Toronto International Film Festival, day five: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Barely a minute to blog today, but I thought I'd send a quick word on (as the credits call it) The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog's highly anticipated, um, rethinking of Abel Ferrara's modern classic. Apart from some hallucinatory asides involving alligators and iguanas, the movie as written turns out to be a fairly routine mediocre cop drama, albeit one rendered distinctive by Nicolas Cage's most batshit performance yet. Based on the way Cage skulks, yelps and twitches (sample dialogue: "Everything I take is prescription, except for the heroin"), Herzog evidently sees him as his new Klaus Kinski. Besides the central character type—a comprehensively corrupt, drug-addled cop—the movie shares nothing in common with Ferrara's film, except perhaps the degree of eccentricity that willed it into being. More on this one after I see Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?