Venue: Tyneside Cinema
Dates: Saturday 27th March
Time: 7pm
Director Werner Herzog / USA 2009 / 122 min
Certificate 18 / In English
There can be few more daring and rule-breaking directors working in film than Werner Herzog. This is the man who, allegedly, used a gun to keep actor Klaus Kinski on the set of his legendary film Fitzcarraldo. His newest film is an absolute blast. Nicholas Cage is compellingly unhinged as the lead, a rogue New Orleans detective
equally as devoted to his job as he is to scoring drugs.
He dominates a film that was reportedly funded by tax incentives to attract industry back to post-Katrina New Orleans, but which seems not quite the kind of tourist-friendly-feature the funders might have had in mind. Herzog and Cage make a great partnership, both throwing caution to the wind with the results being a wild, daring and maniacally humorous masterpiece.
Tickets: £7 / £6, call 0845 217 9909
Buy Online
The camera trails a snake as it coils through flood water, and disappears between the bars of a jail. Imagined iguanas flop about in the middle of a stake-out, as the Bad Lieutenant wigs out. Werner Herzog has bent the straight-to-DVD cop thriller slash Nicolas Cage vehicle to his will. He actually plays it fairly straight- up to a point. Tracking unexpectedly close to crime scenes; taking in the squad-room banter, the streets of after-the-flood New Orleans. But Herzog has as keen an eye for shooting the incongruous as the Lieutenant has for lifting narcotics, and it is these moments, alongside the laugh/laughing-out-loud derangement of Nicolas Cage (a man who long ago took to heart Adam Ant’s adage that ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of’) that really lift this film above the tired norm. Cage ends up looking almost dignified, or at least wise in his decisions for the first time in a long time, and every stock situation in the book is either twisted absurdly, shot full of poetry, or made weirdly poignant. The best part is, these turns arise from the narrative so unexpectedly that the imagination on display is actually moving. The risks somehow really work. There is a fantastic supporting cast (Val Kilmer! Brad Dourif as the bookie!), a great choice of blues tunes, and the unanswerable question “Do fish have dreams?” It’s nowhere near as shocking as the Ferrera film, but it isn’t supposed to be. Highly recommended.