Movie: The Grand

Nick: Yes, that is a big, unpredictable, snarling bear looming behind Werner Herzog. But I ask you, who, really, is in danger here? Surely not a man who checks into hotels simply as "The German." Nor one who, while petting a white rabbit named Munchkin, insists that he has never felt more alive than when strangling a goat with his bare hands. Nor a man who calmly observes that "Las Vegas has no irony" shortly after remarking that "coffee is some kind of beverage for cowards." This fake documentary on high-stakes poker puts everything in and wins big. No, not thanks to smart direction or a good script, but because the man who thirty years ago brought a steamship to the Amazon and made a bunch of tired natives pull it--literally, pull it--over a mountain, who insisted that Steve Zahn brave a poisonous caterpiller because "no, it is perfect," who ate his own shoe on a bet with Errol Morris, because this man briefly put aside making documentaries about the world champion of cattle auctioning and some nut who gets eaten by bears (see above) in order to hold a bunny for fifteen minutes and pretend to act.