They should call this movie "Good Lieutenant" because of how cool he is.I'm taking so much psychic damage from this year's Sundance film festival that I need to counteract the insufferable bullshit I see or I'll go fully into a despair K-hole, in this case I counter a bad Nicholas Cage movie with one of the best. I love everything about this film, but perhaps nothing more than the fact that Cage is just haunting every scene shuffling about hunched over like a doped-up Nosferatu with a .44 Magnum just stuck directly into his pants pointing at his dick the entire movie. Not a single person he works with has any problem with this or seems to be aware of the fact that he's smacked out of his mind of heroin, geeking on coke or just smoked a blunt while investigating a quintuple homicide. The best is when Cage completely changes the voice he's doing about 2/3rds of the way through the movie and then changes it back for no reason.Another great film about the glories of evil, an absolutely depraved and insane drug addict navigates the eddies and currents of his own disaster of a life alongside the madness and degradation of post-Katrina New Orleans but instead of pulling him under, he triumphs against all odds to save the day. Truly inspirational. I hate that this movie has to be compared with the Abel Ferrera film, because it should really just stand on its own, but in the Keitel version a tortured Catholicism means that the bill is always coming due. However in this, not only does he get away with everything, he solves the case, gets promoted, and a year later he's still on his drug shit, nothing's changed, no one has learned anything. The closest we get to the gaze of Jesus, washed in the blood, are the marble eyes of iguanas and alligators. Are they recording our madness? Do they care? Who cares! What a picture!What a cast: Cage, Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Faruza Balk, Jennifer Coolidge, Tom Bower, Xzibit, Vondie Curtis Hall, Shawn Hatosy, Brad Dourif, Shea Whigham, Michael Shannon. Movies, I love 'em!
There is a point in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans where the absurdity hits a boiling point and it goes from an OK police procedural to an absolutely nutso character study. I would imagine most people would consider that moment to be when Nic Cage's Bad Lieutenant, Terrence McDonagh, watches two imaginary lizards cavorting on his coffee table while conducting a police stakeout. For me, that moment is laughably absurd, but the real launchpad into Cage/Herzog hysterics is the scene where McDonagh reveals himself to two old biddies and threatens their lives, all while standing in a corner, nonchalantly shaving. Everything after became an increasingly bizarre and increasingly enjoyable journey into this madman's schemes.Unlike Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, Herzog's titular characterization is not sadistic, brutal, or evil-hearted. He is simply and more sympathetically a 'regular' joe with a lack of self-control. He is neurotic as opposed to psychotic; he is insane, but strangely more human than Keitel's incarnation. It is much easier to sympathize with someone you can laugh at and with than someone who is terrifyingly nihilistic, and I think that's one of the reasons why Herzog's film sat better with me than Ferrara's (I don't mean to say it's a remake or a sequel, but besides their personalities, the characters share too many traits not to infer some kind of relation between the two films).The best part of BL:PoCNO is the actual plot that, while fairly standard crime drama fare, gives us a point of reference for McDonagh and his actions. Sure, he's got some loose screws, but unlike Keitel's LT, we are able to infer reasons for most of his flaws, thanks to the integral back-story and focus given to peripheral characters. They are still moral failings, but they are not entirely his own. While Ferarra's was first and foremost a spectacle, Herzog's vision actually fleshes out situations and characterizations without relying completely on depravity and violence, which ends up making BL:PoCNO not just a conduit for Nic Cage's entrancing performance, but a well-rounded and highly entertaining crime drama as well.
