Werner Herzog | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).

If you’re going to watch ‘companion piece’ movies then these two barking mad features are the ones for you.

The only thing really connecting them is the title, the film from 2009 the most loose ‘remake’ ever. Harvey Keitel goes Full-Harvey and Nicolas Cage goes Full-Cage. You can’t choose a winner. The films aren’t about plotting or themes; they are just an opportunity for the actor to do a Brando, go a wee bit nuts. And it’s a joy to watch. Stay off the drugs, people!

Somehow, Kietel and Cage both wound up in an appalling feature named National Treasure (2004), phoning it in in the worst way. They look bored shitless. As was I. But one has to pay the bills so I forgive them.

Wings of Hope – Juliane Diller.

Juliane Diller, née Koepcke, is the subject of the spellbinding Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope (1998). Diller, a German-Peruvian biologist, was the 17-year-old sole survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash on 24 December, 1971. Diller, strapped in her seat, plummeted 10,000 feet into the Peruvian rainforest during a thunderstorm (the plane had been struck by lightning). Finding a stream and relying on basic survival skills, she travelled along it for nine days before stumbling upon local lumbermen who, at first believing her to be a ‘water godess’, took her to a lumber station via canoe. She was eventually airlifted to hospital. You couldn’t make this shit up. Extraordinary.

Before the plane crash.

Revisiting the crash site in 1998.

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: Werner Herzog

Bad Lieutenant (1992) and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).

Wings of Hope – Juliane Diller.