Bad Cop / Worse Cop

the critic inside me

Remakes are terrible, aren’t they? Cynical cash-ins from the creatively bankrupt; hackney art vacuums designed to sell popcorn from shallow filmmakers like Tony Scott (director of The Taking of Pelham 123 and the upcoming The Warriors) and Michael Bay (producer of Halloween, The Amityville Horror and the recent Nightmare on Elm Street). They’re the cinematic equivalent of fake Kappa trackies. But every once and a while one of these cheap counterfeits is equal to its original; even rarer, it improves upon it. Think John Carpenter’s The Thing, Phillip Kaufmann’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Michael Mann’s Heat. This week sees another film that can be added to this list: Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant. With its release this weekend the Screen Shrapnel team will be revealing their favourite re-makes.

Also on this week’s show Screen Shrapnel get inside the mind of two disturbed law enforcers: we have a bad trip with eponymous bad lieutenant Nicolas Cage in Herzog’s re-imagining and we enter the shattered psyche of Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), the sheriff protagonist of Michael Winterbottom’s neo-noir The Killer Inside Me. We also hitch a ride in a sweaty tin-can in Samual Maoz’s tank set sophomore film, Lebanon

Posted at 12:31, 22nd May 2010