being he cares little for, to accomplish an impossible task: Drag a 320-ton boat over a mountain.\n\n Through Blank's lens, we watch Herzog's problems pile up as thick as the mustache affid to his upper lip: Shot on location 1,000 miles from civilization, two leads (including Mick Jagger) abandon the project; the cast and crew grow restless; locals who don't take kindly to their presence shoot at them; not to mention the harrowing boat haul that goes predictably awry. Turns out filming could have taken place not far outside of a large city in Peru, but Herzog demands an \"authenticity\" he deems unattainable close to such civility.\n\n His monomaniacal, take-no-prisoners drive to make the perfect film is astonishing to watch, like rubbernecking a slow-motion car crash. But the pacing of the film lulls us into Herzog's madcap world so that the idea of schlepping a steel boat through the jungle doesn't seem so crazy after a while. In a career built on making movies about men whose overblown dreams of conquering nature come at the cost of all else, this living diary hems shockingly close to the characters that define his four-decade long career. For a window into an eccentric auteur's mind, you won't find much better or more personal than this.\n\n 5 Other Streaming Recommendations: \n\n 1. Enounters at the End of the World (Netflix)\n\n More Herzog, this one a doc about the beauty and power of Antarctica, and the eccentrics who live there year-round.\n\n 2. Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton (YouTube)\n\n A snappy look at the early years of one of fashion's greats. See how the other (richer) half lives.\n\n 3. Dead Alive (Netflix)\n\n Rarely do horror and comedy blend as well as with Peter Jackson's zombie chortle-fest.\n\n 4. Before Sunrise (Netflix)\n\n Richard Linklater's touching treatment of two lost souls who fall for one another in a day, only to be separated the next morning.\n\n 5. The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization Part II (YouTube)\n\n While Part I tracked the early '80s LA punk rock scene, Part II turns its eye to the dismaying rise of hair metal. The video quality is low but the footage is priceless."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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