I’m not watching much TV at the moment (except for the cooking binge that is Nigella, Hugh FW and Nigel Slater), Dexter, which I loved, has finished (this last season had to be the best season yet), I’m still watching Merlin (which I’m loving as well) and I am trying and failing to get into the new zombie thing on FX that has replaced Dexter in the Friday night slot. I am principally not watching much TV because there’s not much that I like on but I’m also not watching much TV because there is so much on that Mr. Lacer likes and our TV tastes aren’t that compatible these days. Anyway, miracles of miracles, there wasn’t anything Mr. Lacer wanted to watch on TV last night, so we decided to watch a movie on Film Flex (a Virgin thing for all you Sky and Freeview people out there), problem was there wasn’t really any movies I wanted to watch on there either, whereas Mr. Lacer extends his TV watching nerdery to his film watching by having a list on his iPhone of which movies he wants to rent next. He showed me his list, nothing thrilled me, I looked on Film Flex, nothing thrilled me (or as Mr. Lacer put it, “Out of 500 movies there is nothing you want to see?”) but in the end, after me refusing to watch Iron Man 2 on account of me not having seen the first Iron Man, I let Mr. Lacer choose and he chose The Bad Lieutenant and he chose well with the sort of knowledge of knowing exactly what sort of movies I like, even when I don’t seem to know myself.
Anyway, The Bad Lieutenant is a Nick Cage movie (thumbs up already) about a rather nasty New Orleans cop, who as a result of a back injury which has left him in constant pain starts swallowing and sniffing just about anything he can nick from the evidence lock-up. It’s a quirky film and the Nick Cage character doesn’t do anything to redeem himself for most of the movie and I have to admit, for a while I wasn’t sure if I was liking this movie at all, however it’s as if the director had a change of direction about half way through the movie, where the camera work began to feel more like as if we were following the characters around in some sort of very weird real life documentary, everything became much more in their faces and when Nick Cage starts hallucinating iguanas . . .
The supporting characters around Nick Cage’s Bad Lieutenant were very watchable, from Cage’s prostitute girlfriend, to his alcoholic father and the various gang members he meets along the way. Definitely a watchable movie and from a writer’s perspective, an interesting lesson in how to handle a completely unlikable person as your main character, I think the writers of this movie so almost got it wrong, making him too unlikable and consequently not allowing the audience to have any empathy for the guy but they get it right in the end. Also an interesting lesson into how sometimes it’s good to hide your character’s motivation for a bit.
