Dwight Garner at the NYT:
I don’t believe a word of the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s new memoir, which bears the self-deprecating title “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” (What is this, a Metallica album?) But then, I’m not sure we’re supposed to take much of it at face value.
Like Jim Smiley in Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits, Herzog is an old-school, concierge-level bluffer. And ham. He won’t tell you the truth, not quite, unless it falls out of his pocket accidentally, as if it were a cigarette lighter.
Speaking about his documentaries, Herzog uses the phrase “ecstatic truth.” When you imagine that phrase uttered in his droll, stoic German accent, it sounds less evangelical, less like something Kellyanne Conway would say.
more here.