Men on the verge of nervous breakdowns: 'A Single Man' and 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call -- New Orleans'
"BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS"
A cop thriller at the venerable art house, Burns Court Cinemas? Starring Nicolas Cage no less? No, you’re reading this right. The film is a riff on the terrific 1992 Abel Ferrarra film "Bad Lieutenant" with Harvey Keitel. Taking the same type character, a corrupt drug-addled cop, and new storyline, legendary German director Werner Hertzog ("Grizzly Man," "Fitzcarraldo") spins an over-the-top Nicolas Cage to give an incredibly entertaining performance that he couldn’t phone in, as he has on recent projects like "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" and "Knowing."
A great supporting cast with Eva Mendes ("Hitch") and Jennifer Coolidge ("Legally Blonde") gives its all. A great script and Hertzog’s unique type of visual surrealism make it, at times, slip into a hilariously funny parody of bad cop films.
Set in post Katrina New Orleans, Terence McDonagh (Cage) was a pretty good cop in a family of good cops until he hurt his back, got permanent pain and legal pain pills. Now his complicated life includes a prostitute girlfriend (Mendes), an alcoholic father (Tom Bower) with a boozy wife (Coolidge), and the task of solving the slaughter of a whole family of African immigrants. All the while, he’s snatching illegal drugs wherever he can to keep the pain at bay until he realizes where the drugs come from.
"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call" is an entertaining, thinking man’s cop thriller with new angles from artistic flourishes.
"A SINGLE MAN"
Fashion designer now writer/director Tom Ford’s first film project is a visually stunning meditation on grief. Actor Colin Firth ("Bridget Jones Diary," TV’s "Pride and Prejudice") gets the role of a lifetime and gives a career best performance as a closeted gay man who loses the love of his life in a car wreck. Based on the landmark Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, Ford is able to show the social conditions and conventions of 1962 when most gays were "invisible" in plain sight, to keep their jobs and lives private.
Colin Firth and Julianne Moore star in "A Single Man."
Set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, British professor George Falconer (Firth) teaches at a small college in Southern California and lives quietly with his long time partner, architect Jim (Matthew Goode, "Match Point") until tragedy strikes and George is alone.
Months later, George decides to end the pain and spends a day making arrangements, saying goodbye to long ago lover and best friend Charley (Julianne Moore, "Children of Men") and meeting some potential new friends – a beautiful young hustler Carlos (super model Jon Kortajarena) and one of his students, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, "About a Boy") who has a crush on George.
Ford suffers a little from the ‘first director" syndrome where he puts everything he can in the film because he may never get the chance again. He gets a bit carried away with film references, scenes that are homages to his favorite directors Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodovar and Wong Kar Wei, and the incredible artistic (dare we say fashion) perfection of every shot in the film. Nevertheless, I enjoyed all this visual perfection very much. The story and script are so moving and linger long after the final frame on screen.