Screenhead

So I announce my Barney and Friends winners, which is all light and fluffy, and then BANG! BANG!  Two new posters for Bad Lieutenant starring Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendez  arrive at my door step.  Cage and Mendes look so serious. Being a bad cop is no fun.  Yet, I hear that Cage is hilarious in the movie as well. Of course, there’s violence, guns, sex and drugs. Something Barney would never approach with the kiddies.

Cop dramas are often entertaining, but in the case of Bad Lieutenant, recently rereleased on DVD thanks to Lions Gate, it’s not so much entertaining as it is a strange, compelling journey that really doesn’t end well.

Harvey Keitel plays the titular Bad Lieutenant, a family man, a good Catholic, a thief, a murderer, an inveterate gambler.  It’s this last that’s going to land him neck-deep in trouble as he bets repeatedly on the outcome of the World Series and finds himself running afoul of the very worst bookies have to offer.  But he just may find redemption in pursuing a case involving the rape of a nun.

Bad Lieutenant is not an easy movie to follow.  It’s not a simple movie.  It’s actually rather deep, and sometimes prone to rambling.  Everything that happens is almost just shown to kill time until the next bet.  One particularly memorable sequence involves our cop accosting two young ladies out for an evening.  It’s pretty graphic, and frankly, just features Keitel alternately muttering and shrieking obscenities for most of three minutes.

That and suddenly watching a nun get raped isn’t exactly the kind of thing you want to see, either.  Even if you know it’s coming it’s still not the kind of thing you ever want to see.

Interestingly, neither is Harvey Keitel blubbering on a cathedral floor for nearly four straight minutes, but for a much different reason.

I can’t tell if Bad Lieutenant is trying to be a pompous, overblown waste of film or it just turned out that way.  And yet, at the same time, it’s actually fun, sometimes.  It’s really tough to say conclusively how to feel about Bad Lieutenant, because just as it gets horrible for some reason, and by the time your disgust starts to register, they’ll segue into something new and interesting.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale has no real choice but to award the badly schizophrenic Bad Lieutenant a six out of ten for averaging out to pretty good.  It’s awful, it’s exciting, it’s entertaining, it’s boring.  It’s everything a movie can be, and most of which you don’t want it to be.

Nicolas Cage is at his best bad playing a drug addict and takes sexual favors for bribes.  Werner Herzog created a monster of a movie that makes me cringe, knowing that cops can get this bad.

Here’s a bit of news that slipped through the net. In their own rights, directors Werner Herzog and David Lynch are known as eccentric mavericks, and have made some of the most intriguing, if not inspiring films in the last few decades, from Blue Velvet and Fitzcarraldo to Mulholland Drive and Grizzly Man. So it’s a delight to know that Herzog and Lynch are working together on a film.

The movie, entitled My Son, My Son, was scripted by Herzog and his assistant director, and is based on a true story in which a young man acts out a play by ancient Greek playwright Sophocles in his mind, which eventually culminates in the murder of his mother. It’s an odd premise, and probably only a fragment of the actual core meaning of the film. While this EW article only mentions that Lynch is to act as executive producer, this article, from a later date, states that the two are to co-direct. It would be strange to see two visionary artists work together to direct something, as disagreements would be inevitable,  but it’s an exciting prospect. In the meantime, Herzog is working on a re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant, due out next year.

In other Lynch-related news, an official David Lynch box set, known as the Lime Green set, is due out in the US on November 18th. While containing films The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead (as well as Industrial Symphony and the Dumbland flash series), the big draw is almost 2 hours of deleted scenes from the ultraviolent Wild at Heart, never available before.

Denzel Whitaker is set to star in Bad Lieutenantstaring Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer. Bad Lieutenantis a remake of the Abel Ferrara’s cult classic.

I really liked Whitaker in The Great Debaters. He really showed his talent, just like his father Forest.

Denzel Whitaker at the N.Y. premiere of “The Great Debaters.”

Val Kilmer and  are set hook up with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendez in cop drama Bad Lieutenant, a remake of Abel Ferrara’s cult classic.

The original focused on the depraved escapades of a corrupt policeman (Harvey Keitel) investigating the rape of a nun. The new film features Kilmer as the partner of Cage’s crooked cop and Xzibit as a villain.

Lieutenant most likely captures the spirit of the original, with the main character’s  drug intake, his accepting sexual favors as bribes and other elements that inducement so many to the 1992 version.

Filming is set to begin later in the summer.