I tried to tell you guys that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is awesome, but don’t take my word for it, I’m just a guy in a windowless van filled with cats.  Take it from Werner Herzog, he’s, uh… a crazy German guy… who got shot in the belly and laughed about it.  Dang, I may have to rewrite this.

Amped up, antic and crackling with chemical intensity, Nic Cage’s performance moved movie critic Roger Ebert to observe: “Cage is as good as anyone since Klaus Kinski at portraying a man whose head is exploding.”
Cage’s tweaker technique was so realistic, it caused the movie’s director, Werner Herzog — who worked with Kinski on five films — to call into question what the Oscar winner was really putting up his nose.

Was it ants?  Please say it was ants.

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The minute I told friends I loved Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, they asked, “You mean because it’s good or because it’s a train wreck?”

The truth is, I don’t really know.  Imagine The Wire as written by Shane Black.  It rides the line between brilliant and brilliantly terrible so well, all I know is that I loved every minute of it and I couldn’t turn away*.  Like rock n’ roll, there’s something about a movie being almost bad that makes it infinitely better.

Now, before I get to my wholehearted recommendation, (and a wholehearted recommendation is what this is, in case you wanted to save yourself the trouble of reading the rest), I feel I should first clarify that if the crowd at the screening I attended is at all representative, a lot of people will not like this movie.  But I believe I can provide a handy guide to the type of person who will or won’t.  I illustrate by way of a story:  Last week for Halloween, I dressed in a giant penguin suit with a fake mustache, an outfit I thought was pretty self-explanatory.  And yet, a significant number of people came up to me throughout the night to ask, “What are you supposed to be?”

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