Four Generations of Half-Assed NOLA Filmmaking

I've been catching up on reader suggestions for Essential NOLA films. Here's a quick overview, in chronological order.

KING CREOLE (1958)

Full disclosure: I've never seen an Elvis film before. But of course I'd seen countless clips from pastel kitsch like ROUSTABOUT and CLAMBAKE on tv. So I was not prepared for the somber, elegant B&W of KING CREOLE's opening credits, and my jaw hit the floor when I saw the names behind the film— Hal Wallis and Michael Curtiz, the producer and director of CASABLANCA, both Oscar-winners.

The film's not CASABLANCA good, but it is in most ways an excellently written, superbly acted, perfectly directed French Quarter gangster film. Elvis himself completely inhabits a high school ne'er-do-well caught between family disputes, financial imperatives, and bigwig machinations. Most impressively, he plays him without a trace of vanity or irony; he's completely believable. Unfortunately, the screenplay runs out of ideas about 85% into the natural arc of the story, and abruptly just ends, like they ran out of film or something. But for capturing the French Quarter in the 1950s so realistically and its right-from-the-streets cast of characters, it is Essential NOLA Cinema.

CAT PEOPLE (1982)

Paul Schrader's erotic-horror film is better than history remembers it, but worse than its cult following would have you believe.  A spiritual predecessor to Michael Almereyda's HAPPY HERE AND NOW (2002; I'll be writing about it soon) in that it evokes a creepy yet sexual atmosphere, leans heavily on genuine NOLA geography and architecture, then adds half-baked fantasy elements, dubious interior sets, and cheesy music (Tangerine Dream and Vangelis have ruined more movies than Chris Tucker).

It adds up to a mess, but a pleasing mess than never stops entertaining, even as it flops between genuine quality and so-bad-its-good train wreck. See it because Nastassja Kinski's house is across from my old apartment on the corner of Bourbon and Esplanade. (Note: the We Hate Movies podcast has a fantastic take-down of this film that is both exhaustive and fair.)

HEAVEN'S PRISONERS (1996)

This Phil Joanou bomb won 2 Razzies and is most known as how Teri Hatcher lost her credibility after rocketing to fame in "Lois & Clark." All of that is unfair and unjustified: this is actually a solid, ambitious thriller that never quite pulls off a delicate balancing act.  It wants to be "LA CONFIDENTIAL in the French Quarter" but its slick, commercial-yet-kind-of-cheesy style undermines its gravitas and sets the film on the wrong footing.

It opens with a long sequence out of a made-for-tv movie: Alec Baldwin saves a child from a sinking airplane that crashes in a lake while he's sailing. It's standard Hollywood heroics but it turns out that the film is going for the exact opposite of that— Baldwin is in fact playing a thick-headed recovering alcoholic of dim intelligence and real human vulnerability. This fact takes over a half hour to be established, but when it finally does, the screenplay then takes our dumb, obsessed lug and really puts the screws to him in a way that's organic and suspenseful. By the time we enter the finale, it is as dark and distressing as Paul Schrader's AFFLICTION (high praise). Essential? Borderline. Recommended? Yes.

STOLEN (2012)

Ah, Hollywood South. Maybe the only thing worse than a NOLA-shot Hollywood film is a NOLA-shot Hollywood film that wants to cast New Orleans as itself. STOLEN reteams the muscle behind CON AIR, director Simon West and French Quarter resident Nick Cage in a criminal-must-rescue-daughter/heist film. Basically a straight-to-video rip-off of TAKEN, except it's better than TAKEN, because in its corner-cutting it made some interesting choices: the whole film takes place in ~10 hours (including the prologue and epilogue), and Cage actually turns in a grounded, vanity-free performance that's so far from BAD LIEUTENANT it's hard to believe it's the same actor.

Which is not to say STOLEN is good: West is a third-tier Tony Scott and the script is second-rate. The decision to set the story 1) on Mardi Gras Day (!!) and 2) hide the daughter in an active taxi cab (?!?) results in some astounding moments of unintentional comedy, like when Cage meets a colleague in a totally empty Checkpoint Charlie's, or when the villain's cab drives up to a Mardi Gras parade's barricades on Canal Street and stops in surprise, as if the parade dropped out of the sky, or that a car could get within a half mile of Canal on Fat Tuesday. You can play a drinking game by spotting the same set of 12 extras in costume they used in the background of shots on Frenchmen Street. Despite the good cast and Cage's performance, STOLEN is recommended only as a dumb diversion or for lulz.