Of the three important movies opening today, our coverage of one of them will be handled elsewhere, by Mr. Joe MacLeod of the Baltimore City Paper: READ MORE

"It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of some sort of franchise. I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called 'film-studies,' in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory – has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction. Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers." READ MORE

Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant was a gritty portrait of corruption best remembered for the expert way it conveyed the grim inevitably of its desperate protagonist's destruction. Also it was one of the first movies where Harvey Keitel whipped out his wienie. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the Werner Herzog-helmed "remake" whose trailer you see above, will probably be remembered for the sheer comedy that is sure to result from bringing a bad idea to its logical conclusion. Hopefully Nicolas Cage keeps it in his pants.