The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Crit
Golly, this is one weird, hilarious Werner Herzog film. How weird? Well, Nic Cage apparently was given over-the-top carte blanche, yet if anything, his performance is a tad too restrained for the film. Just a tad.Cage, like Harvey Keitel in the original, plays, well, a bad lieutenant, one not altogether bereft of a moral code, but one who has higher priorities than right behavior, mainly cadging heroin and cocaine from the precinct evidence room. The scene with the clearest parallel in Bad Lieutenant, a power-play shakedown of callow upper-class party kids, may be even creepier than its analogue, and that, as my friend who grew up just a few crack-vials' throws from New Orleans would say, is tall cotton.
There is one critical difference between that film and this one, and I'm not talking about the iguana hallucinations. (To be clear: that's hallucinations by a human of iguanas that aren't there, not hallucinations by iguanas.) But if I told you what the critical difference is, then I'd have to, I don't know, plant evidence with your DNA on it at a murder scene or something. Just see the damn movie. Maybe get high first.
Oh, but not so high that you can't answer this quiz question afterward: what obvious error occurs in the presentation of Terry's climactic sports bet (with a bookie played by the always-good-to-see Brad Dourif, by the way)? (Answer below in invisible ink.)
Terry has fixed the star running back for "Louisiana," the nonexistent university to which the cop is devoted, to make sure his team doesn't cover a 6-point spread. That makes sense if Terry is going to bet on Texas in the game, but in fact, when he lays down the bet, he clearly tells his bookie "on Louisiana." I thought maybe it was supposed to be his error, which would have a payoff later when he wins a bet he thought he'd lost, or vice versa, and though he does indeed win a bet he thought he'd lost, that's not why, and he is paid off as if he had bet against Louisiana. Oops.
1 comment:
THIS IS A SILENT FILM FROM 1916 ABOUT COCAINE IT'S ALSO A COMEDY IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT WE DARE YOU TO CHECK IT OUT
Coke Enneday: The Mystery of the Leaping Fish 1916
The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is a 1916 short film starring Douglas Fairbanks and Bessie Love. In this unusually broad comedy for Fairbanks, the acrobatic leading man plays "Coke Enneday," a cocaine-shooting detective parody of Sherlock Holmes given to injecting himself with cocaine from a bandolier of syringes worn across his chest and liberally helping himself to the contents of a hatbox-sized round container of white powder labeled "COCAINE" on his desk. The movie, written by D.W. Griffith, Tod Browning, and Anita Loos, displays a surreally lighthearted attitude toward cocaine and opium. Fairbanks otherwise lampoons Sherlock Holmes with checkered detective hat, coat, and even car, along with the aforementioned propensity for injecting cocaine whenever he feels momentarily down, then laughing with delight. In addition to observing visitors at his door on what appears to be a closed-circuit television referred to in the title cards as his "scientific periscope," a clocklike sign on the wall reminds him to choose between EATS, DRINKS, SLEEPS, and DOPE.
http://www.2010homelesschampions.ca/video/leapingfish.html
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