A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)


Cast: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderón, Eddie Daniels, Bianca Hunter, Zoë Lund, Vincent Laresca, Frankie Thorn, Fernando Véléz, Joseph Michael Cruz, Paul Hipp. Screenplay: Zoë Lund, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Harvey Keitel's lacerating performance and Abel Ferrara's narrative skill, using a baseball playoff series as a thread to hang his story on, almost made me think that Bad Lieutenant was some kind of good film. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me a tired reworking of the old motif of Catholic guilt, a kind of feint at creating a Dostoevskyan moral fable undermined by vulgarity. Was it necessary, for example, to cast a nubile young blond as the nun who gets raped, and to provide so many glimpses of her naked? 
Posted by at
Links: , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)