ScreenCrave.com » Werner Herzog

Blu-ray and DVD Picks For April 10 -16

Damon Houx — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:00:15 +0000

This week is light for big releases, but it does offer one of last year’s big surprise Oscar Winners, and a classic that just turned 60. If you like barely memorable romantic comedies, this is a good week for older titles, and if you like a film that sticks with you for days on end, there’s at least one great documentary worth watching. Check out this week’s releases below…

New:

The Darkest Hour: Each Christmas there’s usually some kind of film meant to be counter-programming – an exploitation film that’s an alternative to the big Oscar Hopefuls and family films. In 2011, that film was The Darkest Hour. It features Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thirlby among others as a group of friends who go to Russia for a vacation, only to face an alien invasion/end of the world type situation. Unfortunately modern bad films/ B-movies aren’t so cheap that you can laugh at all of them. If this film had some rubber suit monsters, it might be more entertaining. Alas.
Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life: Werner Herzog‘s documentary about the Death Penalty is profoundly effecting, though many might view it as propaganda. Perhaps we’re in a culture where there is no such thing as non-partisan documenting. Even if the maker comes to the subject matter with no agenda, and only comes to a conclusion at the end, it will be seen as a statement. But this is one of those films that cuts deep and makes you think about your beliefs, so it’s highly recommended for that.
The Iron Lady: Though I wasn’t crazy about The Help, when Meryl Streep won Best Actress for this – for this – over Viola Davis, I was shocked and puzzled. The Iron Lady is a terrible Bio-pic about Margaret Thatcher, with Streep playing her in a film that covers her run of England through to her more recent years, where she may be suffering from dementia. It used to be that you could call something like this a TV movie of the week and everyone knew what you were talking about, but those don’t really exist any more. But this is a TV movie of the week, and it says nothing interesting about one of the most fascinating leaders of the 20th century – it exists solely to win Streep awards. In that it was successful.

Classics:

Bounce, Kate and Leopold: Director’s Cut, Don Juan DeMarco, and The Truth About Cats & Dogs: I don’t know what about this time of year has unleashed these odd romantic comedies, but here we are. Of this lot, I’d say that Don Juan DeMarco is the best as it features a younger Johnny Depp and a bloated Marlon Brando in a reasonably charming little romantic comedy about the role of fantasy in love. And then in Bounce, that’s Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow in a film that tries to be as thoughtful meditation on death and romance. The others are forgettable.
A Streetcar Named Desire: This was the film that launched Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan into prominence, and through this they became two of the most important artists in the 20th century. Based on the Tennessee Williams play, the film stars Vivian Leigh as Blanche DuBois, who is a delusional woman at odds with her brother in law Stanley (Brando). Though the play may have been neutered for its cinematic run, you watch Brando in this and you see that sometimes words are secondary. Brando is dangerous and sexy and rough and indelible. He is cinema. It’s a truly great performance, and well worth picking up to see what movies could only intimate sixty years ago.

What are you purchasing this week?

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Review

Tom von Logue Newth — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 16:32:42 +0000

For all his life Werner Herzog has been seeking out the unvisited, the unseen and in some cases, the unimagined, to capture them on film with all the wonder and edge-of-the-world danger that have been his unabated inspiration. One of the least accessible and most fascinating places on the planet (also full of dangerous gas!) is the cave system at Chauvet, where only 17 years ago cave paintings were discovered that were twice as old as the previous oldest known. The French government shut it up tight, allowing limited scientific access and, for brief periods last year, Werner Herzog. With a 3D camera no less.

In the enclosed cave, the 3D is great. That uncanny way of seeing fully enhances the intense “experience” of being in such an unusual space. The unweathered folds of rock, the ripples of calcite evoke a lunar or extraterrestrial mood, and chambers seen through chambers efficiently create depth. But its most important function is to demonstrate how the 35,000 year-old art was rendered with full awareness and consideration of the contours and forms of the stone canvas.

Repeated close examination reveals the depictions of a wide variety of animals to have been executed with remarkable sophistication, for all their apparent simplicity. Line, shade and occasionally colour are used with exact and discrete skill, and if they necessarily recall Picasso, that is after all only because he recognized their mastery. Some of the effects are yet more surprising, in the suggestion of sound and movement, with repeated anatomical features working like a flick-book or… the movies (“proto-cinema” in that accent).

Other than wildlife, there are a few abstract paintings, a remarkable wall of red handprints and one mysterious human figure, the lower half of a female, possibly being impregnated by a minotaur, rendered on a fat downward-hanging outcrop (the mystery in part is due to the authorities’ odd decision not to lay the access walkway so as to allow full examination of the reverse – Herzog puts his camera on a stick!) Above ground, we’re shown a similar, modeled figure in the Schwabian museum and one yearns to learn more about the connection and function, but the mists of time remain opaque.

In fact, not only for its pictorial value, Herzog has got his hands on another cracking documentary subject, since most of the questions he could possibly ask are simply answerable “we’ll never know” (which he relishes in his voiceover). He is also blessed with a good handful of learned, engaging and varyingly eccentric interviewees amongst the scientists involved with the site. They all have a marked philosophical bent that makes up for the lack of hard facts, and Herzog is particularly pleased to learn that one serious young man used to be in the circus. There’s also “Experimental Archeologist” Wulf who demonstrates the remarkable discovery that these people used a true pentatonic scale for their simple flutes, whilst garbed in (?)correct period dress; the sense that Herzog has sought out some strange woodland peasants is confirmed when we meet the guy who’s basically ex-head of Perfume in France, who hunts for caves by smell.

Herzog covers a lot of ground, but there remains a sense that this is not as inquiring a documentary as it might be. He makes the most of his time in the cave, but a slightly joshing air in the rest of the – presumably non-time-pressed – sequences goes hand in hand with typically Herzogovian nonsense like “these images are memories of long-forgotten dreams” in the “enchanted world of the imaginary”. Shadows on the cave wall lead him irrelevantly to Fred Astaire rather than to Plato, and the albino alligator epilogue is merely spurious. His usually sure sense of music unfoots him here too: medieval choirs are always good but heartbeats are rarely, and Ernst Reijseger’s score resorts too frequently to self-consciousness mournfulness and try-hard trance.

Suggested traces of spirituality in the cave’s contents indicate a sentience acceptable enough for us to acknowledge the inhabitants as ancestors. Herzog’s most promising supposition is that it “as if the modern soul awakened here” (this is indeed the point at which Neanderthals had been almost entirely replaced by H.sapiens) and Herzog worries at our profound disconnection with something so fundamentally connected. Needless to say, we’ve next to no idea who these artists were, although tantalizing evidence is found in the wall of handprints, via which other work by the same individual can be identified throughout the caves. The question posed is basically: what is humanness? (“we shall never know”!) and if this avenue diverts to a Romantic musing on man’s relation to the splendor and perpetuity of landscape, at least the Ardèche River valley is simply gorgeous. For all one might wish for a little more serious inquiry, it is a remarkable and invaluable record that provides plenty of food for thought.

Rating 8.42/10

Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens in select US cities Friday, April 29 – watch the trailer…

VOTD: Werner Herzog Saves Joaquin Phoenix’s Life

Mali Elfman — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:46:01 +0000

In a recent Twitter interview with Werner Herzog for the DVD release of his film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? David Lynch tweeted in (like he does) asking Werner to “share the story of when Werner bravely saved Joaquin Phoenix‘s life”and Werner so kindly and simply told one of the best, random film stories to date.

Not long after First Look posted the video of Werner answering the question, the very talented Sascha Ciezata approached the company about creating an animated version of Herzog’s incredible tale using the audio from the social media press day.

Check out Ciezata’s animation and Werner’s original response below…

The original interview with Werner below…

Pretty bad-ass Werner. I hope if I ever get in a car accident you’re not far away!

Bad Lieutenant Interview: Cage, Herzog, Mendes, Coolidge

Tom von Logue Newth — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:49:25 +0000

The stars of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes and Jennifer Coolidge – held court in the Four Seasons together with director Werner Herzog last week. The movie got its US premiere at the AFI Festival and the positive reactions there and in Toronto promise a good showing in theaters.

Cage plays a drug-addicted, procedure-ignoring police lieutenant in New Orleans just post-Katrina; Mendes is his high-class prostitute lover; Coolidge is his booze-sodden stepmother; and Werner Herzog is one of the world’s greatest living directors, famed for his visionary features of the seventies (Even Dwarves Started Small, Aguirre Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, tho little to match that work since 1982′s Fitzcarraldo) and for his idiosyncratic documentaries (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, My Best Fiend, Grizzly Man). In response to various members of the press, here’s what they had to say for themselves:

At what point did Bad Lieutenant become part of the title? Originally you had Port of Call New Orleans so when did the Bad Lieutenant come in?

Werner Herzog: No, Bad Lieutenant was the title of the screenplay and it was an idea by one of the producers to start a franchise – apparently they owned the title to it. So I never liked it and tried to have it changed into Port of Call New Orleans and now we have a hybrid. But the question about remake is off the table since people have now seen my film. Sometimes people still speak of the original, which doesn’t really happen when you look at Scorsese’s film about Jesus Christ; it’s not the original and Mel Gibson’s film is not remake of Scorsese’s, so I think the question’s off the table now.

Your movies aren’t exactly comedies, but in this movie there is a lot of humour that seemed intentional, like you were trying to create some comedy elements. The sequence with the iguanas is a really funny scene and at the same time trippy, hallucinogenic.

WH: Yeah, I think we always sensed that there was a dark subversive humour in the screenplay. However, in a way we emphasised it and there was always a quest out there that as vile and debased as the character gets, the more he should enjoy himself; so there’s such a thing as the bliss of evil, we discussed, Nicolas and I, and Eva also. You have to enjoy this. And then it creates a strange humour – it becomes hilarious almost – and people laugh and respond and this is wonderful to see. The iguanas: what shall I say? I love to cast animals in important roles in my films and of course it is a demented fantasy, which I like to create. It came more or less spontaneously but we always kept things open for the unexpected. For example Jennifer Coolidge and Eva Mendes when they are fighting over the handbag and the drugs; there’s not much scripted in it. Yes, there were some lines of dialogue but otherwise the two young ladies had to sort it out themselves. You cannot really direct it bit by bit. Or Nicolas Cage very often had complete liberty, like in jazz music, to have his own voice, to improvise. So those are the real convincing and strong moments in the film.

Mr Cage, when you read the script, how did you feel about this character, how would you describe him? Is he a good guy or a bad gay?

Nicolas Cage: He just is. I don’t judge him. I don’t think of him as being bad or good. It’s more existential. It’s not a part of any kind of religious programme, which is what I think separates it mostly from the other film. It just is.

You were instrumental in having the film set in New Orleans. What is it about New Orleans that inspired you and led you to talk to Mr Herzog about having the film shot there?

NC: I felt that I had to go through a catharsis, that I had to face my fears. New Orleans is a very potent city in my life for various reasons. It’s a combination of different energies – African, French, English, Spanish. There’s a lot of magic there and I had experiences there so I wanted to go back and confront it. And I knew that I would channel that. Anything could happen: it could either be a disaster or it could be something beautiful, so I was up for the challenge.

You went balls-out in this film: did you have a lot of fun letting loose?

NC: I just felt that I was in the zone and I came in prepared and did what I had to do and I thank Werner for letting me go. I didn’t need to be pushed, I didn’t need to be pulled, I just came in and did what I had to do and I thank Werner for having the guts to let me do it.

Eva Mendes: I think the fun was being had by me watching him – he was so inspiring – and watching him act at, I think, his best. I was really excited by that, so I was having fun.

You’ve described this performance as impressionistic whereas something like Leaving Las Vegas was more photo-realistic – could you expand on that and the jazz analogy?

NC: Yeah, well a lot of people like to say things like “over the top”. You can’t say that about other art forms. You can’t say “over the top” with a Picasso or “over the top” with a Van Gogh. And why can’t it be the same with acting? So when I think about it in those terms, in Leaving Las Vegas, you know, I had a couple drinks. I wanted to. I had prescribed scenes where I said I’m going to get drunk and anything goes, and I’m glad I did it. But with Bad Lieutenant I say that this is impressionistic because I was totally sober and I was looking at a landscape from over twenty years ago. And I wasn’t sure I could do it. It was a challenge. But I believed that the filter of my instrument would give you something more exciting because it was impressionistic.

What is your process? Do you like a lot of rehearsals? Do you like a lot of takes? And the way you like to act, did it meld with how Mr Herzog likes to direct?

NC: I think that Werner and I had a perfect marriage. He moves very quickly; my best takes are my first two takes; he has confidence in what I’m going to do and I have confidence in what he’s going to do, that he’ll get it. Sometimes I do love to rehearse; I always switch it up depending on who I am working with. I know Werner likes to do as little rehearsing as possible because he likes the freshness and the spontaneity and I appreciate that.

This is your second collaboration with Ms Mendes and a very different kind of movie from the first one – what did you learn or discover about each other working together a second time?

NC: Well I just feel that Eva has evolved, that she was excellent in Ghost Rider but there’s a new kind of more liquid, soft Eva Mendes that’s very fluid and spontaneous in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and I’ve been a fan of her work and am becoming an even greater fan as I continue to see her growth and I hope we’ll work together again.

EM: For me, as fun as Ghost Rider was I knew going into it that it was a big popcorn comic-book film, and I’d been a fan of Nic’s since I was really young, from like Vampire’s Kiss and Wild At Heart and all that stuff. I loved that Nic – I love this Nic as well – but that to me is as fearless as you get and that’s what I strive to be in my work and I still feel like a student of acting, I still go to acting class and I study withIvana Chubbick , my acting coach. So for me the opportunity for me to work with him on a film like this where he’s just soaring, he’s just doing it, completely fearlessly, for me it was just like school. In the best way possible.

Ms Mendes, yours was a very sexy character – how did you connect to her in that regard? And at the end of the movie she seems to rediscover who she is, to rediscover the joy within herself – did you draw on something from your own past experience?

EM: Well the only way I really connected to my character was that I am a survivor and she’s like the ultimate survivor. Thankfully in my life I haven’t had to make extreme sacrifices and decisions like her – she’s the extreme version of me. But she’s just trying to survive, and I never judged her for the choices she made. I don’t know about her as far as the end of the film when she’s pregnant. I love that there’s hope – new life is always redemption, hope – and I love that it ended on that note. I’m not sure what kind of mother she’s going to be! And this little warped family that they have, I always found that interesting. I’m not sure what’s to come – it’s a little scary. What gives me joy? Honestly, working with people like this. Collaborating with Nicolas Cage for a second time on something this amazing, and working with Werner Herzog who’s been on my hit list for so long. That’s what gives me joy: work, stretching myself. And I look forward to one day really truly, you know, playing the bad lieutenant myself. That’s what brings me joy. And my dog Hugo.

WH: I would like to add one thing because we have these individual actors, individual roles, it must not be forgotten that there’s always a texture, a chemistry between the characters that really makes this wonderful ensemble, and if you isolate one character and the way of acting too much from the other, you would not do justice to the entire ensemble.

Were there any taboos connected with this film where you couldn’t go? What was the atmosphere like down there and what was it like to work in? Are they still in recovery mode?

WH: Taboos – not really, although I always had some hesitation to go too far into drug-taking. I have no experience with it and I do not like the culture of drug-taking, so that was one thing – I wouldn’t have shown someone injecting heroin into a vein or so. It’s not my sort of thing, that I would like to have in a film. New Orleans, yes there is a strong sense of recovery and I do remember very often when we were filming outdoors people would come by and say, are you making a film here? welcome! and, it’s so wonderful that music is coming back, movies are coming here and thank you for doing this. You had the sense yes, there was a void that had to be filled and the void is culture, vibrant culture. So that will probably ultimately be the guiding light of New Orleans’ recovery.

Could you speak to the significance of the breed of fish at the murder scene and any symbolism that it might have?

WH: I think it’s not so much symbolism; it was not in the screenplay, like a few other things, but I had the feeling the little note in the schoolbook of the boy, that his only friend was a fish in a pathetic little water glass, and all of a sudden although you never see the kid who was murdered, you get a sense of what has happened at this murder scene. And of course it is also important for the lieutenant. For him it is not just a case that has to be solved with DNA samples and this and that – all of a sudden there is a real life that was wasted, that was extinguished. There is something real for him where he has an emotional contact, and that’s why we have this notebook with the little thing about the fish, and I really like to have moments like that. For example, the scene with the sterling silver spoon and the pirate treasure: those things were originally not in the screenplay but they really give you an emotional context between Nicolas and Eva, something of more depth, something as if he was handing over his whole childhood, his dreams as a child, when he finds the spoon. So those are scenes which I think are very very strong and very necessary for the story.

There’s a lot places in New Orleans that have not been completely rebuilt yet; did you do a lot of filming there or did you do a lot of set design to mimic right after Katrina? And the opening sequence, with the guy who is drowning in the prison cell, was that in the original script?

WH: No, the original script was written for New York and it started out in the subway with a suicidal man throwing himself in front of an incoming train and the lieutenant saves him, and I thought number one, in New Orleans there is no subway and number two we should start it as vile and debased as it gets, with the two detectives placing bets how long it will take for the prisoner to drown. However, Nicolas jumps eventually and saves him. Set design, no, very little – that was the only real set design; we couldn’t flood a real prison tract, so that was actually there. And otherwise, destroyed, yes, there’s whole areas that look like real open landscape with bush and tall grass and you see a concrete rectangle which was a garage and then 100 feet away the next rectangle in the middle of the grass and bushes, another garage. But we never filmed in an area like that because it is completely deserted; it’s like freed landscape.

Mr Cage, your working relationship with Val Kilmer created a great chemistry, but it seemed as though there might have been scenes missing, or was that the whole thing?

NC: Val Kilmer and I have an interesting relationship with each other in that we have mutual respect for one another and have corresponded over the years. We didn’t have a real friendship per se, but we would write to one another, from one actor to another to say, hey I loved what you did in Tombstone, I loved what you did in Leaving Las Vegas. We always kind of knew that there was a camaraderie there and I would say that probably the best actors of my generation, the two geniuses for me, would be Val and Downey. So to get a chance to work with Val was a good thing, and I hope we’ll have more to do together; he is my brother, in many ways, as a fellow artist, and I hope we’ll find another movie to do together.

You mentioned earlier that the idea with this was to create a franchise; has there been any…

WH: It was not my idea

NC: Now hang on, Werner did say on the telephone with me, he had this idea [slips into passable Herzog impression] “it’s very interesting, Nicol-ars, we could have Bad Lieutenant Bangkok or Bad Lieutenant in Guam“. You did say that!

It would be interesting to see what Frankie is like as a mother or how he erupts in the next Bad Lieutenant.

WH: Yes, why not, but I think I wouldn’t be on board. I am not the man who would do Rocky 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or Aguirre 2, 3, 4, 5. So, yes it is thinkable because the character is fascinating enough to continue and place him in other situations. It’s fine to have Jesus Christ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or, say, James Bond in a variety of stories and in a variety of set-ups. In that case I think yeah, there is something valid about it.

Mr Cage, you get to act in big Hollywood spectaculars as well as being in smaller indie films – what are the difference for you as far as acting in two different genres?

NC: I have been blessed to be able to be eclectic and I am grateful for that. As I became older with my work I became aware of the responsibility of film and I feel one of the best ways I can apply myself as an actor, in terms of going beyond whatever it is to be an actor, or quote-unquote movie-star blah blah blah, all the vanity and BS, is that these movies, these so-called popcorn movies, or these family movies, actually provide something quite beautiful and something quite necessary, which is a family bonding experience. So god bless to popcorn film, especially movies where you can take the kids because I remember looking forward to seeing these movies with my parents and if I can give that back then I’m going to do it. I don’t care if people have criticism toward it or not; I think it’s a good thing. And I still have interest in the midnight audience. I want to make movies for my roots – people that like to see Bad Lieutenant at midnight, or Vampire’s Kiss or Bringing Out The Dead or Wild At Heart. So I’m going to do a little bit of everything, and keep doing that.

You had to have his bad back through most of the film – was that you doing it or were you coached to do it? And what about the southern dialect you all had to deal with?

NC: Well I designed Terrance, let’s be totally honest. I came in with a vision. I designed him. I wanted him to have a back. I was thinking of things like Richard III. I like to get my body into it; my mother was a dancer so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting. So I saw this back injury as an opportunity to transform myself. So that’s where that came from. The dialect, Werner and I agreed we don’t need it. He could have been from anywhere. He is a New Orleans cop, his identity was New Orleans, he took pride in being in the South – he said “we don’t hit women down south” – so that’s his identity, but he could have been from anywhere. Just like me, you know?

EM: As far as my dialect goes, Frankie is not from the south; she’s from a big city so that’s why you didn’t hear one.

Jennifer Coolidge: I worked and rounded up everyone I knew in New Orleans who had a really strong accent before I went in there and then of course I got into the audition and I said “Werner, I hope you like this accent” and he said [rather good Herzog impression] “Oh no, we will not be doing that today”. Crap.

Ms Coolidge, you finally get to play a dramatic role – how does it feel? How did Mr Herzog cast you?

JC: Well I don’t know the answer to some of this stuff, but I was in New Orleans – like Nic I have a house down there – and heard that this movie was happening and so I auditioned down there. I don’t know if that helped me – there’s less competition down there, I don’t know.. But when I went to the audition it felt like it went so horrible. At one point I threw a paper bag and Werner was in the way and I didn’t know that the paper bag had a very hard like two year-old piece of bubble gum in it and I could have taken Werner’s eye out, and if he hadn’t ducked at the right moment it would have been terrible. But as I say you never know how you get roles – it’s such a flukey thing. But I’m so pleased because I just would never get a chance to be in anything like this; except for Christopher Guest movies it’s usually, you know, Cinderalla 5. I don’t really get opportunities so it was very nice.

It’s well-documented that ageism a big problem in Hollywood so Ms Coolidge, have you ever experienced this and Ms Mendes, do you worry about roles shrinking as you get older?

EM: No, I’m actually looking forward to it because maybe they’ll provide me with more layers and more colour and God, I sound bitter, don’t I? But I think that when you’re kind of in your twenties and in your thirties even and you look a certain way – and I’m not complaining because I certainly take responsibility and play into my image – but there’s a lack of colourful roles. Certainly in a lot of American films, anyhow. And what I look for is roles like Frankie: flawed characters. I want flawed characters, I want conflict, I want to stretch and grow and all that fun stuff. There is ageism – it does completely exist – but hopefully that with age as well I’ll be exposed to more colourful characters that give me more to do, whether its the role of a tortured mom or whatever it may be, I look forward to that. Hopefully it will happen.

JC: Well I wish I could say I love ageing and the roles just keep getting better and better. This really felt like a fluke; I mean it really felt like this incredible thing that came my way, but it doesn’t feel like this is going to happen everyday; I feel like this was this thing where I got lucky and it just happened. For myself it’s been depressing as opposed to what was coming my way seven years ago as opposed to now. I mean, I want to say something positive..

EM: Jennifer you’re killing me here! I was looking for the hope and the light!

JC: Like I say, this was an amazing thing and I just can’t believe I got to be a part of this whole thing and I can’t tell you how much I love this movie. It’s so exciting to be in a movie that you’re crazy about, and think it’s brilliant. But no – do I like the scripts that come to my door? A lot of them, no. And I guess I’m going to be honest: I even had a script sent to me where they offered me – they didn’t offer me, wanted me to audition for – the part of “Scary Lady”. Things like that – it does get depressing.

Mr Herzog, Nic mentioned the two of you have a perfect marriage with this film, but you also have a perfect marriage with your cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger. Can you talk a bit about the collaboration that you’ve had with him over the years, and particularly with the film noir look of this particular film?

WH: Yes I have made my last twelve or fourteen films with Peter Zeitlinger, an Austrian, and I love him for his physicality. He’s a very strong beast, and he does handheld camera better than anyone would do with steadicam. And he is a man who would stop things for a moment and take the camera down and say “Werner, this scene has no rhythm”. No cinematographer before has spoken to me like that. And of course I sense he has this feeling of movement and feeling of flow of something and I immediately had to readjust things. Yeah, it has been a very fine collaboration and sometimes I would take things in my own hands when the style had to be completely different, the visual style like the demented imagination of iguanas. So those are small exceptions but otherwise I am planning to work with him on the next film. And on the next and the next after that.

Another rising local Louisiana talent is Lance Nichols: Mr Cage, could you talk about your scenes with him?

NC: He was pretty amazing to watch. He’s very funny, I mean the incredible scenes we had together. [to Herzog] I don’t know how you came up with those ideas – I remember Werner was really telling him what to do.

What are some of the influences that helped you develop the personality of your character?

NC: Memory. I was in Australia when I got the script and I was just trying to.. The strangest thing of all is that in Australia they still use cocaine to clear your sinuses and I had a massive – this is a true story – I had a massive sinus infection and I was trying to understand, recall something from, you know, a hundred years in the past and they sent me to the doctor and he did this cocaine solution thing and he put it in my nose and I just came out and I started taking notes, and noticed that my mouth was getting really dry and I was really like feeling very invincible and I started improvising the scenes and coming up with ideas and swallowing a lot. So then I was graphing it in the script like, ok well this is coke so this is what he’s doing here; there’s going to be a lot of swallowing, there’s going to be a lot of lip-smacking. And then this is heroin: he’s going to be itchy, he’s going to be nodding, he’s going to be a lot slower. The problem is, I didn’t know when Werner was going to cut the scene with me taking heroin or the scene with me taking the coke, so he totally like rerouted the whole direction of the performance.

EM: Do you still have the name of that doctor?

At this point in your career you can do whatever it is that you want to do, so what is necessary in a film or in a character for you to want to play it? Some actors have said with their character there has to be something redeeming about them; some of your characters have been dark and they’ve stayed dark – does it matter to you?

NC. I do have a kind of personal code that I try to apply. I may be alone in this, but I do sense the power of film, in that movies have the power to literally change people’s minds. That’s pretty powerful stuff when you consider that. So I try to be, in this day and age, responsible of what I want to project in terms of who’s going to see it, particularly when it pertains to children, which is a priority of mine. So I am trying to go away from, you know, too much killing and gratuitous violence and things like that, and if I do play a character like that I have to understand why he’s like that, how he got there to be that way. And then it’s just a matter of, is there some truth to it? Is there anything I can do to play the part truthfully? Can I give you something new, something unusual and have a bit of truth?

With regard to your comments about popcorn movies, you’ve always done an interesting job of bringing the kind of eclectic terms that you want to bring into popcorn movies. Do you plan it meticulously? Do you look at what would be an all-audiences thing and think, here’s what I can get away with?

NC: Thank you. Yes. Here’s the thing, I came out of independent film; those are my roots. An independent film is like a laboratory and I have used what I could discover in that laboratory because people weren’t going to lose millions and millions of dollars, and I cherry-picked the gold and I applied it to movies like Face-Off; so if you look at movies like Face-Off, which is a huge movie, there are bits and pieces from Vampire’s Kiss which I pulled out, because not too many people saw Vampire’s Kiss, but I really got a chance to infuse that into my work in Face-Off. And I keep doing that, you know. They work well together.

What validates the work for you at this point in your career? Do you know when you’ve hit it or do you need someone to still tell you?

NC: No, i don’t need anyone to tell me anything, really. I just feel it. It’s like I said earlier, it’s a zone thing. I mean it’s hard to describe these things because they’re pretty abstract, but if you can imagine there’s like a solid piece of wax inside of the centre of your heart and there’s a little needle that’s pressing through the wax and it gets out to the other side, then you know you’ve hit it, and that’s what it feels like.

Mr Herzog, what is the attraction you feel for the intense characters that you have? Even in Grizzly Man the guy was intense – not crazy but intense.

WH: I’m glad that you mention Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man because I did not create him. However, he’s immediately someone who fascinates me, who makes me tick. And it’s not so much the characters in the movies, it’s the people with whom I work like Nicolas Cage, or before with Kinski or with Christian Bale. It’s more the persons with whom I have to spend my time behind the camera, with them in fron t, and just stand there and marvel at the possibilities they create, and the insights and illuminations they can give to an audience. So in that respect I was blessed that I stumbled into the footage of Timothy Treadwell and of course I have been blessed that Nicolas Cage accepted to work with me. Not just spending time but creating things, and of course ultimately characters that fascinate me. But it’s more the persons with whom I want to spend my life and my time of work.

Visit the official site.

Check out the film in theaters November 20.

Opens nov 20

Genevieve, terrence, frankie

Q. At what point did Bad Lieutenant become part of the title? Originally you had Port of Call New Orleans so when did the Bad Lieutenant come in?

Werner Herzog: No, Bad Lieutenant was the title of the screenplay and it was an idea by one of the producers to start a franchise – apparently they owned the title to it. So I never liked it and tried to have it changed into Port of Call New Orleans and now we have a hybrid. But the question about remake is off the table now since people have now seen my film. Sometimes people still speak of the original, which doesn’t really happen when you look at Scorsese’s film about Jesus Christ; it’s not the original and Mel Gibson’s film is not remake of Scorsese’s, so I think the question’s off the table now.

Q. Mr Cage, when you read the script, how did you feel about this character, how would you describe him? Is he a good guy or a bad gay?

Nicolas Cage: He just is. I don’t judge him. I don’t think of him as being bad or good. It’s more existential. It’s not a part of any kind of religious programme, which is what I think separates. It mostly from the other film. It just is.

Q. Mr Cage, You were instrumental in having the film set in New Orleans. What is it about New Orleans that inspired you and led you to talk to Mr Herzog about having the film shot there?

NC: I felt that I had to go through a catharsis, that I had to face my fears. New Orleans is a very potent city in my life for various reasons. It’s a combination of different energies – African, French, English, Spanish. There’s a lot of magic there and I had experiences there so I wanted to go back there and confront it. And I knew that I would channel that. Anything could happen: it could either be a disaster or it could be something beautiful, so I was up for the challenge.

Q. Mr Herzog, you movies aren’t exactly comedies, but in this movie there is a lot of humour that seemed intentional, like you were trying to create some comedy elements. The sequence with the iguanas is a really funny scene and at the same time trippy, hallucinogenic.

WH: Yeah, I think we always sensed that there was a dark subversive humour in the screenplay. However in a way we emphasised it and there was always a quest out there that as vile and debased as the character gets, the more he should enjoy himself; so there’s such a thing as the bliss of evil, we discussed, Nicolas and I, and Eva also. You have to enjoy this. And then it creates a strange humour – it becomes hilarious almost – and people laugh and respond and this is wonderful to see. The iguanas: what shall I say? I love to cast animals in important roles in my films and of course it is a demented fantasy, which I like to create. It came more or less spontaneously but we always kept things open for the unexpected. For example Jennifer Coolidge and Eva Mendes when they are fighting over the handbag and the drugs; there’s not much scripted in it. Yes, there were some lines of dialogue but otherwise the two young ladies had to sort it out themselves. You cannot really direct it bit by bit. Or Nicolas Cage very often had complete liberty, like in jazz music, to have his own voice, to improvise. So those are the real convincing and strong moments in the film.

Q. Mr Cage, you went balls-out in this film: did you have a lot of fun letting loose?

NC: I just felt that I was in the zone

AFI/Film Review for The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Tom von Logue Newth — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:52:40 +0000

So the deal is that Edward Pressman, producer of Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant, owns the rights to the title and decided the time was right to reuse it with an eye to kick-starting a franchise (he is also currently planning Wall Street 2, and a reboot of The Crow.) He wanted someone unexpected to direct and eyebrows were certainly raised when news filtered out that it was to be crazy German arthouse-favourite Werner Herzog; and in star Nicolas Cage, Herzog may just have found a worthy replacement for his erstwhile muse, the late, great and certifiably insane Klaus Kinski.

Cage is back on terrifically loony form after years of pedestrian films and poor performances, as the eponymous drug-addicted, procedure-ignoring cop. It’s not a remake of the Ferrara film which, like Harvey Keitel’s protagonaist, was dark, intense and tortured, but it does depict a man teetering on the edge of chaos and collapse in a borderline-anarchic post-Katrina New Orleans. Cage lurches across the city with a lopsided bad-back gait in search of crime lord Xzibit, but mainly just more drugs, and the setting is used to full advantage, from the ramshackle outskirting neighbourhoods towered over by gleaming skyscrapers, to the French quarter trellising and the upscale casinos and hotels frequented by Cage’s prostitute girlfriend, Eva Mendes (given little to do save look hot, but that she’s very good at).

He cheerfully robs her johns of cash and blow until one turns out to have mob connections (a very funny Shea Wigham); simultaneously his gambling debts are mounting, he loses his crime scene witness and an old woman he manically threatened in a nursing home sics the IA on him. That the resolving of all these problems is eventually whisked through in amusingly perfunctory fashion, could in fact indicate that the film has finally slipped fully into a drug-addled dream state.

The script seems intended for a far more conventional picture, but with Cage and Herzog that was never on the cards. Alongside Cage’s wonderfully manic yet textured performance, the best moments are the hallucinatory Herzog touches: alligator-cam, a lovely surreal sun-streaked vision of iguanas, and the already infamous “Shoot him again, his soul’s still dancing” scene, which is wonderful and perfect and something David Lynch must have wished he’d dreamt up. It’s not all perfect: in a film of such deadpanned exaggeration it’s a shame that past-master Jennifer Coolidge doesn’t get to join in (though she does cut a touchingly tragic figure without much script assistance); Val Kilmer is largely sidelined (no great loss); ditto Fairuza Balk as a foxy little traffic cop; and Brad Dourif plays disappointingly if appealingly straight. This may be no great searching probe of a tortured man’s psyche – the closest we get is a visit to his childhood haven, a ramshackle shed full of clutter and imaginary pirates and a lost silver spoon – but it’s a very funny, manic, amoral romp and hugely enjoyable. My fingers are crossed for a sequel.

Rating: 7.94/10

AFI Festival 2009!

Tom von Logue Newth — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:44:15 +0000

It is finally upon us – as I type the crowds are thronged outside the Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard for the American Film Institute Film Festival Opening Gala and North American Premiere of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion fable Fantastic Mr Fox (already covered by Screencrave from the London Film Festival – ahead of the game as usual).

Taking place all this week, largely at the Mann 6 Cinemas in the Hollywood & Highland Center, with special screenings at the Chinese and some in Santa Monica next weekend for the American Film Market, there’s plenty to see this year. But be warned – it’s going to be busy! Festival sponsors Audi have, remarkably, provided all tickets for free. Which means naturally that that they’ve all been pre-booked. But fear not, for there are standby lines opening an hour before each screening, and unclaimed seats are up for grabs fifteen minutes before the show starts. And this being LA how many people who pre-booked tickets are actually going to turn up do you reckon?

The full list is on the AFI website and it all looks pretty good, but there’s a handful of titles about which I am really excited (Sunday is a particularly good day):

Tonight at 9.30pm: Everyone Else, a German film that has gotten rave reports from Europe, exploring a young couple’s relationship in light of another couple they meet on holiday. Truthful and daring, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Berlin.
Saturday at 7pm: Mother, the latest from The Host director Bong Joon Ho continues to uphold the high reputation of contemporary South Korean cinema in a crime thriller featuring a mother as amateur detective, trying to clear the name of her son. More good festival reports, from Cannes and Karlovy Vary
Sunday 4.15pm (also on Friday at 1pm in Santa Monica): Police, Adjective seems to have been the most impressive film on the European festival circuit so far, a thriller of sorts, but also a philosophical examination of language. Romanian cinema is on a roll right now and if this is any indication, only getting better.
Sunday 7pm: White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and it looks for once as though Michael Haneke may be holding his haughty contempt for the audience in check (*he *calls it “respect”). Mysterious and sinister goings-on in a German village in the years leading up to WWI point fingers at the social mindset soon to be seduced by national socialism (but does not, non-spoiler alert, reveal the source of the aforementioned mysteries. He’s still got to piss some people off apparently).
Sunday 10.30pm: Castro is a short and fast-paced hunt through Buenos Aires for a missing person, described as a cross between Samuel Beckett and Mack Sennett, and reputed to be one of the best films from the very exciting alternative cinema scene in Argentina right now (I am still recommending Historias Extraordinarias to anyone who will listen. Or can find it…)
Monday at 7pm, Centerpiece Gala: The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is the movie in the middle of making which Heath Ledger popped his clogs. So director Terry Gilliam replaced him with Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, playing alongside Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole (rather good, apparently), Verne Troyer and Tom Waits as the devil (excellent!). A traveling magic show features a magical mirror and lots of freaky stuff and no-one seems to want to come out and say if it’s any cop or not, just that it’s a Terry Gilliam film and that he’s back on top eccentric form. Which is good enough for me.
Tuesday at 7pm: I Killed My Mother generated loads of buzz at Cannes, in part because it was written, directed by and stars French-Canadian first-timer Xavier Dolan, who’s a mere 20 years old, and in part because it is actually rather impressive, a caustic and tender tale of familial and (homo)sexual relationships.
Tuesday at 10.15pm: Youth In Revolt. My sister said “I am so over Michael Cera” approximately 15 minutes before seeing the preview for this and her decision was instantly reversed. He plays a nerdy young man (you don’t say) who, to win the love of the girl next door, invents a smooth and unbridled (and mustachioed) alter ego whom only he can see. Much chaos and hilarity ensues; the trailer is, indeed, pretty funny.
Wednesday at 7pm: The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is not a remake of the Abel Ferrara film but does feature Nic Cage as a very badly-behaved police lieutenant, as directed with gloriously surreal touches by Werner Herzog. I got a screening of it last night and it is very funny, hugely enjoyable and Nic Cage is back on wonderfully insane form.
Thursday at 7pm: A Single Man is directed by ex-Gucci head Tom Ford (his first) and stars Colin Firth as a bereaved gay man in 60s LA. More terrific word of mouth from Europe and Oscar buzz for Firth, it’s reported to be arty (in a good way) and deeply moving.

But don’t take my word (entirely..) for it – take a look at the calendar, go stand in line, and enjoy high quality films from all over the world, many of which will never get near a North American release. And do it for free! Full details at AFI.com.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Trailer

Krystal Clark — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:23:33 +0000

A theatrical trailer for Werner Herzog‘s gritty drama, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has been released. The film stars Nicolas Cage as the title character, a morally challenged lawman, who while trying to solve a murder exposes his own personal demons which include drug addiction, theft, and gambling. After watching this trailer you can easily see why the film has the word bad in front of the title.

Check out the trailer…

The original Bad Lieutenant was released in 1992, starred Harvey Keitel as the lead character, and was directed by Abel Ferrar. In this take on the film, both Herzog and Cage put their signatures on the story to make it their own. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not particularly interested in seeing this movie because I wasn’t a fan of the original. I will admit that this trailer is a lot better than the unofficial footage they released a few months back. This one actually has a professional look to it.

What do you think of the theatrical trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Poster

Krystal Clark — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:16:07 +0000

I just wrote a nice post on how Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is an obvious rip off of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult drama Bad Lieutenant. Conveniently a poster for the film has just been released for Werner Herzog‘s remake, I mean “reimagining”of the crime drama. As you can see Nicolas Cage has attached his once credible name to another piece of questionable material.

The following photo highlights the biggest reason I will not see this film in theaters…

I don’t like the pairing of Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes. Who told them they had good onscreen chemistry? I didn’t like their pairing in Ghost Rider, and I don’t like it here. This one sheet gives me too much Mendes, and I can only take her in small doses.

I love how the poster shows stamps from multiple film festivals as a blatant attempt to give the movie credibility. I just can’t do it. After watching the trailer, Port of Call New Orleans looks like a parody of every bad cop movie ever made. Just look at the poster! Everyone on it is trying a little too hard to be bad ass. What exactly is Cage’s character looking at?

Image courtesy of ComingSoon.

What do you think of the first poster for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?

Nicolas Cage’s Bad Lieutenent Not a Remake?

Krystal Clark — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:55:21 +0000

After seeing the trailer for the unofficial reimagining of Bad Lieutenant entitled, Port of Call New Orleans, I got a sharp pain in my stomach. The film stars Oscar winner Nicolas Cage as an alcoholic, drug addicted cop who makes and plays by his own rules. The 1992 original featured Harvey Keitel in the title role, and was directed by Abel Ferrara. Werner Herzog, is helming the newer version, but claims that his film isn’t a remake. I’m not buying it, are you?

According to Yahoo, Abel Ferrara has been very vocal about his disdain for the upcoming Port of Call New Orleans. He was actually quoted as saying “I wish these people die in hell.” Not the most grammatically correct sentence, but we feel his anger. Cage claims that he and Herzog’s take is completely different from the original film.

“This is a New Orleans cop, it takes place in New Orleans, it’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, it’s not Bad Lieutenant.”

The director went on to add:

“I have never seen this film,” Herzog told Reuters. “I only know it has nothing to do with it, because the screenwriter explained to me the other film … and we knew it was not in any way related.”

Both films deal with corrupt cops who moonlight as drug addicted, sex fends. If you don’t want people to think this is a remake, perhaps you should take the words Bad Lieutenant out of the title. That might be your first step towards redemption. Have they even thought of doing that? Of course not, because they want to tap into that built in fanbase from the original.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you know the rest!

Do you see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as a remake or a separate film?

My Son My Son What Have Ye Done Trailer Premiere

Mali Elfman — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:34:45 +0000

Wow. Leave it to Werner Herzog, a director known as much for being crazy personality as his crazy pieces of art, to bring us a greek tragedy set in modern day. He has just finished his second of two films and not long after we get the trailer for his first film, Bad Lieutenant, we now have the trailer for his second project which was produced by David Lynch, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done starring two of my favorite actors Willem Dafoe and Michael Shannon.

Watch the trailer below…

If you’ve ever flipped on the news in LA, at least once a month you get a standoff like this. Apparently, the film was inspired by a true crime story, in which a man named Brad McCallum began to experience “mystifying events” that lead him to brutally murder his own mother with a sword. Very ancient Greek, no?

What do you think of the film?

Top Ten: Arthouse Films to Watch in 2009

Tom von Logue Newth — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:00:37 +0000

For those of you who are sick of the Four Christmases of the film world, here is a list of ten amazing Arthouse films that you need to see. Sadly, only one of these films so far has a US release date as of right now, but if we’re lucky some or all may be coming to a cinema (somewhere vaguely) near you in 2009…

1. Bad Lieutenant – After many years firmly in the arthouse ghetto, director Werner Herzog’s finally beginning to encroach upon the consciousness of a wider public, what with the odd but not unsuccessful Rescue Dawn, the unworldly (tho mildly autopiloted) Encounters at the End of the World, and rescuing Joaquin Phoenix from a car wreck. He seems to be enjoying his flirtation with the mainstream, and from the unexpected move of making a Nam-era true-story action picture, he’s just finished remaking Abel Ferrara’s notorious Bad Lieutenant (1992). The original stars Harvey Keitel in a totally committed performance as a junkie cop with a fistful of sexual psychoses and heavy religious hang-ups. Herzog has Nic Cage and the action is moved from New York to New Orleans. It’s a crazy project that sounds terrible but could just be brilliant – Nic Cage’s weirdness becomes inspired lunacy in the right hands (eg Lynch) and he’s supported by Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, the wonderful Brad Dourif, Xzibit and, of all people, Jennifer Coolidge (also wonderful!). Apparently it contains plenty of Herzogian invention, so if one’s first reaction is a similar “why on earth?” to hearing about van Sant’s Psycho, it’s still tempting to believe that rather than a complete car-wreck, it could just be fantastic.

2. Chelsea on the Rocks – Abel Ferrara’s star, meanwhile, has been going pretty steadily downhill for the last 16 years, but he’s still plugging away, even if failing to get a proper US release for any of his more recent pictures. The latest went down fairly well at Cannes: Chelsea on the Rocks, a typically personal tribute to the hotel and various folks who’ve lived there comprised of documentary and archive footage and dramatisations. I gather Ethan Hawke makes a bit of a twat of himself, but then it also features the return of Grace Jones! It looks as though Ferrara’s previous feature, Go-Go Tales, intriguingly inspired by Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, has gone the way of Mary (2005), ‘R Xmas (2001) and New Rose Hotel (1998) and sunk without trace, but maybe he’ll have more luck with his current project, Pericle e nero; a prequel to his 1990 “hit” King of New York, it stars Michael Pitt as the young version of Christopher Walken, building his drug empire in ’70s New York (strong contender for the very best time/place to set your movie). Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power this will not be.

3. Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon: From the we’ll-be-lucky-if-we-ever-see-it department, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon sounds gorgeous, a medieval pastoral romance filmed with the simplicity and grace that only old master Rohmer can muster (it’s rumoured to be his swansong – he’s 88 this year). Hidden amongst his filmography of self-assured young people navigating the oceans of romance whilst carrying on endless philosophical conversations is one of my favourite films of all time, an adaptation of the middle-French legend, Perceval le gallois (1978). He knows romance and he knows the medieval times – should be magical.

4. 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup: We’re more likely to see something of another old hand of the nouvelle vague. The (relative) success of Jacques Rivette’s mesmerising Ne Touchez pas la hache bodes well for a release of his current production, 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup. Any new Rivette film is cause for excitement; that this one reportedly revolves around a traveling circus is almost too much for me. The title refers to a mountain, and the fact that something can appear different every time you look at it. If the stars align (and if Rivette’s feeling playful) it could be the most exhilarating cinematic experience of the year.

5. Ricky: Of French directors not in their eighties, I like François Ozon by far the best. His last, Angel, was apparently a misfire, but my fingers are crossed for Ricky. This purports to be a mixture of drama and fantasy about an ordinary couple who have an extraordinary baby: it grows wings. Ozon seems to have moved on from his serious/morbid mode and although it’s unlikely to be as delirious Water Falls on Burning Rocks (2000), if it’s as simply entertaining as 8 Women (2002) then that’s good enough for me.

6. Achilles and the Tortoise: The best new film I have seen in as long as I can remember is Beat Takeshi’s Achilles and the Tortoise. I caught it at the AFI festival in November and desperately hope it gets a release so I can go see it again. It’s a wonderful, sad, funny, moving story about an artist, showing him as a child, a student and a middle-aged man, obsessively devoting his life to painting at the expense of family and prosperity. This being Takeshi, there’s not much talk, and the ending (and the exact analogy of the title, taken from Zeno’s paradox) is opaque, but it is a fantastic celebration of art for art’s sake in all its glorious, inexplicable irrationality.

7. Gachi Boi: Quite the most enjoyable film I saw all year was also at the AFI fest and also Japanese: Gachi Boi. It is the utterly charming tale of a nice young man who joins his college wrestling team and whom we gradually come to learn suffers from the inability to make new memories. The wrestling is Mexican rather than Greco-Roman and the memory thing more like 50 First Dates than Memento, but amid the deliberate silliness and immense good humour there’s a very well-poised story of sadness.

8. Gomorra: The Italian Gomorra also played the AFI fest, having won the best director prize at Cannes; it went great guns at the UK box office and is slated for a 19 Feb US release. Based on a journalistic exposé, it’s a hugely impressive tapestry of six stories set around a suburb of Naples and concerning the lowest rungs of the infamous organised crime syndicate the Comorra. It’s not a hugely likable film, in part because there’s no-one really to like in it, but the pace never flags, director Matteo Garrone rarely puts a foot wrong, and the extensive cast (many non-professionals) are uniformly excellent.

9. Still Walking: I don’t go to nearly as many festivals as I would like to. If, for example, I’d made it to Toronto, I’d have made sure not to miss the new Kore-eda Hirokazu, Still Walking, which by all accounts went down extremely well. Comparisons with Ozu have been all over the place, presumably since it concerns the relationship between elderly parents and their children, and the suffocations that family can impose, taking place over the course of one day when “nothing” really happens at the annual get-together to mourn the premature passing of an eldest son fifteen years previously. Family-dissection movies can be a risky affair (how over-rated was A Christmas Tale? ) but the word is that Kore-eda succeeds masterfully and based solely on my experience of his wonderful Afterlife (1998) I am quite prepared to believe the hype.

10. Encarnação do Demônio: And finally, I was thrilled to discover only yesterday of the return of Coffin Joe! More properly, Zé do Caixão, a sinister supernatural grave-digger, sporting top hat, cloak and horrible long fingernails, portrayed by Brazilian surrealist/lunatic director José Mojica Marins in the gloriously titled At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse (1967), as well as here and there and on TV in subsequent years. He finally completes the trilogy with Encarnação do Demônio in which Joe is searching for a woman to bear him a child and continue his powerful and ungodly blood-line. It’ll be trashy, campy and horrifying in equal measure is my guess – one scene has a naked woman emerge into Joe’s arms from the bloody corpse of a dead pig. A real dead pig. The closest cinematic equivalent to Marins is Jodorowsky (himself hugely inspired by a sojourn in Brazil..) and it seems that, unlike the once-inspired Chilean, Marins’ lunacy is as engaging as ever.

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