Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans
The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival is delighted to announce two additions to the 2009 programme in advance of public booking opening this weekend.
The UK premiere of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans will have two screenings on Friday 23 October.
When it was announced one of cinema’s great iconoclasts, Werner Herzog, would be ‘re-imagining’ the work of another by spinning Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant into something new, it’s fair to say that eyebrows, not to mention a few hackles, were raised.
Yet Herzog is right to insist this is not a remake, and moving the action from New York to New Orleans is indicative of how far apart the films are from each other; from sleaze and Catholicism in The Big Apple to the devastation and lizards of The Big Easy. Nicolas Cage is Terence McDonagh, one of the few cops left in town after a post-Katrina exodus, which is enough to get him promoted.
Crippled by a back injury he sustained during the hurricane, the prescription drugs do little to ease his pain, so he turns to the hard stuff, often having a snort with Frankie (Eva Mendes), a high class hooker he thinks he’s protecting, though, more often than not, she ends up looking out for him.
When McDonagh is put in charge of the investigation into the brutal murder of a family, his moral compass gets lost and his behaviour becomes ever more erratic. Is he out of his depth or out of his mind? Cage is on electrifying form here, putting in his most animated performance since he played Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart, while the film’s audacious humour is its trump card.
Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant was truly daring and brilliant, but it would be hard to argue that it was ever this much fun.
The UK premiere of Mandy Stein’s Burning Down The House: The Story of CBGB will screen on Friday 16, Saturday 17 and Wednesday 21 October.
When Hilly Kristal opened CBGB in New York’s Bowery district in 1973, he’d intended to showcase the music that those letters stood for; country, bluegrass, blues. From the time Television played their first gigs there, it was revered as the birthplace of punk, and the place from where The Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith and Talking Heads all emerged. Described by Joey Ramone as ‘the womb of creativity’, it became a rock ‘n’ roll mecca that was mythologised unlike any other.
Never mind the tales of needles in its toilets and shit on its floor, or that every joker from Spinal Tap to Vanilla Ice would play there over the years, when it closed in October 2006, it did feel that part of pop music’s history had been abandoned.
Mandy Stein’s brilliantly realised documentary presents the history of the venue, featuring contributions from CBGB employees, punters and, of course, a number of the artists who played there, from Sting to Henry Rollins.
It also relates the story of the failed campaign to keep it open, which, as it involves a feud with the non-profit homeless charity which owned the building and an attempt to move the club as a franchise to Las Vegas, is fittingly bizarre in itself. As much as anything, the film emerges as a touching tribute to Kristal, whose passion and charisma made CBGB what it was.
The Festival runs from October 14 - 29.
Tagged in BFI