Film Flam

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Bark At The Moon

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It’s more than just a little wonderful that Werner Herzog, a mad-man in his own right, made a film with Nicolas Cage.

In recent years, Cage has been mocked and ridiculed for the types of films that he’s starred in. The consensus being that the films he was in were either beneath him or he was inherently too odd for them and distracting as an individual. There’s probably more emotion than truth in those theories, but I never joined either camp. Part everyman silly Jimmy Stewart, part tortured existentialist James Dean, Cage was one of the few actors of his generation who aspired to something beyond celebrity. When I think back on The Rock — arguably a piece of Hollywood fluff - Cage imbue quirks and madcap zaniness that didn’t exist in the nineties outside of Coen Brothers movies.

Nicolas Cage is in a whole other canon of actors who are artists in their own right. Guys who will deliver to you what’s on the page — they’ll bring what you ordered but they decide how it’s cooked, and ultimately dictate what the lasting flavor of a scene will be. In Kick-Ass the task at hand for Cage is to deliver lines in a gravely voice. As an actor he’s handicapped by half of his face being covered up by a superhero cowl. But he’s Nicholas Cage, he’s not just going to give you what you want, he’s going to give you how he sees the world through the characters eyes. Camp. He does his scenes as superhero father Big Daddy with stilted verbal inflections, referencing Adam West’s characterization of Batman in the 1960’s television series.

Like Al Pacino in the late 60’s, Cage brings a focused intensity to his characters and his creation of police Lieutenant Terrence McDonagh is no exception. He’s really striving to channel that twitchy, live wire we remember from a decade ago. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans he seems to have a fascination with his voice, timbre and inflection. It’s all so wild and frayed. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans recalls the work of the man who could break your heart by destroying himself in the most ridiculous ways.

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This type of performance is extremely compelling. Cage’s attempt to dig out something from the core of your his soul to display, regardless of how ugly, strange and uncomfortable it is provides a bitter kind of truth. In Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Cage/McDonagh needs the acid-bath of crack cocaine, gambling and sex to dislodge the demon living inside of him. He’s not isn’t interested in quieting the beast that lurks inside within — he’s trying to find a mountain to exhale the fire inside of him. His mountain is the street and on those streets he screams himself hoarse trying to exorcise what’s inside of him and protect what makes him human: his ability to love. Because he’s not all bad, not entirely. He is capable of love and dignity but gets lost on the way there. It’s this bouncing back and forth that makes Cage interesting to watch. Loud, yes, but always interesting.

Director Werner Herzog on the other hand is interested in the thin line between the two worlds in McKenna’s head. The madness and the teetering between reality and surreality. Herzog’s surrelism is a subjective one. He reserves it for the soundtrack; the screeching of harmonicas and the primal rhyhths of southern blues music. His surrealism is a the hyper-reality. He’s clearly interested in Cage’s posture, a vulture-necked hunching, always scanning for weakness and lurking in shadow. Herzog stirs out the animalistic in the film. Lizards, alligators and Nicolas Cage; demented reptiles moving through a city craving blood and power.

Herzog excels at creating frightening parallels between the raw carnality of nature and the mirror of that in the world. It’s a form of surrealism that isn’t Lynchian in it’s minimalism. It’s the kind of surrealism seen in night-vision footage of criminal surveillance videos or wolves attacking in the night. It’s the depth and clarity of what is instinctually recognizable, the indifference of nature. Herzog and Cage create a Darwinian madness that growls with ferocity, kills the soul, and feeds on empathy — all of this lurks beneath the surface of social contracts and fear of the inside of man’s heart, Cage and Herzog go deep into the bayou of both and comeback with profound ideas of power and forgiveness.

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Data

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Release Date: November 20, 2009
Director: Werner Herzog
Writer: William Finkelstein
Director of Photography: Peter Zeitlinger
Running Time: 121 minutes or 2 hours and 1 minute

Buy | Rent | wikipedia entry

Academics vs. Critics | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Coloring Outside the Lines

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There’s a thing that I do when I write fiction. As I’m writing I see different ideas display themselves to me, not necessarily answers to the what if… question, but paths that I might not have considered. It’s a paranoid process, because the biggest what if is What if I get it wrong?, What if down that road is the right way? Generally, movies avoid this sort of paranoia. You’ve got to trust them, so they march along to an ending that should seem apparent from the get go. Justice will be served, all will be right with the world by the time the titles scroll up toward the heavens.

A Scanner Darkly, like most of the work of Philip K. Dick, isn’t concerned with endings as much as it is with cautious steps. Every step could lead down a dangerous path, a deadly path if you’re not careful. So much thought goes into the how and why that fear renders things immobile.

The world of A Scanner Darkly is a drug-fueled paranoid ramble — but it’s fun. Often movies with drugs anywhere near the plot will portray them as the ultimate evil, a dark and foolish choice where nothing good can come from it. There is that in A Scanner Darkly but there is also community.

In A Scanner Darkly, and most Richard Linklater films, drugs are tools of psychic and philosophical exploration, discussed and dissected in social settings. For all the technological wonders of the film it’s visually just a bunch of people sitting in a room talking to one another about what makes them afraid, and what makes that fear go away. In A Scanner Darkly it’s Substance D; a MacGuffin drug with an apparent high that is difficult to discern from an audiences perspective. Substance D makes you see wild stuff, but that’s more a bug (no pun intended) than a feature. Substance D seems to be more about depression and not living in an empty house filled with the same nothing everyday.

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Director Richard Linklater feeds off of the the free-form mental jazz riffs that spill from Dick’s frenetic drugged-out characters. To them, most of the “real” world is bland and repetiive. Better to seek out other realities; scary and weird, the unknown landscape looms large and unexplored. Skiing down the slopes of ideas churned out by stoners pushing their minds to the limit is an exciting and fascinating journey to watch.

This is what drugs do. They spiral into implosions of the self. Drug users appear passive and useless to the outsider looking in, but a chasm of self is revealed and reflected back to the drug user. In their minds they slam on the gas, collide, carreen and redirect from idea to idea like a psychological bumper car.

There is only pain when you start to wonder what these cerebral Lewis & Clark’s have left behind, and what are they trying so hard to get away from. Because everyone’s reality is their own, the group will always disintergrate. The journeys into ideas always boomerang back to the self.

After surviving a near fatal car crash, the characters assess the probable causes; freak accident or vastly detailed conspiracy? In the end it doesn’t matter. Substance D gets passed around and when one character begins to wonder if maybe his disconnection with reality has anything to do with their lack of answers or trust in them, the group replies “…man, don’t blame the drugs…”.

They’re right. It’s got nothing to do with the drugs, and everything to do with choice. Sometimes another reality is easier to explore when someone else is with you. It’s why going to the movies with a group can better than going alone. A Scanner Darkly is about a drug community. As a non-drug user I don’t think these really exists anymore.

As I understand it some of the most dangerous drug use comes from prescription drugs. The panic, and fear of the numbing blandness and screaming horror of the world has caused people to turn Big Pharma for salvataion.

The evils of A Scanner Darkly aren’t unlike the evils at your local multiplex. Corporations have created drugs that will alter your god, and change the mantra of your internal worship. You will love them, you will worship them. They will fill your voids, and heal your lonely nights; they are experts of your emotions; the new explorers of your mind. All of your dreams and joys will be enginneered by them and birthed into your soul. They wil color the world inside your mind if you let them.

You can get through this of course, you can fight it, but you’ll need friends to help you find your way, and it is this sentiment that holds A Scanner Darkly together.

Yes, everyone’s reality is their own, you can step away from it with the drugs and whiz-bang blockbusters, but when that crumbles and decays your mind will run back into the cave, afraid and lost and begging not to be alone anymore. In these moments you must reassess the things that you love in this world, if you have courage you will venture forth once more into the unknown with a friends hand to guide you as far as the road will take you both.

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Stone (2010)

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Growing up, Robert De Niro meant a lot to me. His work in the 70’s, filled with an alienation and pain, made him more human being than movie star in my eyes. Generations were affected by his soul-scraping work. Edward Norton was clearly influenced by him. His work in John Dahl’s Rounders is his homage Mean Streets Johnny Boy; his nameless character in Fight Club carries the names of De Niro characters, The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pubkin, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. De Niro’s shadow looms large over Norton’s work.

A few years ago, like most, I flocked to see De Niro, Norton and the grandfather of method acting Marlon Brando in The Score. Today, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about that movie. A plot-driven piece designed to make money and not necessarily convey any of the emotions of its players, the movie has since gone on to be deservedly forgotten by the majority of audiences.

I haven’t followed De Niro’s career for some time now. With studio fare like Meet the Fockers and Limitless it seemed that De Niro had given up or found little reward in doing dramatic films; but Stone proves otherwise. Stone, if nothing else, is notable for the return of De Niro’s exploration of characters who are haunted by an anguished existensialism and a deep internalization of emotions caused by fits of philosophical ideas that mock more than they heal.

But don’t get me wrong, there is also a great deal of De Niro phoning things in. With age De Niro has decided to spend energy only on ideas that interest him. The uninteresting gets tossed aside. Like an employee repeating a task for the millionth time; it’s just not worth the emotional strain of reaching. As such, those scenes are forgetttable.

But there are a few scenes that display that De Niro’s razor sharp attention to concepts that interest him. In those scenes, you can see him reaching for the ideas that he had explored so long ago.

The anguish, the anger, and the pain are all still there. None of it with a home. God’s lonely man drives from home to work, if there is good in him or the world, he can’t see it anymore. Nor does he understand the nature of good. Nearing retirement, he sees years that have gone by with more questions than answers. In the time he’s lived the rage inside of him hasn’t been quenched by wisdom, it’s been fueled by indignities, lies, and the failure of the world around him. A man in search of an absolute truth, he seen the answer like a light in the forest, flickering on and off. The peace that he chases would come if he could only reach it long enough to understand it. It’s amazing to watch De Niro articulate the feelings of that shifting goalpost.

It is the feeling that things will work out if only you can believe something that every fiber in your body tells you is wrong and stupid. There’s a part of De Niro’s character that screams to be stupid, to be evil and carefree, but he can’t, and when he tries it only causes the anger in him to circle around again to it’s point of origin: himself.

And so, that’s what Stone turns out to be; a portrait of a spinning top, emotionally it just goes round and round, when it comes in contact with an object it’s inertia is altered some but still it spins on the axis of it’s own rage. These are the bits of Stone that carry a solid emotiional weight, but others are too light and ebb into ideas that are interesting but aren’t articulated well and end up being buried under a great heaps of detritus.

Stone is by no means garbage. It’s simply a film that doesn’t know who it is. It’s in twenty different places at once. All of them interesting. Every character has a motivation and it’s not one you can fully understand or endorse; leading to feelings of disinterest or lack of trust in the movie and where its going. Because you never really trust it, you never really feel too let down when it gets both of you lost on a different path to who knows where.

Along the road through the film you come across interesting ideas, but never stay long enough to care. There’s the node of Edward Norton’s character as De Niro’s Tyler Durden, that doesn’t really come to frution. There’s also a mild Christian-conservative theme that gets very little attention. Milla Jovovich emits an transfixing energy and control between sexual power and female vulnerabilty — it’s a typical female role but she plays it with extrodinary agility. Her performance, as well as everyone else’s, is cut short but what soils the rest of the film; brusque editing and indifferent direction.

It’s hard to blame this on anyone in particular. It’s a bit painful to watch, so many compelling elements, ultimately squandered. You get to understand what it’s like for De Niro’s character, you search the landscape of the film for beauty, for truth, and just when you think you can stand beside it — it’s slippery hand falls from yours and you’re left with disappointment and anger.

I thought I understood… but it’s just more bullshit.

Fuller_Pacino_Screentest from Heiko van der Scherm on Vimeo.

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SAM FULLER AUDITIONS FOR ‘THE GODFATHER II’ WITH AL PACINO via Dangerous Minds

A few things:

Sam Fuller. Sam Fuller. Wow.

I think as a character, Fuller looks amazing, but seems to be reading the script for the first time. He’s also a little wonky physically. He leans in, leans back, changes inflections in his speech, and generally seems to be a bit lost with the character. Though as a pulp-meister extraordinaire he gravitates towards the meat in Coppola’s dialogue. Things like “…it’s more important than money”, are delivered with the kind of gusto and pizazz that you’d see in one of Fuller’s films. Hammy, and a little over the top, sure, but that was the style that Fuller knew like the back of his hand. He’s in a different film altogether.

But man, is he making some interesting choices. When I watch this clip I just wonder what’s going through Fuller’s mind, reacting to a young actor like Pacino, who’s strange naturalism must’ve thrown the elder actor off some.

Also, how great is quiet Pacino? I sure do miss that quiet. Made all the explosions and outbursts that came later, both in the Godfather films and in other characters, seem like boiling kettles of gasoline. End of an era.