Bad Lieutenant Port of Call
One of my favourite recent Herzog films is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans and I saw it again last night. Whenever I see it, I notice how it reuses some ideas from Stroszek (My favourite Herzog film, after Heart of Glass).
Spoilers for both films.
First of all, there's the song at the end of Stroszek which is reused in the dancing soul scene. While it's awesome and fitting, I was annoyed at first by it and feel bad for anyone who sees it before Stroszek, because the ending of Stroszek is the best thing ever - my jaw was dropped when I first saw it - and the song played a large part of that. It's so perfect and hilarious and I think it's impact would be lessened if you'd heard it before, especially in the context of another Herzog movie.
But that scene in Bad Lieutenant was definitely the best in the movie anyway, and the way it was juxtaposed with the state of Nicholas Cage's character at the time was not far off from the way it was in Stroszek.
Secondly, there's a scene where the girlfriend in Bad Lieutenant (played by Eva Mendes), a prostitute, while applying her eyeliner, draws a spot on her cheek almost exactly like the Eva in Stroszek, also the girlfriend of the protagonist and a prostitute.
And finally there are the iguanas, and further, the musical montage of iguanas, which strikes me as being, like what Herzog says about the dancing chicken scene, "a great metaphor, though for what I could not say".
So what does everyone think? Are these surface similarities with no substantial underlying connection? Or if I try harder could I come up with some parallels between Bruno and Terence's story (I feel like I could)? Am I justified in saying Bad Lieutenant is the most similar Herzog film to Stroszek, and vice versa? Do Stroszek fans even like Bad Lieutenant?
Personally I think that between the demented iguanas, the dancing soul, and the dreaming fish, there's enough of what I love about Herzog in it to turn a great character study and fun movie into something really special.
My Top 51 Films:
http://www.imdb.com/list/Bw65XZIpkH8/