Last night, German director Werner Herzog spoke with American director Jonathan Demme at one of those “A Conversation With…” shindigs held by the Museum of the Moving Image at The New York Times Building. As Herzog was waiting to take the stage, a man from Brooklyn was scaling the building’s ceramic tubes (the second man that day) in a bid to end malaria, or at least bring attention to its desired demise with an anti-malaria shirt.

Werner Herzog is a bad mother. Not in the way that Andrea Yates is a bad mother, but more like Samuel L. Jackson. Here’s a guy—and we’re not even going to include his daredevil filmography—who has the audacity to remake a cult classic and claim to have never seen a movie by the director who made it. He actually claims to not know who the director is. When it was announced that Herzog would be remaking the Harvey Keitel crime drama Bad Lieutenant with Nicholas Cage in the lead, people didn’t believe it. Well, it’s going down, and Abel Ferrara, the original film’s director, is peeved. Last month at Cannes, he vented on the issue, saying, “I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.” What about everyone is else on that streetcar? Is Abel Ferrara summoning the death of innocents, just so his movie won’t get remade? Grim.