Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is camp on arrival. With a name and aesthetic that recalls direct-to-video sequels (Lost Boys: The Tribe, Roadhouse 2: Last Call, or Darkman III: Die Darkman Die anyone?), the film arrives about six months after its loony internet trailer became a viral “this can’t be real” laughingstock— more than enough time for defenders, Herzogians, so-bad-it’s-good Snakes on a Plane enthusiasts, and Nicolas Cage lovers to settle on an appropriately slanted vantage from which to appreciate the film. If you’ve seen that trailer, or any clips since, and are still excited about this proudly superfluous reboot of a 1992 Abel Ferrara film, then you’re likely also intimate with the word “awesome” as a term of enthusiastic, double-sided irony. As it happens, much of Herzog’s film is indeed “awesome” as campy, seedy, awkward entertainment. It also occasionally transcends those quotes. But art so fleetingly glimpsed only demonstrates how hard it is to make of low-rent trash something truly sublime. Even though this is Herzog and Cage’s wheelhouse—each in his own way is a spectacle of ridiculous genius—Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is too half-assed and knowing to be really, deliriously mad. Click here to read the rest of Eric Hynes’s review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
If he weren’t so damn likable and talented, it would be tempting to begrudge Pedro Almodóvar his success. Almodóvar—always a gifted visual stylist—turned an artistic corner a decade ago with All About My Mother and its follow-up, Talk to Her. To the eye-popping color, self-conscious deconstruction of genre, and playful performativity that had characterized his earlier work, those films added an emotional maturity and clarity that his previous movies only hinted at. They were serious, and they were seriously fun to watch. Since then, Almodóvar has honed a brand of cinema that weds respectability and commercial viability so seamlessly that Cannes invites and U.S. distribution now come pro forma. That bankable Almodóvar brand, coupled with his larger-than-life personality, has made him one of the few breakout directorial stars of contemporary international cinema. People and critics love to love him and his movies. As a result, he’s difficult to criticize. Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski’s review of Broken Embraces.
Updating the private investigator film with September 11 shadings is not a terribly novel idea, but writer/director Noah Buschel isn’t an idea man. He likes feelings, atmosphere, actors, and emotion, and he originally said he was inspired to make The Missing Person because he was reading Raymond Chandler around the time of the attacks—but then he told indieWIRE that he was being slightly disingenuous when he originally said this, as his motivations were more vague. Buschel’s deprioritzing of tagline-ready storytelling mechanics is evident as his movie gawkily transitions between various plots. Surprisingly, it’s two elements that might seem like drawbacks that glue the pieces together and (somewhat) sustain the appeal of this mess—the consistently ugly graininess of the HDCAM and super-16 (itself digitally altered to look like DV) and Michael Shannon’s rewardingly repetitive performance. Click here to read the rest of Justin Stewart’s review of The Missing Person.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness opens with Emperor Hirohito’s radio announcement renouncing his divinity going unremarked by a Taiwanese family as they gather around a newborn son, establishing both the distance of power from the everyday and its invisible pervasiveness. Hou’s tactic is not simply a clever way of handling a tale of people caught up in the world historic, a clichéd notion which simultaneously aggrandizes the individual’s tragedy while subordinating him to the seeming untouchability of historic forces. The oblique scenes in which Hou depicts Taiwan’s White Terror are truths in themselves, not cryptograms to be decoded for the historical answers they contain, not mere indicators of something beyond the limits of the frame.
It is one of our more damaging and persistent fictions that identifies power with truth—as opposed to honesty, which almost no one would accept—because it spawns the further fiction that those who hold the former possess the keys to the latter. Click here to read the rest of Andrew Tracy’s review of The Sun.
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