At the Movies With Peter Travers: “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”
https://player.ooyala.com/player.js?width=400&height=300&embedCode=t4MzgzMTqhi0aISw0NqVj8Mq8VNk_B4g&autoplay=1https://player.ooyala.com/player.swf?embedCode=t4MzgzMTqhi0aISw0NqVj8Mq8VNk_B4g&version=2
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and there’s plenty of turkeys in theaters. Thankfully, Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers is here to tell you what to see and what to definitely avoid this four-day weekend. For instance, why see 2012 or New Moon when you can instead opt for the latest adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road starring Viggo Mortensen? Why see Old Dogs starring
Robin Williams and John Travolta or the silly swordplay in Ninja Assassin when you could instead save your money and spend it on Black Friday?
There is one movie that’s out this week that Travers recommends, a winning wishbone so to speak and a movie “so crazy, it’s almost endearing,” called Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Directed by oddball auteur Werner Herzog and featuring one of the craziest, zaniest performances of Nicolas Cage‘s crazy, zany career, like the film’s title suggests, Bad Lieutenant is about a police officer in the Big Easy who’s on the wrong side of the law.
He abuses every drug known to man, has sex with prostitutes while forcing their criminal boyfriends to watch and commits several other felonies before his shift is through. Throw in a hallucination of an iguana that Cage frequently engages in conversations with and you have what Travers lovingly calls a “bugfuck” of a movie.
Cage has done “bugfuck” before, in Vampire’s Kiss and Face-Off and the unintentionally hilarious Wicker Man remake, but this is Cage in his weirdest and strangely riveting role yet. Plus, his partner-in-crime is 50 Cent’s new BFF Val Kilmer, so you know you have a recipe for insanity. Bad Lieutenant is a remake of the Harvey Keitel film of the same name, but a remake in name only. That 1992 film was a drama, this film is…it’s essentially just Cage going nuts. This Thanksgiving, go nuts with him.
Read this week’s reviews:
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
• The Road
• Me and Orson Welles
• The Twilight Saga: New Moon
• 2012