Salon.com > Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Nic Cage: The genius of the full-throttle freak

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:30:00 +0000

This weekend, Nicolas Cage was arrested for domestic abuse charges in New Orleans after a drunken fight with his wife. New York magazine couldn't help making the comparison to Charlie Sheen, perhaps as an apology for being late to the "female battery" outrage train after all major media outlets glossed over that particular section of Sheen's history.

The only problem? Nic Cage was not involved in a "domestic assault." He and his wife were drunkenly arguing about which house they lived in (LOL), he "grabbed her arm," the cops came, and Nic screamed "Arrest me!" until they finally did. His wife is not pressing charges. Dog the Bounty Hunter bailed him out of jail.

Werner Herzog among the demented iguanas

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:21:00 +0000

If the essence of Werner Herzog could somehow be bottled and preserved, it could make a more effective remedy for clinical depression and seasonal affective disorder than anything found in the pharmacist's cabinet. Whatever you make of the guy's movies -- a prodigious and often baffling output unlike anything else in cinema history -- he's the most irrepressibly optimistic man in show business. At one point in our recent phone conversation, he took a break from listing all his innovations and brewing projects and exclaimed in his trademark Bavaria-by-way-of-West L.A. drawl: "You name it -- it just can't get any better!"

Maybe "show business" sounds like a dis, when applied to a filmmaker who began as one of the young lions of 1970s New German Cinema (with "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and "Nosferatu the Vampyre"), developed a global reputation for overweening ambition (mainly "Fitzcarraldo") and then moved on to become a groundbreaking American documentarian (with films like "Grizzly Man" and the Oscar-nominated "Encounters at the End of the World"). I don't mean it to. What I mean is that Herzog loves traveling the world making movies -- lots and lots of movies -- and showing them to as many people as possible.

“Bad Lieutenant”: So bad it’s good

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:20:00 +0000

There's a valuable lesson to be learned from "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans": Two wrongs don't make a right -- it takes at least three. And Nicolas Cage, as detective Terence McDonagh, is a very bad lieutenant: An unrepentant, if highly functional, cokehead, he accosts and bullies unwitting club kids so he can steal their drugs and, possibly, have sex with their girlfriends. He has no compunction about playing rival crime bosses against one another if it will somehow help pay off his mounting gambling debts. He thinks nothing of choking off an old lady's oxygen supply, if that's what it takes to get her to listen up. And his closest friend, maybe the love of his life, is a high-class call girl named Frankie (Eva Mendes, who's wonderful even when she's barely trying). You can tell he really, really likes her by the way he shares his drugs with her: They're like two kids bonding over the contents of a single Pixy Stix.