Screenhead

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

About three years ago, I joined most of the rest of humanity and got cable.  Dish Network, specifically–great stuff.  But it was about that time that I pretty much stopped caring about what network TV had to offer.  It seemed like they could never put out much that wasn’t already available.  Thus, when I got my hands on a box set of the second season of Third Watch on DVD, I found myself pretty surprised by what they saw.

Third Watch, so named for the period of time between three and eleven PM, follows the lives and adventures of various cops, firefighters and paramedics in the world of first responders.  And as they tackle situations of every size and variety, from the small ones of people with a penchant for dialing 911 over the least little thing and killer parakeets run amok to the nigh-apocalyptic of cop-killing snipers and kidnapping victims buried alive, we discover that life isn’t all about chasing perps and patching wounds.  These people who we call heroes are just as human as the rest of us.  They make decisions, just like we do.  They have tragedies, just like we do.  And over the course of several months, we’ll get to see a lot of them.

Third Watch is a strange little animal.  It manages to do two things, and equally well.  It manages to humanize the men and women of the police, fire and rescue departments of New York City, and it also manages to regularly annoy the viewer with more schmaltz than a chicken ranch.  In case you’re wondering, schmaltz is both the Yiddish word for chicken fat and a colloquial term for maudlin sentimentality, at least one of the two is well represented in Third Watch.

The worst part of it all was how differently this show would make me feel WITHIN episodes.  They would literally manage to make me glad I was watching, by putting in something really exciting or something funny or even just something interesting, and then they would proceed to blow all that solid good feeling by doing something so cheesy in an attempt at a tearjerker moment  that I couldn’t help but be put off.

There’s a lot to like here–if you were fond of shows like ER and NYPD Blue and suchlike, you’ll probably be into this one.  The real advantage is that it manages to combine several different subgenres–it’s part cop show, and part doctor show, and part firefighter show and even some comedy and drama thrown in for added flavor.  The only real problem with it is that some times they’ll jack up the drama a whole lot more than I care for myself, to where it goes past a slight extra flavoring and into an overpowering force that just goes way too far.

But if you’re okay with that sort of thing–if you can handle a little extra drama in your television, and if you like cop drama and firefighter drama and medical drama with just a little extra slug of comedy and of course that extra heaping helping of drama–then you’ll definitely enjoy Third Watch.

Season two will hit your DVD players July 7th.

Popularity: unranked [?]