Rescue Dawn

It was another really quiet day at work today. One of my friends got into work at around twelve and took about a four hour lunch. During the afternoon I had about twenty angry text messages from his girlfriend who was worried that he was drunk. Of course I wasn't with him, so I didn't know. One thing is that he is sitting next to one of the bosses now so he'll have to be really careful.

This evening I went along to the Vue Cinema to see a preview screening of Rescue Dawn, directed by Werner Herzog. Based on true events, the film is set in 1965 and tells of the story of Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), a US fighter pilot, who crashes in the jungles of Vietnam. Shortly afterwards, he is captured and held as a prisoner of war. Trapped in horrendous conditions, Dengler comes up with an audacious plan to escape. Herzog first dealt with the Dieter Dengler story in a 1997 documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The film is powerful, exciting and entertaining, being more like a survival adventure film than a war movie. However it has attracted controversy from the friends and family members of some of the people depicted in the film, who claim that they have been misrepresented. Of course, there are plenty of famous stories about the insanity of previous Herzog films: On the set of Even Dwarves Started Small Herzog jumped naked into a cactus patch to apologise for setting one of the cast members on fire and running him over with a car. On the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God Herzog threatened to shoot dead the actor Klaus Kinski when he threatened to walk off the set (on that same film Kinski had fired three random shots into a hut filled with partying extras because he thought they were making too much noise, and almost killed another actor by hitting him on the head with a sword). Herzog also ate one of his shoes for a documentary, and once walked from Munich to Paris because he thought it would stop a friend of his from dying. I think the craziest story from the set of Rescue Dawn was that Herzog ate live maggots with Christian Bale.

I walked home, the first time I had done so since my robbery, and on the way as I was about to head into my road, I saw the guy who did it on the other side of the road. He didn't see me, he was too busy trying to beg money off passers by, and then he vanished, so I was able to cross the road and get home without being spotted. That was quite disturbing.

My mum had been in my flat today because some workmen came to finish off the work to the windows. The windowsills and frames still have to be painted though. I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow.