Déjà Vu: You've Never Seen Something Quite Like This Before

My review for Tony Scott's masterpiece, Déjà Vu, is now up at Cinelogue. A digital version of Vertigo, Scott's film probes issues of obsession, fractured identity and time travel, always focusing on the emotion over narrative. It represents the apotheosis of Scott's poetic chaos, taking his complicated, arrhythmic preference for the subjective, stream-of-consciousness close-up and incorporating it into the always-corkscrewing nature of time travel. Plot holes abound, but Scott masterfully controls the aspects of the film he wants to stress most. For all the film's talk of terrorism and its open acknowledgment of such travesties as Oklahoma City, 9/11 and Katrina, Déjà Vu is largely apolitical. Instead, it gives us the alternative to the false closure of revenge: the desire to go back and prevent the whole thing from happening, saving hundreds, maybe thousands, and especially that one person you'd give anything to see again.

Please check out my review at Cinelogue.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

The release of every new Nicolas Cage feature brings with it a question: will we be getting the Nicolas Cage of actorly fearlessness -- the one who will go to any lengths for his character in films like Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas and Bringing Out the Dead -- or the Nicolas Cage who looked at the paycheck and not the script, who is just as fearless but in all the wrong ways. You know, the Cage who will thunder such choice lines as "HOW'D IT GET BURRRRRNNNED?!" like William Shatner's mentally deficient, incestuous lovechild.

With Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans, Werner Herzog's kind-of, sort-of, not-even-remotely remake/sequel of Abel Ferrara's 1992 opus, the answer to that question is "yes." Cage's Terrence McDonagh roams the streets of a post-Katrina New Orleans looking for any means to distract him from the back pain he suffered in an uncharacteristic display of heroism, as much a junkie as the suspects he questions in the case of murdered African immigrants. Were this anyone else's movie -- and I promise that it couldn't possibly be -- Terrence might be a symbol of the U.S. government's appalling reaction to the hurricane, his stance as the lawman who ignores the law cruising uncomfortably close to the hysterical reactions to looting and the Bush administration's despicable inaction. And perhaps, in some way, it is; in response to my recent review of Aguirre and my brief discussion of the warped colonial microcosm Herzog created, Ed Howard (author of the estimable blog Only the Cinema) remarked that political readings of Herzog's work are too narrow, that the auteur cares for the endless contradictions and mysteries of humanity itself and not the petty ways in which it is expressed. He's absolutely right, but I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss potential political explorations within his corpus; one should not use them as a bedrock for criticism of the man, but politics are one way that the ideas and dreams of mankind are exhibited.

However, if I were to truly delve into Herzog's mind -- a terrifying prospect, but something a viewer must do with all of his films as they are so inexorably tied to his skewed perspective -- I would indeed expand the scope: Cage, clearly kneeling at the altar of Herzog's insane muse Klaus Kinski, is so unhinged that he becomes a force of nature. When those levees broke, water wasn't the only thing they unleashed upon New Orleans. McDonagh, who sees hallucinations of dancing souls and exerting an inexplicable control over those with whom he crosses paths. Katrina, it seems, set loose the white devil, master and slave to powders that have replaced old voodoo concoctions.

The thought of Werner Herzog directing a police procedural likely doesn't leap out at the average filmgoer as much as Nicolas Cage in a role that promises utmost hyperbole, which is a shame. If more people knew about the director, the prospect of him even nominally approaching such a plot-heavy genre as "crime drama" is funnier than anything Cage has ever done. Indeed, Bad Lieutenant takes so many left turns that the fleeting moments where it actually plays the genre straight are as uproarious as the rest of the film, which departs not only from any identifiable genre trappings but reality itself.

This is a film where a police detective rips out an elderly woman's oxygen hose to get information out of her caregiver. This is a film that cuts from a moment of rivalry between police officers to a shot of an alligator nearby. This is a film where that isn't the only cutaway to a reptile: it opens on a shot of a snake slithering through the fetid waters flowing in the city streets and features an extended sequence between Terrence and a pair of imaginary iguanas (singing iguanas, no less, and not of the computer-animated variety). "Who but Cage could regard an iguana sideways in a look of suspicion and disquiet?" asked Roger Ebert in his review of the film; "You need to keep an eye on an iguana. The bastards are always up to something." With all respect, Roger, I think the iguanas might be the ones casting glances at him.

Herzog has crafted here his finest and most inexplicable comedy since his great Stroszek, though even the broad brushstroke of comedy might still be to restrictive a label for this film. Herzog has directed numerous operas in his career, primarily the works of Richard Wagner (he even directed Lohengrin one year at Bayreuth, king of the opera/classical music festivals), and Bad Lieutenant is certainly outlandish enough for the stage. Unlike the serious-minded opera of Wagner, Bad Lieutenant recalls the comedic German opera of the singspiel, particularly semi-dramatic works like Beethoven's Fidelio (which also features a rescue in a cell and, even more incidentally, was once directed by Herzog).

As is nearly always the case with Herzog's films (at least on the first go), I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, yet I'm in love with its delirium. Herzog packed his cast with performers who are no strangers to going above and beyond the call of duty -- Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dourif, Val Kilmer(!) -- yet they seem to recognize that any attempts to approach Cage's mania would simply melt the film stock and give reserved but no less entertaining performances. Cage's, though, is his finest in years, his best since Lord of War if not his otherworldly turn in Adaptation: he is a star going nova, yet he also has his moments of lucidity and deduction, and we can see that he can be a good cop -- in a memorable early scene and the only one to completely work as a straight piece of cop drama, he displays a keen insight into interrogating suspects without forcing guns to their heads. The original Bad Lieutenant was no standard police drama, what with its deliberately suffocating Catholic guilt fogging over the narrative, and Herzog manages to sidestep the genre without using any of Ferrara's themes or techniques; as he did with his other, wonderful recent foray into American cinema, Rescue Dawn, Herzog displays just enough respect (or tolerance) for a rigid genre to dabble in it for a few moments before subverting everything in his path, not out of discontent and irascibility but through the simple nature of his being. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans is a portrait of its titular city via its rampaging demon, giving its darkly humorous, endlessly quotable script an undercurrent of sadness: for once, the man who could dominate the world around him is not the hero of Herzog's focus but a tragic victim.

The Doors

Oliver Stone might have fallen to the wayside this decade, but I have already made my feelings clear on the level of talent he displayed throughout the '80s and '90s. There was one black sheep from this period, however, that I knew I had to confront some day, Stone's biopic of Doors frontman Jim Morrison. Indeed, that Stone would call his film The Doors is the first offense of the film, as he doesn't give a damn about any of the other members. Unfortunately, it is not remotely the last, and after I suffered through this empty display of fandom I wanted to run back to JFK or Platoon to remind me that Stone could mix technical flash with something, anything, of substance.

The Doors opens with Morrison at UCLA's film school, weathering both criticism and accolades from his peers over his avant-garde short film. When the professor asks Morrison for his own thoughts on the picture, the young man stands up and announces he's quitting. Later, he tells his buddy Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) that he's off movies; he wants to be a musician now. Stone goes through the motions of introducing guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) and drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon), and before we've even had time to care about any of these characters we are meant to celebrate them landing a record deal after shocking audiences at the Whiskey a Go Go in L.A.

At least the pacing of this initial segment suggests that this glorified piece of fan service will be over quickly, a fluff piece that annoys those who want something of substance but its inoffensive in its brevity. If only that were the case; no, Stone suddenly slams on the brakes to pore over the minutiae of Doors mythology, much of which, according to Manzarek, is a fabrication. He distorts infamous incidents such as the band's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Miami concert were Morrison was arrested for indecent exposure. No real reflection exists, other than the constant focus upon alcohol and its destructive influence on the singer.

Val Kilmer received considerable acclaim for his performance as Morrison, but the only impressive facet I can identify is that he sang the songs himself. Well, I should blame the screenplay, but Kilmer clearly took to it as if it was a great piece of writing, because he does his best to sell Jim as a tragic hero. Instead, Kilmer and Stone inadvertently paint Morrison as a drunken, narcissistic fool; Morrison is his biggest fan, and he buys into his own image as the Lizard King with such fervor that he not only lashes out in drunken arrogance but places himself above petty human feelings. His mounting obsession with death is not so much morbid as grating and vain.

Therein lies the ultimate irony of Stone's vision: in a quest to paint Morrison as a dreamer undone by vices, he instead created a damning portrait of the vacuity of the hippie ideology, one whose good ideas of freedom, love and peace were snuffed out by its own buried sense of objectivistic greed and drug-induced mental stagnation. Ebert compared the film to "being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you're not drinking," but that hardly scratches the surface of what makes Morrison so unpleasant. Alcohol does not turn Morrison into a monster; it is merely the monster's beverage of choice. The band, understandably, grows to resent him almost as much as we do. Their producer, Paul Rothchild (Michael Wincott), gives an obviously rehearsed spiel about how he watched Janis Joplin ruin herself and won't sit by and watch it again, but he does not follow his words with actions. One senses that the band just wants him to go away, and if he dies so be it. I must confess that I have rarely wanted a character to die as badly as I kept waiting for Morrison to finally snuff it in a bathtub.

The only moments I enjoyed involved Morrison's mistress Patricia Keneally (Kathleen Quinlan), a rock journalist who engages in various rituals of witchcraft, including drinking blood. Her weirdness cures Morrison of his alcoholic impotence -- itself hilarious when juxtaposed with his sex god preening -- if only for a moment. But this is a minor part of a seemingly endless film, and instead of this warped, off-kilter romance we must focus on the frightening one between Morrison and his partner Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan).

Stone's camera pans through the Père Lachaise Cemetery at the end are meant to enshrine Morrison as one of the key figures of his time, but as the director runs over the grave markers of such artists as Proust and Rossini, he only emphasizes the dark irony of Morrison's life that he brings to light. I have to question my own belief that Stone wanted to paint an ultimately supportive portrait of Morrison, because by the end of this film only a madman or a fool would think of Morrison as anything else than the drunken lout he detractors always took him for, a sophomoric poet whose crap lyrics made for great rock precisely because -- if we all break out our degrees from the Lester Bangs School of Rock Appreciation -- they were simple-minded, chauvinistic, and made to be played loud. Stone wanted to make a eulogy for the '60s, and instead he crafted its most damning condemnation since Gimme Shelter.