THINGS have gone a little crazy in the final week of the London Film Festival.
Actually, some of the films have been batshit insane, starting with Werner Herzog's gloriously demented The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a remake of Abel Ferrara's whacked-out 1992 cop film. If money is to be thrown at a director to do s
omething as creatively bankrupt as remaking such a unique and bleak piece of over-the-edge cinema, it may as well be thrown at Herzog. Though everything about the original's story has effectively been softened, Herzog has taken a sizeable budget and made one of the trippiest, most hilariously over-the-top, outlandish and defiantly uncommercial police procedurals in recent years.
It comes replete with crocodile point-of-view shots, rampant substance abuse and Nicolas Cage, who delivers his most entertainingly freaked-out performance since Wild at Heart. Charged with playing the role Harvey Keitel made infamous, Cage had his work cut out trying to compete with Keitel's no-holds-barred descent into madness, but he's done an admirable job, playing the entire film with a stoop to signify the back injury his character, Terrance McDonagh, has sustained in the line of duty. This injury is the reason he's become a drug-hoovering, senior citizen-abusing, gambling-addicted, crook-assassinating, crack-smoking nut-job, and as the increasingly erratic Terrence attempts to hold his life together as it spirals out of control in the midst of a drug-related murder investigation, Cage makes for hilariously compelling viewing, especially as Terrence has a habit of getting out of every jam in the nick of time. With loopy supporting turns from Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes and Michael Shannon, this is how all remakes should be approached.
The spirit of Herzog seemed to be alive and well in a couple of the festival's other films too. Valhalla Rising, Bronson director Nicolas Winding Refn's deranged Viking film, had a flavour of Herzog's 1972 folly Aguirre, the Wrath of God about it. Shooting mostly in Scotland, Refn transforms his locations into a bleak, almost alien landscape, which acts as the perfect backdrop for his nightmarish tale of a savage, one-eyed mute warrior (Mads Mikkelsen) taken by a band of Christian Vikings on bloody odyssey to the Holy Land. I won't pretend I know what the film is actually about, but like all of Refn's films it's such an audacious, gut-punching piece of work, I'm already looking forward to seeing it again to try and make more sense of it.
Serial oddball Harmony Korine also returned to the festival with another head-scratching cinematic experiment. Trash Humpers follows a group of geriatric freaks as they run around the city gyrating against garbage, fellating shrubbery and mutilating dolls. Shot on VHS camcorders to give it a cheap, worn-out quality, it's Korine's version of an apocalyptic horror movie. As Korine revealed at the highly amusing post-screening Q&A, the visual style – and the project in general – was inspired by finding homemade porn in his neighbours' rubbish bins while he was growing up. He also asked anybody turned off by the prospect of 90-year-olds simulating sex with garbage to leave before it started. "I won't be offended," he said. No-one wanted to look like a prude while the lights were up, but ten minutes in and the walkouts began, which seemed a little harsh. The uncompromising originality made the film worth sticking with and this was a festival screening, when audiences are supposed to be a little more open-minded.
Having said that, had professional duty not compelled me to stay I'd have happily walked out of Todd Solondz's latest, Life During Wartime. It's a semi-sequel to Happiness, a fact that suggests his creativity might have dried up. If not, the general wretchedness of the movie certainly did. Another dysfunctional family drama, Solondz's preoccupations – paedophilia, sex and emotional brutality – are warmed over in a self-consciously cute way as the film explores the impact the release from prison of a child molester (played by Ciaran Hinds) has on his own family. Solondz can still attract a classy cast, but the likes of Allison Janney and Shirley Henderson look weirdly uncomfortable delivering his increasingly mannered dialogue.
