The Pnictogen Wing

Tonight in self-harm theater it's Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a film I associate firmly with miserable Caltech days, but also I was foolish enough to become a fanatical Kubrick fan for a while. It took me a while to grasp that better movies existed, and better directors.

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, for all its nastiness, feels like a movie made with compassion. This doesn't. I really ought to read the Burgess book.

~Χαρά

spinning our wheels, so...movie time, I guess? Logan's Run this afternoon

it's time for self-harm theater. I've been saving up this one for a long time—I've known about this movie for decades without actually watching it. Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. ~Χαρά

I liked it. Oh, it's foul, but that's just part of the cosmic joke. The titular "Bad Lieutenant" writhes uselessly on the end of God's marionette-strings. I read somewhere that Abel Ferrara wanted this movie to be funnier, but Harvey Keitel's apocalyptic performance dragged the film in a more serious direction. But there's still a lot of gallows-humor in Bad Lieutenant. Among the Lieutenant's many sins: he bets against his home team in a fictitious league championship series between the Mets and the Dodgers. The Dodgers win the first three games so the Lieutenant thinks he's going to win big by encouraging his fellow cops to bet on the Mets while he secretly bets against them—and for this heinous treachery, the Lieutenant is punished, forced to listen and watch as the Mets miraculously win the series anyway. Everything he does along the way makes his situation worse, until finally God takes mercy on the Lieutenant and sends a loan-shark's hitman who shoots the Lieutenant dead underneath a Trump Plaza billboard which reads "It All Happens Here".

How could this movie have been funnier?

~Χαρά

it's time for self-harm theater. I've been saving up this one for a long time—I've known about this movie for decades without actually watching it. Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant. ~Χαρά