Again, maybe those were posted already, but I´m copiyng them here just in case. My apologies if I´m duplicating something guys...

It´s funny about the BL reviews... most Continental critics have panned the movie (except for the German) but most English speaking critics seem to like it, and they praise Nic´s return to (his wildest) form... This kind of mixed and even contradictory reception makes the movie more appealing in my eyes....I´m dying to see it. What about you?


THE INDEPENDENT review

News | First Night BadLieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Venice Film Festival ***

WHAT HAPPENS when an obsessive German art-house director is given a CSI-style crime thriller to direct? The answer - if this highly eccentric new version of Bad Lieutenant is taken as the measure - is that you end up with a film that is pulling furiously in two competing directions at once.

On the one hand, this is a cliche-ridden police procedural, rehashing ideas we've seen many times before. On the other, Werner Herzog and his star Nicolas Cage, who gives a manic and wildly overblown performance, want to push to extremes, even if they do risk falling flat on their faces.

Abel Ferrara is reportedly unhappy that Herzog has had the temerity to remake his original film. Ferrara doesn't have too much to worry about, though: the Ferrara Bad Lieutenant and the new version are very different projects. The new film opens in New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina. Cage plays Terrence McDonagh, a cop with an appetite for sex, drugs and blackmail. McDonagh is sleazy but there is also an innocence, and even an idealism, about him. He is ready to dive into the foetid water left by the hurricane to rescue a low-life felon who is about to drown.

McDonagh's heroism wins him a promotion but does nothing for his back. That's why he is so dependent on painkillers. "Whatever I take is prescription, except for the heroin," he protests at the idea that he is an addict. Nor are his back pains behind his gambling addiction, which has left him massively in debt. His superiors tolerate his eccentricities because he is such an accomplished detective. His girlfriend, high-class call girl Frankie (Eva Mendes), is likewise able to overlook his indulgences.

The screenplay by William Finkelstein certainly isn't very original. There has been a massacre and the New Orleans cops are shaking down the local drug dealers and hoods to find out who committed it.

In Herzog's films with Klaus Kinski (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo et al), the director encouraged his lead actor to push toward that line where acting and psychosis collide. Kinski played megalomaniacs so set on achieving some ludicrous goal that their reason seems to desert them. There is nothing especially heroic about Cage's quest here, but the actor does his best to match the febrile intensity of Kinski. Cage's McDonagh grows more demented. He hallucinates that he sees the souls of dead men and, whenever he's too high, iguanas and crocodiles mysteriously seem to wander into frame.

In truth, the screenplay can't quite sustain the pressure that the director and the star's operatics place upon it. We're never quite sure how far Herzog's tongue is in his cheek or how seriously Cage expects us to take his hamming. But, whatever else, this film is a slap in the face to all those Michael Mann movies in which cops and thieves are rigorously professional and everything is precise and polished. Here, chaos prevails.

Both director and actor risk making asses of themselves. But, in a world that is already full of conventional, straitlaced cop movies, a film as preposterous as this arrives as a tonic: an object lesson in how to take a routine assignment and subvert it.

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THE GUARDIAN REVIEW

Wonder of wonders: The Bad Lieutenant remake is not actually bad at all.

Werner Herzog has taken Abel Ferrara's 1992 saga by the scruff of the neck, shifted the action from New York to New Orleans and cast Nicolas Cage in the old Harvey Keitel role as a morally bankrupt law enforcer. The purists are raging and Ferrara is incensed. If ever a movie arrives hexed with dark voodoo, this movie is it.

And yet Herzog's devil-may-care insouciance has paid off brilliantly. He does not retread Bad Lieutenant so much as reinvent it.

Out goes Ferrara's dark marinade of blood, semen and Catholic guilt. In comes an espresso of caffeine and amphetamines that, in its way, is just as effective.

Cage gives what is surely his best performance in years as Terence McDonough, a New Orleans cop with a bad back and a faulty moral compass. His shoulders are hitched up around his ears as he picks his way gingerly around New Orleans and in his heightened state he is liable to laugh at just about anything (one street hoodlum goes by the name of "G" and this he finds endlessly amusing).

The fact that McDonough is accompanied on some of his errands by a sidekick played by puffy, paunchy Val Kilmer only adds to the film's air of gleeful corruption. One has the sense that, in his sly fashion, Herzog is somehow getting off on the sight of these two Hollywood golden boys run hopelessly to seed.

McDonough is nominally spearheading the investigation of a local crime boss ("Big Fate"), though before long he's veering dangerously off the map.

He busts small-time dealers and pockets their stash and pulls a gun on a respectable old lady at the local care-home, while his gallant attempt to ride to the rescue of his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) ends in disaster.

Finally he is yanked off the case and demoted to the property room, where the drug seizures are stored. That's like giving a fox the keys to the chicken coop.

Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, like the lieutenant himself, is wild, ill-disciplined and never less than mesmerising. Even when it seems to be sticking doggedly to the script, there's something wonky and dangerous about this film.

Herzog takes one of the oldest genre cliches in the book (the Maverick Cop Who Gets Results) and then sees how far he can twist it before it snaps.

This, I suppose, is simply par for the course. Werner Herzog has made good movies and bad movies. But he is not a man to feel pinched by his material, or daunted by an illustrious predecessor.

Here he takes Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and makes it gloriously, shamelessly his own.

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EVENING STANDARD REVIEW

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/film/film-23374546-details/Bad+Lieutenant/filmReview.do?reviewId=23740591


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GOOD REVIEW from Telluride

http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/09/07/telluride-2009-review-werner-herzogs-bad-lieutenant/

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ANNE THOMSON from Telluride

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/


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EBERT anticipating the movie in Toronto

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/tiff_1_darwin_herzog_the_coens.html


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2 GERMAN REVIEWS (sorry about the crappy automatic translation, I simply dont´have the time to draft a better one)

http://fm4.orf.at/stories/1626600/

Wacky Werner rules the Lido

Why Werner Herzog is still one of the best directors in the world. And why his films make the competition on the Lido in the shade. A love story.

"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of," says the handsome "Prince Charming" by Adam and the Ants: a director who has understood this lesson to the smallest detail that is Werner Herzog. For forty years, turning the Bavarian visionary films like no one else: passionate, excessive, and visually, naturmystisch they are walking through and flying over the human and social landscapes of the soul, which is in the Werner-verse inevitably connected with what to "us" around happened.
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog, 2007

Just Duke has become 67 years old, but looks still looks like a young savage, just stop with gray hair. As was his, I do not save here with superlatives, unparalleled career was not already sufficiently rich in anecdotes and true stories - many of which are not absolute, but "are ecstatically true" - is now the director succeeded in Venice another sensation: was the first filmmaker in history, he immediately takes part in the official competition with two works of an A-list festivals. And, surprise surprise's, both are unique, crazy, so herzogianisch to the smallest detail.

As a festival should critics, can not and will not only follow my own personal Gusto see, therefore, films from many genres, I would not count privately to my favorite gaits, trust me, therefore, have a glance if there is something in a digital world of art production can ever give. But it gave me (yes, it will be mushy) drove the tears into his eyes, it has set my body, my brain is energized, and this veteran renegades of the world cinema, which until recently almost all written down, and - because of its various eccentricities - have ridiculed see return as triumphant return to the limelight.
The Bad Lieutenant

Contrary months of speculation and a rumor mill churning "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" no restoration of Abel Ferrara's almost the same name psychodrama masterpiece starring Harvey Keitel. And quite frankly, who has only some idea of how Duke does, thinks and works, should have known that he will turn not a remake.
Nicolas Cage in "Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans"

Nicolas Cage plays the lieutenant of the title and thus the role of his life: the German director because each actor has not only physiognomy, but also in character chooses to fit the role, Cage - for me for quite some time, one of the unforgettable faces of Hollywod, especially Since he has begun to occur mainly in B movies - manic, depressed, sweating, excessive, physically. Like a ghost, he drags himself through Duke feverish parallel universe of a broken New Orleans after the hurricane disaster that beats in the heart of the USA like a broken heart on speed.
Nicolas Cage in "Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans"

The Nutty Cop picks up small dealer, is based on a young woman to crack smoke blown in his throat before he fired shots into the air and draws a laugh from that place. Flickering in the center of his investigation of the murder is at a six Senegalese immigrant family: the more he finds out about it, the more quickly dissolve the porous borders in the world of reason.

Solve Duke and Mark Isham's score pumping carpet - almost imperceptibly - the incomprehensibility of the seemingly mundane out to put out the absurdity, insanity and sheer fervor whose dementia, of which the humanitarian catastrophe in the post-hurricane New Orleans, only one, but one for Western world, the symptom is clearly understandable. The mistaken lieutenant, who takes in its investigations on iguanas and crocodiles waving, is a product of his environment, the environment is a product of his psyche. Duke brilliant casts, Fairuza Balk is the goddess in an unforgettable sequence as a highway police officer, as the underworld Gentleman Xzibit, Eva Mendes as a noble prostitute occur while Cage sniff, inject, and inhaled, which can always find it. In a climactic sequence of this meandering masterpiece, there is a gunfight in slow motion: in the end the cop standing in the corner, on the dance floor a colorful rogue breakdancing. Cage screams, "Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!"
My son, my son, what have ye done?

Similarly, Duke is unbelievable second competition film "My son, my son, what have ye done?" By David Lynch's new "Absurda" label (under the rotating grad also Jodorowsky) has been funded. Based on a true story (a fact that Duke might Mythomane great in a fit of self-mockery to the screen writing), the great Michael Shannon plays a young man (with his mother, the beautiful Grace Zabriskie) in a small house in San Diego lives.
Michael Shannon, Grace Zabriskie, and Chloë Sevigny in "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done"
Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon and Chloë Sevigny in "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done"

In the garden of his two flamingos stand in the house there are hundreds of pictures, drawings and references to the pink birds. Herzog also shows him as Cage in another movie, a product of its built and artificial life-world from which he breaks free only when he has some friends on a canoe trip in Peru, a spiritual awakening experience. Henceforth, his girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny) and director of the play in which the young man has a role (Udo Kier) observed shifts in his personality.
Michael Shannon and Willem Dafoe
Michael Shannon and Willem Dafoe

"My son, my son, what have ye done?" Opened "at the scene of a crime: Willem Dafoe is investigating the case of a man who stabbed his mother with a samurai sword. Duke's film is built up - who would have thought it? - On non-chronological, reminiscent of earlier films by the total of German director: Though the story is basically formulated more, eat again and again poetic, anarchic moment sequences through and you see running ostriches ( "Dinosaurs in drag," as she calls Brad Dourif ), a dwarf dancing in on the biggest snag in the world or was eaten Udo Kier, whose glasses from an animal.

The time is again too short: I will try to squeeze the next time some of my highlights in the text, such as the HK film "Accident", the famous Kontemplationsfilm "Between Two Worlds" from Sri Lanka, and Shinya Tsukamotos "Tetsuo 3".
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madameclaudine | next 11 hours, 2 minutes

Grace Zabriskie, michael shannon, Chloë Sevigny, Udo Kier and Willem Dafoe in a movie? aaaahhh, my brain explodes ...
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kinski | 1 Day, 4 hours, 33 minutes

I have found in some TV shows, also in New York when someone asked "What do you think about Duke?" And as I said - the American one can do it as well say: "He's a pain in the ass!" I mean "pain in the ass, "or I know something. That is, he gets on my nerves.
Reply to this Posting
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crutches | 1 Day, 4 hours, 16 minutes

You of all, kinski ...
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alpiarts | 1 Day, 3 hours, 50 minutes
... This has to be now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75ADI9p2wHY
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christian lehner | 1 Day, 1 hours, 41 minutes

"lick me on the ass, man. we shoot a film!"
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tricky | next 1 days, 7 hours, 54 minutes
Movie reviews

Please now only film reviews, which also reliably at the Viennale start in October, OK? Here I will read anything more that I can not watch in a maximum of 2 months even in the cinema.
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qubert | 1 Day, 6 hours, 49 minutes
Then I'd suggest

You read it simply does not. It even forces you not!
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sauvage | 1 Day, 10 hours, 21 minutes

I think Nicolas HACKFRESSE "Cage actually one of the worst actors without mercy at all - talk about" Schnoferl "when someone has perfected this expression, then Cage - but under the right direction," Adaptation "has been mentioned, he can still brilliant be. I do not trust one of Werner Herzog, to those who made the rausholen the Cage? - Oh YES!
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dilak | 1 Day, 9 hours, 9 minutes

hackfresse? what does that mean?

But the actor's performance reminds me only: "I will be back in face to get rid of ...".
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sauvage | next 1 days, 7 hours, 24 minutes

"HACKFRESSE is" North German for "Watschngsicht.
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samlowry | next 1 days, 11 hours, 39 minutes

Anyone who has seen Duke's recent works such as "Invincible" or "Rescue Dawn", which can not canonization of these almost-here agree quite well. Of visionary cinema, these films are certainly miles away. On "My son, my son ..." I'm still excited.
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matthews | vor 1 days, 21 hours, 4 minutes

werner finally make the tv uebers (doku) films: "I do not want to be a fly on the wall. I want to be the hornet who stings"
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alpiarts | next 1 days, 23 hours, 18 minutes

The eternal suffering face and posturing of Nicolas Cage is monotonous over time. Can this man for a change, at least here smiling? As a professional he should be able, but he can only suffer, - Over the years it gets stale. Always this same suffering face, without variation.
WH rules, of course ...
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selwalist | next 1 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes

just kept smiling face of the cage, I was increasingly stressful, action, see his stripes "fabulosen" such as air con, etc.
I do not want to again quote adaptation, but since mine have been playing big cinema was. charlie kaufman is alive!
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alpiarts | next 1 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes

Thanks for the tip.
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mizanthrop | next 12 hours, 48 minutes

Nicolas Cage in sachen übertifft mimik Steven Seagal well. though just barely.
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godspeedyou | 2 Days, 42 minutes

How about the Austrian right rental for the two movies - there are at least (two to create my son especially my son) here in the cinemas?
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markuskeuschnigg | 1 Day, 4 hours, 9 minutes

my son my son has at least a lender (movie download). if he goes to the cinema, however, is still uncertain.
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mizanthrop | 2 Days, 1 hours, 32 minutes

I have in my mind so funny truppe. especially as regards Nicolas Cage. I like him somehow, but a character actor, he is not straight.
I find it unnecessary after 20 years equal rauszuhauen already a remake - I have not even digested the original. and I have my doubts whether it can surpass the same.
the name Werner Herzog makes me freeze in awe: why I do not know. know hardly any of his movies. All filmmakers rave about his work, so he must have what on it.
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selwalist | next 1 days, 21 hours, 9 minutes
nosferatu

# tragik and madness so wonderfully attack each other, they can be flange * ssen.
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harald123 | next 1 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes
remake?

@ mizanthrop: I told you copied everything to one sentence, so you do not read the whole text:

"He who has only some idea of how Duke does, thinks and works, should have known that he will turn not a remake."
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bloodshed | next 19 hours, 28 minutes
Is it a safe remake

except this strange goscherten Rate it autors, there is nothing in the description of the films that it was not a remake. only different setting / darsteller / murder case, but in principle the same. which herzog m. but not a cheap remake delivers an exciting new / weiterinterpretation makes is also clear. Lustig's statements to the ferrara gibts übrigens ...
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bloodshed | next 19 hours, 27 minutes

"In a June 2008 interview with The Guardian, Abel Ferrara, who directed and co-wrote the original Bad Lieutenant (1992), said that finding out his movie was being remade as" a horrible feeling "like," when you get robbed " , and that those involved in this remake "should all the idiot in hell." He also wondered how Nicolas Cage "can even have the nerve to play Harvey Keitel", and called screenwriter William M. Finkelstein on. "


__________

The triumph of Werner Herzog

By Frank Olbert, 06.09.09, 20:30, updated 09.09.09, 20:54
The German Werner Herzog takes the same as the first director with two films at the festival in Venice. "Bad Lieutenant" and "My Son, My Son" that a strong comeback for the most recently entered into the background of old masters.
The Bad Lieutenant
Enlarge Image
Werner Herzog to the First: "The Bad Lieutenant" with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes. (Picture: rental)
The Bad Lieutenant
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Werner Herzog to the First: "The Bad Lieutenant" with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes. (Picture: rental)
My Son, My Son
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Duke on the Second: "My Son, My Son .." with Michael Shannon (M.). (Picture: rental)
My Son, My Son
This 66th "Mostra" in Venice, these are the Film Festival by Werner Herzog. How frustrating is the doyen actually fled from Germany after having spurned his films there recently - he now returns triumphant return from America to Europe to be feted at the Lido, "Bad Lieutenant" was the first strike with demonic fury, Nicolas Cage as a bad cop then asked the second Herzog film, the mother her own flesh and blood, "My son, my son, what have you done?" before being slaughtered by the murderous offspring. It is the first time in the history of the Venice Film Festival that a directed two films shown in competition.

As the crown to Duke's comeback with a cherry on top, brought the Mostra then also his four-minute short film "La Bohème". But even without this addition is the former conqueror of Kinski-Star on the Lido, a German, which extends to the remake of "Bad Lieutenant," the New Orleans after the hurricane to an American panorama full of pessimism, melancholy and funny. In addition, Michael Moore appeared with his article "Capitalism. A Love Story, "a fortiori, as a strong adolescent novice who wants to have just discovered that the U.S. monetary system is with curly promises and false papers.

Photo Line: Venice Film Festival - update [27 images]
Clooney
Swinton
Ethan Hawke
Michele Placido

In his determination to show it to the film world again, Duke is potent accomplices. In the "Lieutenant" is a stunning addition to Cage, Eva Mendes, who sees herself with her lover koksenden one environment to the beginning of wily snakes and iguanas foolhardy augend himself heavily contaminated on the way BE MADE alligators: that New Orleans is a zoo Delirium in the form in which the cops and the criminals just another species and, moreover, not particularly distinguished from each other. Morality will be sought in vain in this fauna. It's about eating, they do not want to be eaten.

Similarly, out of control, the picture comes into suburban mores "My son, my son, what have you done?" This is precisely the most sensitive soul, which begins to pedal up before Totalabsturz provides: Michael Shannon in the film alongside Willem Dafoe for New Star Power at Duke's films, and if he has always played well the role of the madman, he is crazy in a razor-sharp painful, because somehow traceable way. Who could endure this mother who had planned to tie her son to the nursery for ever?

This stories staged disruption Duke before overpowering, empty landscapes, almost his American-scenes look as though he wanted to revive the Western, only without the Cowboys. Empowered soundtracks like riding freight trains through the pictures, and suddenly you understand how it could come after the infantile and moral squalor of the Bush years to such a violent change: behind it the desire for a pioneer who make America into a new home promises. This sentiment captures Duke is a terrific.

And then just Michael Moore, the eternal-alls, even when he disguises himself behind irony. He has always had an inkling that things go wrong with capitalism, but unfortunately he has only now turned to the right film queasy feeling - with the usual platitudes, when the United States since the Reaganomics with the Roman Empire is in one, but now even with a healthy dose of Christian messages: The drive with which Moore admits in "Capitalism" to Jesus, emphasizes the hard way once his cinematic Missionartum.

As brooding, sometimes even act humbly in contrast, the European contributions in these first days at the Lido. In Patrice Chéreau's "Persécution" No one knows quite what he really wants to tell: about a young man, who keeps homes renovated and inexplicably harbors a grudge against everything and everyone, or by his unrequited love for Sonia, the one in all its obvious futility quickly gets on your nerves.

The Austrian Jessica Hausner has made a silent film about Lourdes, which allows no doubt, an intimate insight into the miracle business, but where Chéreau simply can not find a dramatic thread running into "Lourdes" far too compelling addition to disenchantment. So it was only Pipilotti Rist, which could match in terms of social criticism scratched with U.S. contributions: in bright, mostly red-colored images, she shows her "Pepperminta, a rebellious figure of naivety in their struggle against conventions Messianic disciples around accumulates. The world is not okay, that's also in "Pepperminta" safe. But while Rist hinwegfantasiert from the relations, saw themselves confronted with Werner Herzog on much more merciless, but ultimately more profound way with them. Because it is simply about the choice between escapism and analysis.
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There´s a review on the AICN site from Telluride, but I´ll link it in a separate post cause this is getting too long...

http://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1246883871161.shtml





-- Edited by mara on Saturday 12th of September 2009 03:32:53 AM