I'm just now getting gack to this thread. I must not be subscribed to it.

Belated thanks to Oscar for his extravagantly kind words about my review. It's been a while and many other movies since I saw Grizzly Man, but I definitely think it's one of the best documentaries of this year or any year in recent memory. This is not so much for the beauty of the footage or the brilliance of the construction, as for the importance of the ideas contained therein, and Herzog's honesty and presence. There is the "fly on the wall" kind of documentary, and of recent ones I'd say Être et avoir/To Be and to Have is the best example of that I can cite; and there is the openly committed and directly, personally involved kind, of which the best recent example is My Architect. Herzog's Grizzly Man is of the second kind. Yes, Herzog felt a kinship with Treadwell, but he also saw that Treadwell was seriously deluded and his purpose in Grizzly Man is to tell the story of this delusion and its tragic consequences. arsaib makes this clear when he says "Early on in the film, it’s hard not to sympathize with Treadwell and his passion, but slowly and surely, it becomes apparent...." -- and he thereafter explains that Treadwell wanted fame and had delusions of grandeur in ways that, by implication, we can't sympathize with. I differ with arsaib on some points, but we're together on this.

Later it becomes clear that arsaib has lost sight of the most important issue in the whole film: that of Treadwell's anthromorphizing and cutesyfying bears, which are not our friends, not domestic animals, and very dangerous to be around. Herzog is clear and emphatic about his stand on this, that nature in the wild is alien and dangerous to man, and that Treadwell was living and promulgating a lie. Let me be clear about myself: I agree. I personally have no sympathy for people who romanticize nature. arsaib takes note of a duality in nature ("Nature is cruel...But it is also beautiful and majestic") but he doesn't make clear what the film is ultimately about, namely the failure to deal appropraitely with nature and to recognize its dangers.

This is why I brought in the comparison with March of the Penguins, an example of what I call the "touchy feely" approach to nature, and the anthropmorphizing of alien creatures. I've heard that the sentimental US narration differs starkly from the French one on this, but I haven't heard the French one so I can't say. Certainly the footage of March of the Penguins itself is remarkable; it's the narration that is offensive. It may not be so dangerous to pet a penguin or get close to one, I don't know. But the Penguin film at least with the US narration fails to adequately acknowledge how alien they are to us and how hostile and dangerous to us is the environment in which they live.

I think arsaib is on the wrong track in implying that Herzog failed to investigate Treadwell's relationship with his girlfriend in enough detail and that doing so would somehow have made his documentary about the Grizzly Man significantly different. It's pretty clear that Treadwell provided very scant information about anyone other than himself and the bears and there's no reason to assume there are some key secrets about the relationship with the woman that are lurking there, waiting to create a very different documentary. Herzog was made to make this documentary, and Treadwell was made to be his subject. It seems very odd, not to say dense, to speculate that somebody else might make a better, or even significantly different, documentary about the same subject. All one could expect from another filmmaker would be a more watered-down version, probably one with a more limited perspective. Oscar is right in commenting that Treadwell is a psychological type, and one could look at him from the bi-polar standpoint; but that would still be a part of what Herzog already takes account of in his film, though he focuses elsewhere -- as did Treadwell.

In fact if arsaib recalls, we do hear part of the audio tape of Treadwell's and his girlfriend's deaths. We just don't hear it down to the grim finale. Why doing so would somehow be essential and revelatory and not just gruesome is a point that elludes me. Herzog's intervention with the lady and assertion that she should destroy the tape I think is a very moral thing and one of the film's finest moments, though it may be hard to understand at first. Overall, the idea that Herzog could have studied a hundred hours of video and somehow come up with odd conclusions others would not agree with seems also quite odd to me. The tapes of Treadwell speak for themselves. They cover a wide range of behaviors and moods. There's little reason to suppose that the nature of the videos has been distorted by Herzog's choices.

I think these points about the death tape and Treadwell's relationship with Amie Huguenard are side issues; not only are the questions about Herzog's treatment of them relatively unimportant quibbles, but they lead arsaib away from the central ideas of the film. And this is a film about ideas. To expand on my point as Oscar requests about the lesson of the film being "important": our falsifying of nature can be taken further -- to this present government's falsifying of the dangers to the environment of ignoring the effects of human pollution. If the planet is being allowed to devolve and our coastlines and cities and the health of our grandchildren are all in very serious jeopardy, this is in a sense a consequence of the view that nature is benign. If it's benign, it will take care of itself; we don't have to worry about it. Likewise if it is wonderfully noble and powerful, it will take care of itself. But unfortunately both ideas are now false: nature is not benign -- it never has been. And it is not so powerful that humans cannot do irreparable damage to the planet. They have done so. Or at least, the damage is beginning to look more and more like it could be irreparable. Even if the planet can be saved -- admittedly a hubristic and mistaken notion, because we don't know what the future holds for it; but we can try -- the extent of the alterations that have taken place demonstrably as a result of human activities is now so great, that we are going to have to suffer a lot of damage to our lifestyles and to our habitations.

Again, I still conclude, from the perspective of some months since my original viewing of it, that this is a very fine film. I have the greatest respect for my colleague arsaib's judgment, his ability as a writer of reviews, and his extensive knowledge of the movies, but nonetheless in this case I have to disagree strongly; hence I find arsaib's grading it with a mediocre "B" unjustifiable. If I gave grades to filmmakers or films, I'd give it and Werner Herzog an A+ for Grizzly Man and still consider that an understatement.