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" We tend to think of a filmmaker&amp;#039;s legacyin terms of their artistic footprint, the work they produce. But then Werner Herzog was never like any other filmmaker. I mean, this is the guy who pulled Joaquin Phoenix from a car wreck. And this is the man who \u2014 for a long time, but especially recently \u2014 has used his place in the movies to try to make the world a noticeably better place.  Consider the film he produced earlier this year, The Act of Killing, which details how the hired killers of Indonesia&amp;#039;s genocide have been celebrated for five decades on. (Herzog told us, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not gonna leave you until the end of your days.&amp;quot;) It&amp;#039;s a gripping movie, but it also managed the uneasy task of putting a global spotlight on a culture of violence that wasn&amp;#039;t there before. Herzog had nothing to do with making the movie (he signed on after seeing it), but he put his name on it because he knew it would help, and it did.      Now Herzog has made From One Second to the Next, a truly gut-wrenching short documentary about, essentially, the dangers of texting while driving. But it&amp;#039;s so much more: Herzog has created a portrait of four accidents, the people who suffer them and the people who cause them. He lets his camera roll as one mother describes the pain of never again being able to tell your child, &amp;quot;Go play outside.&amp;quot; AT&amp;amp;amp;T, whose &amp;quot;It Can Wait&amp;quot; campaign commissioned the film, plans to release it in high schools. That&amp;#039;s a very good thing, because this doc is nothing like the generally finger-wagging films shown to high-school students to make them better people. From One Second is a lot like Herzog&amp;#039;s other movies. It doesn&amp;#039;t tell us to be better. It shows us the horrible things we&amp;#039;re capable of, how they happen for no good reason at all. Which is a whole lot more effective. A lot was said about the dubious nature of the Kony video last year, its oversimplification of global problems and our ability to solve them. If From One Second can get even close to the exposure of that campaign (it looks like it will \u2014 the video already has 1.5 million views on YouTube), one hopes it has the potential to help us help ourselves, even if just a little. And we hope Herzog continues to make movies not for their own sake but because he believes movies actually matter. He&amp;#039;s already more than proven they do. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a24328/werner-herzog-texting-doc/>