End of Watch is a top notch thriller of a cop movie. Two cops, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, patrol a hell hole beat in South Central LA. They are well-intentioned cops, but they are testosterone-fueled young guys. They are always looking for action, and this neighborhood has plenty of action. They ultimately bite off more than they should try to chew.
Writer-director David Ayer (Training Day) has made a movie that rises above the genre because of the well-written main characters and their relationship. We watch them chiefly from a camera on the dashboard of their squad car. We learn that they are both decent guys and both adrenaline junkies, but one is more aspirational and one is more settled. They are both funny, and the multiracial theater audience at my screening was howling at the ethnic ball-breaking.
There are also some impressive chases, often filmed with the dashboard camera facing forward. It’s thrilling stuff. There’s a lot of shaky cam (which I usually hate), but here it works well to enhance the chaos of the setting as well as the action.
The rest of the cast is excellent, most notably Natalie Martinez and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as the love interests, David Harbour, America Ferrera and Frank Grillo as fellow cops, and Diamonique as a fierce gangbanger.
And here’s a shout out to Michael Peña. In End of Watch, Peña nails both the humor and the action; he’s on-screen almost the whole movie and has an engaging presence. He has played so many Latino cops, and he really deserves a chance to show what he can do with a different type of role.
Lawless is a good looking, well-acted and completely predictable crime drama among moonshiners in Prohibition Era Appalachia. The filmmakers were careful to enrich the film with all kind of period detail – not just the cars and the clothes, but down to the advertisements at the gas station and the footwashing and the Sacred Harp singing at the Church of the Brethren. However, we always know that [minor spoilers] the good guys will defeat the villain and Jessica Chastain will fall for Alpha male Tom Hardy.
The story by musician Nick Cave is based on a real family of Virginia bootleggers and, as typical for Cave, is severely violent. Hardy grunts and snorts, but is convincing as the leader of his brothers, played by Jason Clarke and (why is he a movie star?) Shia LaBeouf.
But the best acting is by the supporting company. As the villain, Guy Pearce plays a lethal dandy. Gary Oldman sparkles as a gangster ally. Mia Wasikowska, looking like she stepped out of a Dorothea Lange photo, is perfectly cast as a teen girl with an eye for bad boys. And every time Jessica Chastain is on camera, she commands the screen and elevates the entire film; her beauty is especially breathtaking in Lawless, particularly when naked.
During the next few months, we’re going to see some major releases of violent crime dramas.
The first, opening on August 29, is Lawless, written by musician Nick Cave. It is set among moonshiners in Depression Era Appalachia. The cast includes Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska and (why is he a movie star?) Shia LaBeouf.
On October 19, we’ll see what I expect to be the best of the lot, the stylishly violent Killing Them Softly, a big hit at Cannes. It’s a contemporary story with an ensemble cast featuring Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins and Sam Shepherd.
Those two movies were going to sandwich the release of Gangster Squad, a mob movie based on Mickey Cohn’s 1949 sojourn in LA, starring Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) and Giovanni Ribisi. But one scene in Gangster Squad is a shooting in a movie theater; the Aurora, Colorado, tragedy made the distributor skittish, and the release has been delayed to January 13.
You can read descriptions and view trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To. Here’s the trailer for Killing Me Softly:
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, one of the best movies of the year and an extraordinary achievement in filmmaking, is too long and too slow for most audiences. That’s okay with its director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who says that it’s just fine with him if audiences give up halfway through. That sounds self-indulgent, but there isn’t a bit of self-indulgence in the film’s 2 hours and 37 minutes. It’s just that the movie demands that you meet it halfway. If you don’t, you’re going to be bored. If you patiently settle in to the tempo of the film, you’ll be as transfixed as I was.
Technically, it’s a police procedural because the cops are solving a crime – and, indeed, by the end, we know who committed the crime and why and how. But those aren’t the most important questions posed in the movie, which probes fundamental aspects of the human condition – love, betrayal, loss and decency.
As the movie begins, three carloads of men are driving at night through rural Turkey. They think that they are wrapping up a murder investigation. Two guys have confessed to killing a man and burying his body out in the sticks. The cops are taking the culprits out in the country to locate the body. But the desolate hills and lonely roads all look alike. One of the killers was asleep on the drive and can’t help find the grave. The other one was drunk, and he only remembers a nearby fountain and, unhelpfully, “a round tree”.
They arrive at a potential crime site, but it isn’t the right place. So they drive to another, but strike out again. One group argues about the best unpasteurized yogurt. The men are becoming fatigued and irritable, and, as we listen to snippets of conversation, we learn about each of the characters. We piece together that they all defer to the prosecuting attorney. He has brought along a doctor to observe the corpse; the doctor is living a rut-like existence in a nowhere town, not able to move on after a divorce. The provincial police chief is burned out but puts in long hours to avoid the stress at home (he has a son with a condition, maybe autism or epilepsy). One affable cop goes to the country and shoots his guns to blow off steam. One man is haunted by an event in his past.
This first one hour and twenty minutes of the film is at night – lit only by the headlights of the three cars. Although nothing seems to be advancing the plot, the story is spellbinding as we lean in and try to deconstruct the characters. By now, the rhythm of the story is hypnotic.
The men take a predawn break in a tiny village. The mayor gives them food and tea, acting out of Middle Eastern courtesy and also taking advantage of a chance to pitch a public works project to the official from the capital. The power goes out, and they sit in darkness. Then a door creaks open and the mayor’s teenage daughter brings in a tray with an oil lamp and glasses of tea. She is modestly dressed, beautiful and lit only by the lamp. As she serves tea to each of the exhausted men, we can see that she looks to them like an angel. They wonder how such beauty could appear out of nowhere and about her fate in such a remote village. It’s a stunning scene.
Now the convoy sets off again, and dawn breaks. We see the Anatolian steppe in widescreen desolate vistas like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. As in the nighttime scenes, when they get out of their vehicles, the camera shoots the men in extreme long shot, so they are tiny against the endless steppe. The cinematography is superb.
Forty minutes in, a character begins telling an anecdote to another, but they are interrupted. After another thirty minutes, the listener presses the teller to finish the story and weighs in with some questions of his own. Near the end of the movie, the two revisit the story. This time the teller of the anecdote connects the dots and finally understands a pivotal moment in his own life. This moment, drawing on profound acting by Taner Birsel, is raw and searing.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the jury prize at Cannes. I felt well rewarded for investing in its 2 hours and 37 minutes. This visually striking movie, with its mesmerizing story, is uncommonly good. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is now available on DVD.
Richard Widmark running out of luck in THE NIGHT AND THE CITY
On July 15, Turner Classic Movies is showing the under appreciated film noir classic Night in the City (1950). Richard Widmark is superb as a loser who tries to corner the pro wrestling business in post-war London – and, as in any noir classic, it doesn’t end well for the sap.
The American director Jules Dassin had just made the noir classics The Naked City and Thieves’ Highway when he shot Night and the City in the UK. He was blackballed in the McCarthy Era and never moved back to the US.
At the request of a studio exec, Dassin created a role in Night and the City for the stunningly beautiful but emotionally fragile Gene Tierney. The cast also includes real life wrestlers Stanislaus Zbyszko and Mike Mazurki.
Night in the City (along with The Wrestler) represents wrestling on my list of Best Sports Movies, and there’s a clip of an extended wrestling scene from the movie on that page. (Also, Dassin’s Brute Force makes my list of Best Prison Movies.)
Polisse is a riveting French police procedural about the child protective services unit in Paris. Most cop movies are about how the cops solve the crime. Instead, Polisse is about the job’s emotional impact on the cops themselves – when their assignment is rescuing kids from various degrees of abuse. It’s an uncommonly good film.
Writer-director Maiwenn embedded herself with this police unit for several months. At the San Francisco International Film Festival screening, she said that, although the film is fictional, everything in the movie happened in real life (except for the love story between Maiwenn’s photographer and Joey Starr’s cop). Maiwenn also said that, although the real-life cops were rooting for her to do a movie about their most spectacular exploits, she chose to focus on a realistic cross-section of cases to depict the unit’s actual daily experience.
There are about ten cops in the unit, and it’s an excellent ensemble cast. Joey Starr is the cop who cares too much. Karin Viard (Paris, Potiche, Time Out) is the seemingly together cop whose family life has been sacrificed. Marine Fois (seen earlier this year in Four Lovers) is wound way too tight. Frederic Pierrot (I’ve Loved You So Long, Let It Rain, Sarah’s Key) is the conflict-averse commander trying to keep the lid on his rambunctious unit.
Okay, the Oscars are over. In case you’re done with high-falutin’ cinema, here’s a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other – Outrage (Autoreiji). Like any good Yakuza film, there are lots of full body tattoos and severed fingers.
But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese).
Director Takeshi Kitano also stars, credited as Beat Takeshi. Takeshi, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.
Outrage is just filmed too brightly to qualify as a film noir, but the story has all the tragedy of a classic noir. You’re rooting for the characters to survive, but you know that they probably won’t – and they know it, too.
There is also a crime boss so cynical and duplicitous that he puts the Sopranos to shame.
Outrage is not a great movie, but is plenty entertaining if you’re in the mood.
If you’re looking for a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other, Outrage (Autoreiji) is the film for you. Like any good Yakuza film, there are lots of full body tattoos and severed fingers.
But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese).
Director Takeshi Kitano also stars, credited as Beat Takeshi. Takeshi, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.
Outrage is just filmed too brightly to qualify as a film noir, but the story has all the tragedy of a classic noir. You’re rooting for the characters to survive, but you know that they probably won’t – and they know it, too.
There is also a crime boss so cynical and duplicitous that he puts the Sopranos to shame.
Outrage is not a great movie, but is plenty entertaining if you’re in the mood.
Ben Affleck knows Boston, which is the best thing about this crime drama about thieves desperately evading the FBI. The Town is a well made, satisfying Hollywood action thriller, but nothing more. The movie really had me hooked through the second act with the world of Irish professional criminals in Charleston, Mass. But the end of the movie wraps up everything way too neatly.
Ben Affleck the actor, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall, and The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner are all good. Chris Cooper is excellent in a five-minute scene.
Ben Affleck proved in Gone Baby Gone that he can be a fine director, and hopefully he will reach that standard again.
Ajami is an ultra-realistic crime drama set in a scruffy neighborhood in Jaffa, Israel. The story weaves together Arab Christians and Arab Muslims and both religious and non-religious Israeli Jews. Everyone aspires to make a living and live in personal safety, but the circumstances and tribal identities make this very difficult at best. There are two trans-religious romances, but no one is going to live happily ever after.
It’s a film that doesn’t make any overt political statements, but shows what is from the perspective of individual of different backgrounds. Given their own experiences, it’s easy to understand the motivations of each character.
Ajami was co-writtten and co-directed by Scandar Copti, a Jaffa-born Palestinian, and Yaron Shoni, an Israeli Jew. After seeing the film, I was surprised to learn that it has no trained actors – all of the roles are played by real-life residents who improvised their lines to follow the story line.
Ajami was nominated for the most recent Best Foreign Language Oscar, was released earlier this year in US art houses and is now available on DVD..
Co-Director Scandar Copti discusses the process of using non-actors improvising within a script framework.
