Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is submerged from the start. Sloshing around in a flooding police station, Sergeant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) and his lacky partner Stevie (Val Kilmer) ransack a locker room, pocketing dirty pictures of a colleagues wife, snickering maliciously. Their joking isn’t imbued with puerile innocence, it comes weighted...
Small Actors: Brad Dourif
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans is, more than anything else, a showcase for Nicolas Cage. It barely works as a police procedural, and it stands out as a pretty odd entry in the already-eclectic oeuvre of Werner Herzog. What value the film has comes almost entirely from Cage’s aversion to consistency from scene...
Mr. Arkadin: Une Grosse Legume
In my last post I wondered offhandedly who wrote the novelization of Mr. Arkadin. As you can see clearly on the book’s cover, it is attributed to the one and only Orson Welles. But as usual with him, things are not always what they seem. Numerous times, Welles is quoted denying involvement with the creation of the...