More classic BluRay goodness...and Jesus to boot!
Bad Lieutenant is hardcore because Abel Ferrara pulls no punches. The Catholic imagery weaved into drug-fueled acts of moral degradation is the sort of stuff I live for in a films - but I survived nuns. Maybe you didn't. But that's your trip, not mine. You'll never fully understand the film, though. Hmmmmmmm...oh well.
From Janet Maslin at the New York Times:
When Abel Ferrara calls something bad, better believe it: he means business. Mr. Ferrara, whose gleefully down-and-dirty films include "Fear City" and "King of New York," has used his latest, "Bad Lieutenant," as a form of personal one-upmanship. He has come up with his own brand of supersleaze, in a film that would seem outrageously, unforgivably lurid if it were not also somehow perfectly sincere.
In inventing the corrupt police officer of the title, this director is not thinking of the sort who fixes parking tickets. He's imagining a crack addict who'll yell "Police business!" to empty a tenement hallway so he can make his drug buy. Mr. Ferrara is inventing a law officer who, confronted with the sight of a robbery in progress, runs to a pay phone to call his bookie with a bet on a Mets game.
As played by Harvey Keitel, the eponymous (and otherwise nameless) Bad Lieutenant is so far gone he initially seems funny. Here, after all, is a cop so jaded he frightens suspects at the scene of a crime. Here's a man who can give an appreciative once-over to a well-built female corpse, and whose idea of a romantic evening is two hookers, slow dance music and a blood alcohol level that would fell a horse. The film's depiction of the lieutenant's badness reaches an over-the-top epiphany in a long, rambling scene that shows Mr. Keitel sexually intimidating two women, whom he suspects of a minor driving infraction. One of Mr. Ferrara's directorial frissons at such a moment is to have the cooperation of one of these trampy-looking women, whom the Lieutenant orders to simulate a sexual act, impeded by the fact that she is chewing gum.
It goes without saying that Mr. Ferrara's work has a polarizing effect. One condition of his cult status is that his films give as much offense as possible (without resorting to much violence) and make no attempt to find the middle of the road. Viewers with little tolerance for over-the-top sensationalism will this time be even further put off than they might have been by Mr. Ferrara's tamer efforts, since the subject is the rape of an extremely pretty nun. The director is not shy about either the details of the assault or the nun's extreme piety in its aftermath. He may mean to switch gears when he moves from a sordid rape scene to the nun's forgiveness of "those boys, those sad, raging boys," but in fact the note of excess is much the same.
The Lieutenant eventually finds his saving grace through the nun's ordeal. Mr. Ferrara has his saving graces, too, the chief one being raw talent, which he continues to display while telling even the most far-fetched story. Imagine a Martin Scorsese who had chosen to make nothing but B movies and you may have some idea of what Mr. Ferrara can be capable of. Imagine a series of long, improvised-sounding behavioral meltdowns and you get some notion of what happens when "Bad Lieutenant" goes off the tracks.
The results may be uneven, but they certainly aren't dull. "Bad Lieutenant" uses a long string of vivid New York locations without often retracing its steps, and presents a brutal, knowing look at the city's seamy side. A take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward mainstream audiences also gives the film a distinct independent streak. Even its frequent excesses can have a certain panache when viewed with suitable open-mindedness, though such tolerance is not always easily achieved. When Jesus Christ appears to a hallucinating Lieutenant late in the story, even He displays a hip-tilting posture and has swagger to spare.
Mr. Keitel gives the Lieutenant's role his all, which is sometimes more than it requires. At its best, the performance conveys a lost, sardonic character in real pain; at other times, Mr. Keitel's Lieutenant is too stonily silent to evoke much feeling. Also appearing briefly as part of the film's large cast is Zoe Lund, the co-screenwriter, who plays a bleary-eyed, stick-thin drug addict and espouses the sentiment that best defines the film's tortured characters. "We gotta eat away at ourselves until there's nothing left except appetite," she says.
Mr. Ferrara's own appetite for sensationalism remains untempered. Even at his most reckless, he continues to indulge it with a lively, low-down version of high style. "Bad Lieutenant" is rated NC-17 (No one under 17 admitted). It includes nudity, profanity and countless situations that make it unsuitable for children.
Technical Information:
Title: Bad Lieutenant
Year: 1992
Country: USA
Director: Abel Ferrara
Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 5.77 GB
Length: 1:36:13
Programs used: mkvmerge
Resolution: 1280x720
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~8592 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.97 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby DTS Stereo @ 1509 kb/s
Audio 2: Russian- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 384 kb/s
Audio 3: Russian- Dolby DTS Stereo @ 1509 kb/s
Audio 4: Russian- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: Russian, English
(Our prefered x264 player is Media Player Classic.)
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