Film: "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans"

This Werner Herzog directed film features Nicolas Cage playing the titular cop on the edge, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department who, thanks to chronic back pain, has found himself lumbered with a serious addiction to prescription pain killers and anything else he can get his hands on. He also seems quite happy to sexually exploit random members of the public, especially if he can also shake them down for drøgs to fuel his habit.

The film does not just follow the lieutenant as he aimlessly trawls through the crescent city trying to sate his appetites. Instead, he finds himself investigating a rather nasty gang-related murder case. In broad terms, the plot follows a police-procedural trajectory, except that the cop at the centre of the case is a raving lunatic (c.f. when the cops are on a stake-out and he starts complaining about all the iguanas running around them, to quizzical stares from his colleagues, or when he interrupts his high class prostitute girlfriend's work saying "Have you got any coke left? I took what I thought was cocaine but it turned out to be heroin, and I'm due at work in half an hour"; why is my life not more like this?) At the same time, he is conflicted – he seems determined to hunt down the murderers, and away from his struggles with his own dark urges he is capable of real tenderness and warm human interaction. Nicolas Cage's performance here has been justly praised – suddenly we have been given back underground film actor Cage, a man whose presence in a film marked it out as having a certain eccentric quality. Top marks. But Herzog also extracts great performances from the other principals. I was particularly struck by comic genius Jennifer Coolidge in a rare straight rule as the cop's father's drink sodden wife, but they are all great. At the same time, the real star here is Werner Herzog himself.

And finally, what is the link between this film and Abel Ferrara's banned-in-Ireland Bad Lieutenant? From something I read Herzog saying, it seems like the studio had brought out Ferrara's film, owning the name, and they reckoned that throwing a similar title onto Herzog's own film about an out-control-cop would generate a bit of media buzz. Which, I suppose, it has. I find myself wondering now whether there could a series of Bad Lieutenant films, all made by different film auteurs. This could be the future of cinema – I'm really looking forward to the Tarantino, Coen Brothers, and Merchant-Ivory versions.

One final thought – the bad lieutenant's more bestial behaviour is arguably driven by his trouble with back pain. Yet I myself am, as I write, suffering from (admittedly mild) back pain and am self medicating with a dangerous booze cocktail*. Now, is there any danger that I could turn into some kind of crazed maniac? Is there any possibility of Werner Herzog making a film about me called something like Bad Civil Servant – Port of Call Kildare Street?

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* But don't worry guys, I can handle it… I'm not drinking vodka out of saucers yet.

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Do You Like A Laugh?

I have long thought of Werner Herzog as a bit of a roffler, albeit one of a wry and ironic nature. Last night I saw his film Encounters at the End of the World, making the astonishing discovery that there are many people out there who find Herzog side-splittingly hilarious. These were, of course, people in the audience, not in the film. A particular offender was some woman who would cackle away maniacally at pretty much everything that Herzog said or showed on screen. She was not the only one. The guffawing and oafish frat boy a little bit to my left was another candidate for instant justice, but it was the cackling witch who most made me regret my decision to see the film. Compared to her, Viz Comic's Fat Slags giggle like virginal schoolgirls, and she subjected us to her deranged laughter at every opportunity. "Here is an English vulcanologist," said Mr Herzog. "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!" she responded. "This man is an expert on seals." "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!" "This confused penguin is marching to certain death." "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!"

I have always thought that there is something of the mentalist about people who shun the cinema, but maybe I am starting to see their point of view. For all that, I still recommend seeing this film. It is worth seeing in the cinema, even though you run the risk of being stuck among amused munters, as it is the kind of picture that really gains from being seen on the big screen.

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My Boring Weekend

I finished the weekend gone by with a dreadful sense of having pissed it away. In an effort to make my life seem more exciting to myself, I will now list the things I did when I was not staring into space or looking at shite on the internet.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to see a 1950s film called Gun Crazy in the IFI. It is a B-Movie about this guy who is obsessed with guns yet unable to hurt a fly. Sadly for him, he falls in with a bad girl who is also crazy about guns but perfectly able and willing to kill anyone who gets in her way. They embark on a life of crime. You can guess how it ends. The film has a very noir feel to it – great use of shadows and general noir shady-lady action, even if the plot is not really noir as such. For all that the story was maybe a bit slight, it was really well filmed, with some striking shots taken from the back seat of a car (one long tracking shot building up to a bank heist in particular). There was also a lovely tracking shot of the guy walking through a meat packing factory (past endless rows of cadavers) while on his way to do a job. I reckon the film is worth seeing just for the look of it, though I wish they had been showing The Big Combo, the originally advertised film by the same director.

On Saturday night, I watched a DVD of film Aguirre – Wrath of God. This was Werner Herzog's breakthrough film, and it starred Klaus Kinski as the eponymous conquistador. Together with Fitzcarraldo and The Making of Fitzcarraldo it forms a loose trilogy of films about nutters boating up and down the Amazon. In this one, Aguirre is taking part in an expedition to find the fabled city of El Dorado, which the Spanish believe to be located somewhere down the Amazon. The opening scene communicates the folly of this endeavour, as we see an army of conquistadors humping loads of crap down the side of a mountain into the jungle. It is easy to tell that this will not end well, and indeed it does not – by the end of it, Aguirre is trying to conquer the world with an army of squirrel monkeys. That is an odd thing about this film – it is a tale of madness and delusion, but it is oddly humorous. It also has one of the great spooky film soundtracks of all time, by the Krautrock sensations Popul Vuh.

On Sunday afternoon I went to visit the Dublin Jewish Museum, one of the great local attractions I had never hitherto made it to. Where I live is broadly speaking the heart of what was once the Jewish area of Dublin (with the Jewish community reputedly now concentrated out in Terenure). The museum is a great old-school museum, largely just a collection of random bits of stuff. At times I got the impression that this was a museum primarily aimed at the Dublin Jewish community, with the preponderance of old photos being so that people could see what their neighbours parents used to look like. There is some wonderful detail in it. The first mention of Jews in Ireland comes from some monasteries annals, where it records several arriving from abroad on a boat and then being sent away again*. I also liked the photographs of all the taxis some guy owned.

I have tended to think of Ireland as somewhere largely untroubled by anti-Semitism, for all that there were some unsavoury incidents**. The museum made me think again about this, as it has a section reproducing some rather crazy pamphlets produced the odder end of Irish life. I was also struck by several reproduced advertisements from the Dublin Tweed Company, who proudly boasted that no Jews were in their employ. That said, you do not really get much sense from the museum that Irish Jews led or lead now a sadface life of endless persecution.

One thing I thought the Jewish Museum could have done better would be to give out (or sell) some kind of local area map that would guide you to what were once Jewish community centres or businesses in the area. They could probably get sponsorship for this from the Bretzel, this being a local bakery, no longer owned by Jews but still making kosher bread and thus, apart from the museum, the only functioning link to the area's Jewish past. Sadly, the Bretzel's treats have been outsourced and are now non-kosher***, so eat them at your peril.

That evening I finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin's novel about weirdo androgynous aliens and their funny planet. I will talk more of this subsequently, but the many Le Guin fans reading will be pleased to hear that I enjoyed this book a lot.

*It seems like that was a particularly exciting time for the monastic chronicler. One of the four other noteworthy things that happened that year was the local bishop having a rest somewhere.

**of which the Limerick pogrom is the most notorious. Although nothing like the kind of pogrom you would get in Tsarist Russia, this early 20th century boycott of Jewish businesses did see many Jewish people flee from that city; given that this is Limerick we are talking about, some may say that the boycott was indirectly doing them a favour.

***what do you do to confectionary to make it non-kosher?

Nightmare Before Christmas 2007, Sunday: Little Dieter Wants To Fly

On Sunday morning, ATP TV were showing this documentary by Werner Herzog, about some German guy called Dieter who joined the US Navy air force during the Vietnam War. He was eventually shot down over enemy territory, and locked up in one of those scary prisoner of war camps you see in films. After a bit he busted loose with some other guy and they tried to escape to freedom. Dieter made it, the other guy didn't. What is funny about the film is that Dieter – who spends a lot of the film talking to camera, often in the places where unpleasant things happened to him – seems like an incredibly chirpy and well-adjusted fellow, even while describing the grimmest of events. "Watching my friend being killed in front of me, it was terrible. I wanted to die too… but here I am, let's party burr burr burr" seemed to be his attitude. Herzog wasn't really having it, so all his narration was all "The pointlessness of human existence is revealed yet again by Dieter's desperate attempts to put a happy face on his travails etc.". I reckon these two would make a great comedy double act.

Herzog recently made a drama film about Dieter's story, with crazy man Christian Bale playing the German pilot. I suppose I have given away a lot of the plot in the last paragraph. Ho ho ho.

One odd thing about this film is that it got me wondering if Herzog has a bit of a thing for bears. You are familiar of course with his Grizzly Man film, about that guy who made friends with grizzly bears and was then eaten by one. And recently I saw a film showing of his Kaspar Hauser, which features a circus and a performing bear. In Little Dieter Wants To Fly, Dieter talks about how when he was lost in the jungle and all alone, a bear started following him around. He began to see the bear as his friend, as it was the only living thing with which he was having any interaction. Then he realised that the bear was just waiting for him to die, so that he could eat him. "But I didn't mind, he was still my friend," says Dieter.

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Film (Cinema): “The Grizzly Man”

You may have read in the paper a couple of years back about this guy and his girlfriend who were eaten by a bear in the wilds of Alaska. As it happened, the guy had been spending summers with the bears for the previous eleven years and reckoned he had got the hang of interacting with them. The other bizarre feature of his death was that it was recorded on audio – in the confusion of the attack a camcorder (with the lens cap still on) was activated, recording for posterity the guy struggling for his life and advising the girlfriend to run for it in a futile attempt to save her life.

Tim Treadwell was the bear guy’s name. It turned out that in his many years hanging out with the bears he had compiled a lot of video-footage, both of bears doing bear stuff and of himself talking to camera. He had also become relatively famous, spreading the word of how kewl bears are to schoolchildren everywhere and appearing on Lenoman a couple of times (being asked once whether he would one day be eaten by a bear).

Now Werner Herzog has got his paws on the Treadwell’s footage, and has produced a film from it and his own interviews with people who knew Treadwell or were associated with his death (such as the coroner who presided over the inquest). A lot of it is about how disturbed Treadwell is, with Herzog doing a lot of grappling with the question of what kind of lunatic would spend their time camped out in the middle of nowhere with monstrous animals for companions. He also marvels at Treadwell’s skills with the camera and ability to approach filming in a methodical manner considerably divorced from the idea you would otherwise have of him as some kind of naively disorganised nut-job. Treadwell’s footage is very striking, both in terms of the beauty of nature and the majesty of the bears on the one hand, and of his ability to interact with bears. There are a lot of scenes in this film where a bear starts growling at him very aggressively indeed and he manages to just face them down and save his life. I suppose it helped that he had got to know these animals over a number of years, and they had developed some sense of him as that weird thing which does not act in a normal manner and is hence best avoided. It is telling that Treadwell was eaten by a bear who had wandered into the area and which he had not developed this kind of rudimentary rapport.

Grizzly bears are very impressive and very fierce animals. They are huge, for one thing, and this is something you maybe only grasp when you have something human sized beside them. They also do great strange stuff like eating their young in times of food shortages. One thing I do wish the film had done was focus a little bit more on the bears, as it ended without very much being communicated about what they do and how they interact with each other.

The other fascinating thing about all this was the strangeness of many of the other people whose lives crossed Treadwell’s. One great strange character is a woman who was his lover at one stage but remained his friend and worked with him in whatever Bear Love Foundation he had founded. And there is the coroner, already mentioned, who seems to have approached Herzog’s interviewing as his opportunity to ham it up big-time. Herzog himself is a calm and measured character by contrast, but he does seem to inhabit a world of existential bleakness, commenting at one stage that all Treadwell’s ideas on the harmony of nature and his rapport with the bears are entirely illusory, with chaos and disorder being the real principles that govern the universe (leading Mark S on ILX to suggest that it is a shame he did not provide the narration for “MARCH OF THE PENGUINS”). And there is an amusing bit where he plays some footage of Treadwell ranting to camera like a lunatic, denouncing the Alaskan park services in the most deranged fashion. “I have seen this kind of madness from actors before” the frequent director of Klaus Kinski laconically comments.

So, Treadwell, mad guy who thought he had a rapport with bears, bear then eats him – a cautionary tale about how humans and nature are profoundly different and the boundaries between them should never be breached. Perhaps, but one very striking thing from Treadwell’s footage is that he seems to have struck up a genuine rapport with this arctic fox, with the animal displaying the kind of relaxed demeanour in his company that suggests the easy familiarity of actual friendship. Maybe if Treadwell had stuck to animals too small to eat him we would be hailing him as someone who had breached the boundary between humanity and nature, and lived to tell the tale.