We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Daredevil Thor Drake, the man responsible for some of the craziest mini-bike stunts in Jackass Number Two, is living the dream. What kid doesn’t want to grow up to do crazy tricks, weld together trampolines and bounce down the street? Thanks Lance, for allowing us to vicariously live like Thor– if only for a few minutes.

Werner Herzog has spent his whole life a maverick — he’s not the type of filmmaker who plays the “one for me, one for them” game, satiating studio executives in between forgotten passion projects. Herzog just doesn’t give a hoot. Rather than working his way up the industry ladder, he simply stole a camera from the Munich Film School, made some oddball shorts and documentaries, and then released an audaciously lunatic feature film in 1970 called Even Dwarfs Started Small.

Foreshadowing the spirit of anarchic glee that would take the world by storm through Jackass and its derivatives three decades later, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a delirious orgy of mayhem-cum-art film. With a threadbare narrative (a hoarde of little people go wild in the wake of a jailbreak from an abusive institution), Herzog sets the stage for one of his most spontaneous and startling masterpieces. He merely allows the film to revel in the increasingly mad escapades it portrays until the final frame. Best of all, Herzog doesn’t force the audience to approach Even Dwarfs with a critical eye, never imposing the pretense of a deeper meaning or a moral imperative behind the work. You can read what you want into the monkey crucifism, or the plight of the deposed dwarf despot– or you can just sit back and enjoy the carnage.

Jesco White: unparalleled tap dancer, charismatic Elvis impersonator and notorious criminal, was first introduced to the public through the PBS documentary Dancing Outlaw in 1991– a sort of testosterone-fueled, rebel yelling Grey Gardens. Like the Beales, the Whites were a family living on the fringes of society, dazzling audiences with their outrageous lifestyles. Transformed by the film into a cult phenomenon, Jesco toured the nation in the early 90’s and ended up tap dancing on the set of Roseanne (as seen in Dancing Outlaw II: Jesco Goes to Hollywood) before disappearing from the public eye.

Nearly two decades later, producer Johnny Knoxville has returned to the iconoclastic White family in The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, finding them in a state of utterly exhilarating, free-flowing anarchy that would put the Jackass crew to shame. Providing a close-up look at the White family’s vile charm, the film examines their tendency to pass their dancing skills– along with their drug problems– on to each successive generation. If that weren’t enough for you, it’s got original songs and commentary from the freewheeling Hank Williams III. Check out the trailer, and then watch the following comically optimistic news report about Jesco White from 1994:

Lance Bangs found a Super 8 cartridge from a camera he used back in 2002 when were were working on Adaptation and Jackass. We were shooting a sequence from Adaptation where I played one of the orchid hunters who got killed and I had a big beard from editing so long so I thought I’d do it myself. As it turns out I almost drowned. They put so many weights on me in this eighteen foot deep pool that I panicked and sank to the bottom and kept trying to swim to the top but I couldn’t. I was supposed to be a dead body just floating beneath the water but I’m not that good of a swimmer I guess.

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