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Observation #4: Without new images, we die. On a weekend where the majority of the movie-going public was jetting off to Pandora to experience sights and sounds the likes of which they HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE, I was feeling reactions of a similar kind to a feature with a significantly smaller budget. I don't know if I would have pegged this as a Herzog film if I were shown it with no knowledge of its history. Finkelstein's long tenure on episodic work is evident in that at times POCNO plays like a loopy rejected pilot for a proposed series about a messed-up cop but then it plays itself out to some sense of resolution (does this make it Herzog's Mulholland Dr?)

What is unusual is that this is no pretzel of a plot-twist police procedural. The crime is straightforward. The obvious suspect is called out early on and turns out to have committed the crime. There is no chain of corruption to be unraveled or surprise bad guy. Finkelstein is more concerned with behavior (primarily McDonagh's) and locale (post-Katrina New Orleans, where the film was shot entirely on location). The Big Easy has not been given a gloss of prettified local color to make it seem exotic or mysterious. It feels like an area hit by a natural disaster (much like the fictional one created by Herzog-approved auteur Harmony Korine in Gummo) and still digging itself out. Herzog does include extended interludes with local aquatic wildlife that help tie the plot together on at least some thematic level and two of these - the aftermath of an unseen car accident caused by an alligator on the freeway and a stare down between McDonagh and some iguanas who might not actually be in the room with him - are as warped and singular as any moments I have encountered in film before. From the man who once had a steamboat dragged up the side of a hill because the plot of his movie called for it, I would expect nothing less.

Observation #5: Failure to communicate. Is POCNO a good film or a bad film? Examining it from the viewpoint of a structured, tight screenplay, it's a disaster. The film threatens to build or suggests possible building towards something but then does a lope of a zigzag toward a (fairly unironic) happy ending. Among the actors, Nicolas Cage isn't the whole show but he's fairly close. Eva Mendes, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit, Michael Shannon and an almost unrecognizable Jennifer Coolidge provide measured support in parts both large and small. Val Kilmer is sadly wasted in the film's sole straight role. He's in the first 40 minutes, disappears for an hour and then returns at the end for what threatens to be an explosive climax but then isn't. POCNO is also a failure as a thriller, if that's what it was intended to be. There is no action, fleeting suspense and one brief shootout (said shootout does result in one of the film's other iconic visual moments of which I will only say look back to the quote at the top of the column). As a dark comedy of (rude) manners, POCNO is often a delight. Nobody really calls McDonagh out on his insane behavior and when they do, he still somehow skates away on the thin ice of a new day. If Keitel's Bad Lieutenant was confronting the limits of his reprehensible behavior, Cage's creation still has a ways to go, an improbable safety net still stretching underneath him.

And as for McDonagh, as flagrant and obvious and on the surface as his behavior and gratification and needs seem to be, he still remains a mystery perhaps even to himself. Consider his selfless action in the opening minutes - that sets the plot in motion - and how it dovetails with a neat coincidence and a flicker of redemption at the end. Why does he do this? Bad Lieutenant? Good cop? Maybe only the iguanas know and even in Herzog's cock-eyed world, they ain't talking.

Next time: See you in 2010 with my birthday column (bye-bye Christ year), a look back at the decade in films and a Chapter Two from what I think is the best year for movies in my lifetime (hint: I am kind of stretching the definition of "lifetime"). Happy Holidays!

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