The title of this post is a line from the movie
Fitzcarraldo, directed by
Werner "I'll eat my shoe" Herzog. If you like two and half hour long foreign movies, check it out. If you have no attention span, buy yourself a six-pack and a bottle of Ritalin and watch it anyway. You get to see a rubber baron (no relation to The Baroness) feed some fish thousand dollar bills.
What's it about? Since I'm terrible at condensing 2 1/2 hour movies into short paragraphs, here's the synopsis from Wik-omnipotia:
Fitzcarraldo, a great fan of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso, dreams of building an opera house in the remote Peruvian city of Iquitos. To make his dream a reality, he purchases a steamer, acquires the deed to a rubber-rich, but inaccessible, area of the jungle, and sets off to exploit this area until he earns enough money to build his opera. However, because his newly-acquired territory can only be reached via a tributary of the Amazon River strewn with dangerous rapids, he devises a more creative solution: travel up a parallel tributary; then, with the manpower of helpful natives, physically pull the steamship over a mountain, from one river to the next.In one scene, they show a rubber tree (
hevea brasiliensis) being tapped for it's sap (latex), and talk about how heavy it is and how much it stinks. Sorry, no dildo-licking fake lesbians playing dress up in this movie. No, that's a lie: I'm not sorry.
The documentary filmaker,
Les Blank, made a documentary about the filming of
Fitzcarraldo, called
Burden of Dreams. I haven't watched that one yet, but it's in my Netflix queue. I'll do a post about it after I watch it if I feel the need to. However, a little birdie tells me that most of you would rather read about the fake lesbos in latex.
