Bad Lieutenant

I'm going to put my thoughts on the interwebs concerning 1992's "Bad Lieutenant" with the caveat that my sole reason for doing so is autobiographical. I want to record every movie I watched in 2011. Given these past couple of weeks and that it took at least 4 separate nights of viewing to get through "Bad Lieutenant," I wish I could give this a more thorough critique.

My initial conclusion is that Abel Ferrara and Alejandro González Iñárritu share a common goal: torture their viewers while appearing to make insightful social commentary. Throughout the movie there are gratuitous scenes of drug and alcohol use, sexual abuse of teenagers, nuns being raped, etc. This might have been progressive in 1950, but attempting to illustrate society's ills by graphically depicting them on screen without another frame of reference was passé, conservatively, 30 years prior to the making of this film.

What's sad is that Iñárritu is attempting the same tactic 20 years later.

Ebert loved this movie. He praised Keitel for being courageous enough to take the part.

Bruno Ganz was courageous to play the darkest portrayal of Hitler to see the silver screen. I think Keitel knew that Ferrara would let him have free reign, and it apparently wowed many, but I think it wasn't courageous - it was a misstep.