FILM: Cobra Verde

Cobra Verde - Green Snake - is an enterprising outlaw (he murdered his previous boss when he discovered he was being financially exploited). He is taken in by a baron who owns a sugar plantation run by slaves. After impregnating the Baron's three daughters, he is sent to West Africa where he is to restart the slave trade.
An African king wants him killed and captures him. The king's nephew rescues him from capture and he is given an army of female warriors by who he trains to fight in order to overtake a king.
Having won the fight, the King's nephew turns on Cobra Verde who tries and fails to escape into the ocean on a large canoe.

This is one film in which Klaus Kinski doesn't play a mad man!
Characteristically for Herzog, the film doesn't involve a lot of dialogue, more an in depth look into the internal struggles of one character.

Do we like Cobra Verde? He is a murderer and a slave trader, but he's not nasty to his slaves like the other traders - he seems a more moral man than many of the other characters - perhaps a misunderstood man? He does like to disobey orders and refuses to pander to those with a higher station to him - qualities I tend to like in a character.
The film leaves one with their own individual opinion of the man, Cobra Verde, since it doesn't give it's own moral stance of the situation - it just shows the happenings.
In this way, the film is brilliantly a-moral: it doesn't have an opinion; that is left for the viewer.

FILM: The History Boys

With a star-studded cast, this film made Dominic Cooper and James Corden famous.
Written by Alan Bennett, starring Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, this film was always going to be good.
It's about the struggle of a group of school boys doing their best to get into Oxbridge.
It tackles issues like homosexuality, paedophilia, education (how one should be educated), elitism in schools, and the life of a teenage schoolboy.
It tackles quite a lot in one go.
The lead roles are brilliantly acted, though the film doesn't have much depth to the characters - you could either say this makes the characters easier to act, or you could say the acting was brilliant because there wasn't much character for the actors to use.
The film seems to laugh its way through really troubling topics - like the relationships between the boys and their teachers.
The question is, were the decisions made the correct ones to make?
When the headmaster discovers the paedophilic actions of Richard Griffiths' character, he quietly fires him and does all he can not to make a scene for the sake of his school's reputation. Shouldn't he have got the police involved? Considering it is set in the 1980s, when this sort of thing happened frequently, should we just take it on the chin or should we condemn the headmaster along with the teacher nonetheless?