Movie Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

by Tony Dayoub



Forget what you've read so far about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Those that insist the only way to truly appreciate this movie is to view it as a comedy have it all wrong—unless they are referring to Nicolas Cage's only-guy-who-gets-the-joke approach to playing the coke-addled cop, Terence McDonagh. No, Werner Herzog's post-Katrina policier is less comedy and more opera. From its ripped-from-the-headlines setting to the often stagey mise en scène (as seen in the picture above) to the electrifying heightened performance by Cage, Bad Lieutenant derives its quirky style from the verismo-style operas of composers like Puccini—melodramas which tended to focus on the often sleazy stories of the lower classes. And it has less of a relationship with the original Bad Lieutenant (1992) than it does with another quirky detective film by, of all people, Robert Altman.


Abel Ferrara's original Bad Lieutenant is a gritty classic about a nameless cop (Harvey Keitel) who lies, cheats, and steals his way through the film hoping to pay off his gambling debts before he's killed. Once his impending death is almost assured he becomes obsessed with finding redemption by solving a rape case in which the victim was a pious nun. Herzog's film is a spiritual descendant to some extent. Cage's McDonagh is a dirty cop on the corrupt New Orleans police force who often shakes down young couples leaving nightclubs for any drugs they might be carrying to satisfy his own addiction. He isn't quite caught in mid-downward spiral as Keitel's cop was. Instead, Herzog shows us the entire arc of how the decorated McDonagh acquires his habit, the depths of depravity he sinks to, and the surrounding bad influences that contribute to perpetuating his cycle of addiction.

Much of these influences stem from a cast of disgraceful characters stuck in their own personal hells. Tom Bower plays his alcoholic ex-cop father; Eva Mendes plays McDonagh's girlfriend Frankie, a high-priced call girl; and Xhibit plays his new business associate, local drug dealer Big Fate. With Fairuza Balk, Jennifer Coolidge, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Brad Dourif, Shawn Hatosy, Val Kilmer, and Michael Shannon all cast in supporting parts, the cast is large and interesting enough to rival one of Robert Altman's ensembles. But the similarities don't end there. As in your typical Altman film, one gets a keen sense of place. Post-hurricane New Orleans, is even slimier and more dangerous than it was before, a place where it's not uncommon to find a fatal car accident caused by an alligator crossing a road or an heinous crime such as the execution of an African immigrant family—the result of the father turning to dealing to support his family in the severely economically depressed city. In Altman's The Long Goodbye, Elliot Gould's Marlowe is not so strange to viewers as much as his hippie-era L.A. and its oddball characters are. Similarly, Cage's compromised police detective is not so different from his film noir ancestors as much as the contemporary decaying New Orleans and its dubious citizens are. One scene in the new film—involving a trio of thugs threatening to cut Frankie if McDonagh doesn't pay his debts—is as charged and nerve-wracking as a scene in The Long Goodbye that predates it, where gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) mutilates his own girlfriend's face by crushing a coke bottle against it.

But unlike Gould, who plays it low-key through most of The Long Goodbye, Cage is on another wavelength. As he should be. Unlike Gould's cool, detached Marlowe, who simply desires to be left alone, McDonagh is a debased man still haunted by his inclinations to be a savior. One interesting choice by Cage is to emphasize McDonagh's twisted psyche through his back injury, an injury that spurs his later addiction to coke and Vicodin. Cage walks zombie-like through the film with one shoulder hunched in a rather obvious callback to Klaus Kinski, another lunatic actor who usually performed as Herzog's alter ego in films like Nosferatu (1979) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). The effect is endearing as the increasingly manic Cage, dark circles highlighting his pale blue eyes, comes across as a fascinating throwback to the silent actors—heightened emotions and all—in much the same way Kinski did as the vampire Nosferatu in Herzog's own remake of the classic silent film.

The result is Cage's strongest performance in years in a cop film directed by a European—a European that gets it more right than any of his American counterparts have since Joe Carnahan's Narc (2002). Herzog goes for broke in the bizarre Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, fusing his skewed vision of America's degradation onto the hunched back of his well-meaning but depraved cop. Take Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), move it to New Orleans and give it enough hallucinogenic drugs until it suffers a psychotic break, and you might start to imagine what this Bad Lieutenant is like.

DVD Review: The Girlfriend Experience

by Tony Dayoub



As is evident in the picture above where The Girlfriend Experience's two protagonists—Chelsea, nee Christine (Sasha Grey), and Chris (Chris Santos)—are out of focus, director Steven Soderbergh is preoccupied with the bejeweled adornments, glossy finishes, and burnished surfaces that make up the backdrop of this film. That is to the say, superficiality is at the crux of the story here, a tale that takes place during the 2008 Presidential elections. If the film seems like a historical document that is because Soderbergh is using this account of a few days in the life of an escort to focus on the extravagance that Americans had so much trouble leaving behind in the days after the financial meltdown of last year, a point all the more salient today since it is the anniversary of last year's stock market drop of nearly 778 points, the biggest single-day point loss ever.

Blu-ray Review: Playtime (1967)

God bless Criterion for reissuing Playtime on Blu-ray. This visual Where's Waldo? for movie watchers depends on the clarity that only Blu can offer, due to French director Jacques Tati's decision to shoot in 70mm and avoid anything but wide-angle shots. The third in the series of films starring Monsieur Hulot, a forerunner of the far inferior but better known Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson), starts to minimize the character's footprint on the story, allowing other characters to initiate the gags in a virtual cityscape constructed by the production solely for use in the film. For director Tati (who also plays Hulot), Playtime is also a natural progression from his previous movies in that they all have a preoccupation with the effect of encroaching modernity on a romanticized past. This isn't immediately apparent in his earlier films, but even in L'ecole des facteurs (1947), there is the implied pressure of speed on the country postman Tati plays due to the conceptual invasion of air mail into his territory. By the time Hulot is introduced, as an agent of chaos in Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), the idea of technology disturbing the serenity of nature (in this case, a secluded beach) is brought closer to the foreground. In the next Hulot film, the charming Mon Oncle (1958), the incongruity between the modern Parisian suburbs and the quaint Old World Paris is the basis of the central plot, where by the end of the film one is a spectator to the demolishment of Hulot's enchanting neighborhood. In Playtime, the complete takeover of any recognizable Paris has already occurred. As the near plotless movie begins, a group of American tourists are by turns impressed with and disappointed by the modernization of Paris. All that's left is one little old flower lady to evoke the Paris of postcards, as even a famous landmark like the Eiffel Tower is reduced to a cameo in a reflection on a building's glass door. This time, even the comical Hulot is being crowded out to the sidelines, spending most of the film looking for his new employer in a maze of architecture that constitutes his new workplace. Tati utilized the film's scope and depth of field to pack each shot with so many visual gags (his films have very little dialogue) that it is impossible to catch them in one viewing. The Blu-ray enhances the possibility of being able to appreciate it fully in the best way one can short of seeing it the way Tati originally intended. And though this is a reissue from Criterion, it is not simply a port-over from the original disc (Update: My mistake... apparently it IS a port-over from a disc Criterion reissued in 2006; I was comparing the Blu-ray to my copy of Criterion's 2001 DVD). The film has been restored, and there are considerably more special features that go into some depth about how Tati, an affable comic but a despotic director, gambled his fortune on the making of this unusual film. These include a behind-the-scenes documentary called Au-delà de "Playtime," a rare BBC interview with Jacques Tati near the end of his life, an essay by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who once worked as a script consultant for Tati), and more. Ultimately, Playtime failed upon its release because it was ahead of its time, forever relegating Tati to the category of "mad genius" for overreaching. But Criterion's new Blu-ray is a treasure to modern film buffs who are ripe for a reassessment of this visual oddity.

DVD Review: I'm Not There - Bob Dylan... Chameleon or Cipher?

by Tony Dayoub

Look up the definition of a cipher. The first definition on Dictionary.com for cipher is simply the word zero. Singer Bob Dylan has been anything and everything but a zero. However, as Todd Haynes illustrates in his paean to Dylan, I'm Not There, Dylan viewed himself as somewhat of an empty receptacle. As he used his chameleon-like abilities to create new personas he could hide behind, friends, fans, and particularly the press, would fill that receptacle with their own preconceived notions of who Dylan really was. Haynes found it so difficult to present Dylan in a straightforward manner, that he instead chose six actors to interpret many of his adopted personas. And if much of the stories told about Dylan or by him are apocryphal, then Haynes found the best way to tell the story. He took the advice of a character in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Among the personas appearing in the movie are the poet-like Dylan known as Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), Rimbaud being the poet whose quotation, "I is the other," is the central thesis of the film. Young African-American actor, Marcus Carl Franklin, plays the Woody Guthrie persona. Dylan had fashioned a background story for himself as a young folk-singing hobo, who spent his youth jumping on trains to travel cross-country, a story later found out to be false. Haynes casting of the 11-year-old Franklin is a wink to viewers, making it obvious that this kid could not possibly be a surrogate for Dylan despite his stories leading one to believe it so. Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) is the Greenwich Village folkie that we closely associate with Joan Baez (or in this movie, Julianne Moore's Alice Fabian). Bale also reappears as Pastor John, the born-again Dylan of the late seventies. Jack Rollins (Heath Ledger) is the self-absorbed movie star Dylan, who's crumbling marriage is symbolized by the trajectory America takes during the Vietnam war. Richard Gere is Billy the Kid, the Dylan that retreats from public view to live a quiet life in Riddle, a town populated by characters from his songs.

The most iconic and spot-on performance, in fact, almost a transformation, is Cate Blanchett as Jude Quinn, the defensive Dylan facing rejection from his folk fans after going electric. Her nomination for an Oscar is well deserved, for at no time are you consciously aware that this is Blanchett acting. You are transfixed by her charisma as the androgynous rock star at the height of his sixties-era confrontational posturing towards the press. Blanchett captures the Dylan that sees himself as a cipher, "One having no influence or value; a nonentity."

Haynes shoots each story in the style of cinema suited to the period and story being covered. For example, Blanchett's segment is reminiscent of Fellini's 8 1/2, and Gere's evokes the westerns of the seventies, like Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (which Dylan appeared in).

I was enthralled by the enigmatic film on a level that I can't quite explain. It certainly has an emotional effect on the most visceral level. But the enigmatic film resists any intellectualizing. Much of the explanations above were derived from a thorough survey of the special features included on the DVD, in stores now. I am a casual Bob Dylan fan so I did not have any reference points to lean on when watching the film. But the wealth of extras on the disc can serve as a crash-course on the singer's life and work. Special attention should be payed to the writings on the film collected under the title "An Introduction to the Film" on Disc 1. The point is that none of this should hinder enjoyment of the film, as long as you can accept its perplexing metaphorical nature.

"I is the other." As Dylan would say, I is not me... I'm not there. Haynes fractured biopic depicts the nonentity that characterizes Dylan. And perhaps his film consciously exemplifies yet another definition of a cipher, "[a private mode of communication] contrived for the safe transmission of secrets."

Still provided courtesy of Genius Products and The Weinstein Company.