End of Watch

Written at the time of the film's release...long before the Derek Chauvin conviction, but long after the Rodney King footage. Police work is a tough job that I'd be quite incapable of. And it's made tougher by the fact that they've become the "catch-all" solution to all of Society's problems. There's got to be a better way...for them and for us. I stand by the police. But, I don't stand by, blindly, ignoring the fact that they've become a symptom of a system doing as little as possible...and leaving it for someone else to fix.

Cops, the Home Movie
or
"...More Capers in One Deployment Than Most Cops Will See Their Entire Career."

It's a war out there "once upon a time in South Central." And Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the front-line reporter documenting the whole thing "for a project."  He's carrying a camera—not that he really needs it, the dashboard cam will pick up everything needed for an investigation. But that camera can only look forward—it's myopic. It can't see around you, it can't check the perimeter. And it can't look into your soul. It can look at your back, but it can't have it.

It starts with one of those dash-cam chases, so familiar to "reality" chase shows. No overlayed sound, save for Gyllenhall's narration, said in a monotone as if he was giving you your Miranda.  

I am the police and I am here to arrest you. You have broken the law. I did not write the law. I may even disagree with the law. But I will enforce it. No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy, nothing you do will stop me from putting you in a steel cage with gray bars. If you run away, I will chase you. If you fight me, I will fight back. If you shoot at me, I will shoot back. By law I am unable to walk away. I am a consequence. I am the unpaid bill. I am fate with a badge and a gun. Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who would die for me and I for them. We stand watch together. The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.*

And with that, the law of the film is laid down. The dash-cam goes away and the camera goes into cinema verité, the camera pointing from inside Taylor's locker as he goes through basic introductions—himself, his partner Mike Zavalla (Michael Peña, never better), his equipment (and a conversation from Rio Bravo pops into one's head: "That all you got?" "That's what I got."), and the beginning of the look inside—the harsh joshing, the tensions, the coolness and coldness and camaraderie of the corps. Joseph Wambaugh had an apt phrase for them in his book (and subsequent film), "The New Centurions." But Rome was never like this.

The turf in South Central is tough and hard-scrabble. Poverty is on display on every street corner, and behind the boarded-up windows of the houses in various states of disrepute are secrets for the outside world not to know, but will see the light of day once the front door is kicked in. The war is in the streets, but inside cook the warning signs that something is about to explode, the stakes rising, the limits of human degradation dropping, the calibers of the weapons increasing, the risks increasing and the only good side of it being that they're not increasing exponentially.

It's a tough film, directed and written by the guy who wrote Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious, David Ayer, who has a knack for keeping things on the down-trodden path no matter who's behind the camera or what the subject matter is. It's not a film for continuity buffs, who will be driven crazy if they think "Okay, who's taking that shot?" with every change of perspective. Very quickly, the strictures of the snatch-and-grabbed shot are forgotten to gain perspective. The film would have been a pretentious (and claustrophobic) confusion if the conceit was maintained throughout, (I can see the review headline now: "The Blair Watch Project"), but as it is, breathes enough air into it while maintaining a feeling of impromptu recording—keeping the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of it. That, along with the ad-libbed spark of the dialogue gives it an edgy immediacy that, again, "seems" right, while never fully escaping the feeling of planned manipulation (not that it ever could). Game try, though. And manages to show the life—long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of terror—that one imagines the life to be, even though blown up with steroids to fulfill the needs for melodrama and tension.

* But, what it doesn't say is "We are also responsible, culpable, and...accountable."

Suicide Squad

Buzz-Kill
or
"Puddin', He's Ruining Date Night!!"

It's hard to say why Suicide Squad leaves such a bad taste in the brain. It is, at least, coherent in the story-telling (the insistence of graphics in the first half-hour is another story*) and is easily followed even if its attention wanders like a five year old on sugar. Based on a second-tier DC comic featuring a "Dirty Dozen" team of "super-villains,"** organized by one of DC's ever-increasing number of government agencies (does DC stand for "DemoCrat?), they take on super-human threats that the "nice" super-teams don't touch...or find out about.

It takes place in the continuity of the DC Movie Universe after the apparent death of Superman (in Batman v Superman: Damn of Justice) when a government operative named Amanda Waller (played by a non-nonsense Viola Davis, who seizes the screen every time she walks in a room) devises a plan that keeps stock of "meta-humans" and coerces them to do her or the government's bidding. Amanda's showed up in other DC properties (like the CW's "Arrow" and "Smallville") and her mantra is "What if the next Superman becomes a terrorist?" There's only so much kryptonite to go around, so she recruits criminals with "special skills" who might be able to take on such a threat. But her idea of doing that is using folks like Deadshot (who shoots good), Harley Quinn (who uses a baseball bat), Slipknot (good with knots...???), Killer Croc, a human alligator and...Captain Boomerang.

These guys will take down a Superman? Not bloody likely.

But, let that pass. She does recruit a remorseful ganger named El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) who has considerably more fire-power (literally) and The Enchantress (Cara Delavingne), an archaeologist named June Moone (go ahead and laugh, Marvel-zombies, then tell me how great a name Victor von Doom is) who is possessed by the spirit of a centuries old witch and becomes Waller's go-to prestidigitator. She uses her best commando, Lt. Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman, looking perpetually miserable), to keep her manageable, but Moon and Flag fall in love and in the time that Dick York can blurt "Sa-a-am!" things get a little out of hand.

Moone's witch-renter gets a little cranky and takes over command from her host, resurrects her warlock-brother using a stray passer-by, and the two start construction on a thing that makes a big light in the sky, to what end the movie never makes clear other than to employ some special effects houses and direct opponents to their exact position. Not sure why superhero villains like to do this, but they sure seem to do it a lot in the movies. Waller coordinates her select villains, puts a remote mini-bomb into their necks to keep them grudgingly compliant (but no less belligerent) and sends them on their surly way.

The mission is to harness Enchantress and put a stop to the big swirling bright thing pointing into the sky. None of these villains has any great skills that might hinder anything supernatural (bullets, boomerangs, baseball bats?) so the only thing they're good for is to slice through the hordes of humans the Enchantress has turned into walking pudding-pops that seem to have the same ability to attract direct hits that Imperial Stormtroopers do and, from the looks of things, also have a very low threshold of death. Convenient.

Each of the Squad finds a reason (aside from the pains in their necks) to voluntarily put themselves in harms' way, usually tied to their origin stories. Deadshot's is a flashback to when he was captured by Batman (Ben Affleck, now that he's committed) entirely due to the intervention of his beloved 11 year old daughter. Harley's is tied to her work at Arkham Asylum as a psychiatrist and coming under the thrall of The Joker (Jared Leto, good enough but he'll never become a Hallmark Christmas Ornament) Captain Boomerang gets caught by The Flash (Ezra Miller in costumed cameo) during a botched robbery that turns back on him. El Diablo's flash-fires back to his gang-banger days and the death of his family. Everybody else has to wait for the sequel for theirs, I guess.

Except for Slipknot (Adam Beach...and he's a favorite of mine, too!)

Now, director David Ayer can be a very effective director with a knack for the off-putting as is displayed in his controversial police-cam masquerading as a movie End of Watch and the Brad Pitt WWII tank-drama Fury. Both movies have things that were actually arresting, like Fury's field-jousting with tanks and EOW's in-your-face pacing with a perpetual overlay of dread. Ayer is good at portraying sacrifice and selflessness in the midst of looming destruction, which would make you think that something like Suicide Squad would be right in his wheelhouse.

There is some of that; fleeting moments of "why am I doing this, again? Oh yeah, I know." But they flit by and, given the rest of the movie, they're out of place. They're also out of "pace." You can tell when something is VERY IMPORTANT when Ayer tosses in the slow-motion for far too long and for far too much emphasis. You almost want to wave him along, especially when the rest of the movie—except for a couple of thudding laugh-lines—moves along rather zippily.

Sometimes too much so. I've mentioned the graphics sequences that pop up and disappear before you can register what they're saying. Those sequences are so out of whack from the rest of the movie, you get the impression they came from another filmmaker. One hears rumors. One is that there were two competing edits of the movie—one that was supervised by Ayer and another that was supervised by the trailer-house that made the admittedly excellent trailers for the film. 

Bad idea. Ayer is a storyteller. Trailer-editors are marketers. The jobs are completely different. As good as those trailers are (and I've included them below) they aren't a story. They're a collage, a highlights real. It doesn't have to make sense, merely make money. Trailers are sizzle. Movies are a meal. At least they're supposed to be. It's wrong to sell the sizzle and offer a plate of steaming tofu. You're defeating the purpose of the trailer in the first place. It's false advertising. More importantly, if you're splicing together a film from those different sources with their different agendas, you're not making a movie, you're constructing a Frankenstein monster out of disparate parts.

While I'm on the subject, as good as those trailers are, they're an even better example of TMI. This is getting to be a disastrous trend. That first trailer played at Comic-Con for an audience of comics and movie-geeks and was designed to quell the masses, to douse the torches, and dull the pitchforks of their rebellious target-group (that's an exercise in futility—read the comments and you'll find bubble-people who don't like anything that's not originating from their heads).  Reassure them that the Joker is "edgy" (the way you like him), Harley Quinn is "hot" (the kind boys like—not precisely how she is in the comics or the animated series she sprang from), or that even Captain Boomerang doesn't look silly. The schizy target audience wants the comic book characters taken oh-so-seriously, but with a lot of humor. How bi-polar is that? 

But, to appease the fickle and volatile target audience, you run the risk of squeezing every last drop of surprise or discovery out of a movie. You don't start a poker hand showing all your cards on the table.*** And if it happens, you'd better be damned sure the rest of the movie holds up and surpasses its hype. And Suicide Squad does not.

It is designed to an inch of its life. The casting is very well done; even Will Smith manages to make Deadshot seem like a distillation of every Will Smith character from his last ten movies (a combination of hard wise-ass and sentimental softie). But all of those Frankenstein body-parts does not add up to a satisfying movie or movie experience. For whatever reason, and there are many, not just with the movie but its selling and franchise-hyping, they contribute to making the movie an indifferent exercise on first—and more importantly, last—viewing.

My, my. Quite a long review for a movie I had a dull reaction to. But, the many issues it raises in "the culture" padded the thing out. I'll just let Leto's Joker sum it up succinctly:

"Really...Really...Bad"

* It's cute when Tarantino does it, it's entertaining in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but in Suicide Squad, it is irritating and even obfuscating—it tells you less than if they had no graphics at all, if such a thing is possible. They throw so much crap at the screen and in such flashing illegible fonts that you just kind of give-up trying to follow and dismiss it with "it's not important..." Maybe they're trying to encourage multiple viewings by leaving viewers in the dust, but I won't be seeing this twice—what's the point?—and only a devotee would buy the DVD to slow down the retinal-image-defying graphics to be able to see them. Frankly, I'd rather not spend MORE time watching this, even if it DOES reveal that one of the weapons that Deadshot is an expert with is a potato-gun.  That sort of registered as it flashed by. Useful. And telling.

** The cast in the comics has changed over the years—they do specialize in suicide missions—but the movie features Batman villains Deadshot, Harley Quinn and Killer Croc (not only does he have the best toys, he has the best villains, for example....), Captain Boomerang (who battles the super-speeding Flash with...boomerangs), El Diablo (from "All-Star Westerns", originally), Slipknot (from "Firestorm"), Enchantress (from "Strange Adventures" and the "Superman" titles) and the non-villainous Katana (from "Batman and The Outsiders"). At least they didn't include Bronze Tiger.

*** There's another aspect to this: the video fan-press has created a cottage industry of hyper-ventilating fan-people who parse each single image of a trailer in an attempt to "divine" every last tidbit of information that can be gleaned from it, like pigs snuffling for truffles. There are videos of up to 30 to 40 minutes analyzing a 3 minute trailer, with as much misinformation and unsupported speculation as fact. That's nuts, and that kind of spoon-feeding can't come to any good for an audience-member wanting to be satisfied...or entertained.

End of Watch

Cops, the Home Movie
or
"...More Capers in One Deployment Than Most Cops Will See Their Entire Career."

It's a war out there "once upon a time in South Central."  And Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the front-line reporter documenting the whole thing "for a project."  He's carrying a camera—not that he really needs it, the dashboard cam will pick up everything needed for an investigation.  But that camera can only look forward—it's myopic.  It can't see around you, it can't check the perimeter.  And it can't look into your soul.  It can look at your back, but it can't have it.

It starts with one of those dash-cam chases, so familiar to "reality" chase shows.  No overlayed sound, save for Gyllenhall's narration, said in a monotone as if he was giving you your Miranda.  

I am the police and I am here to arrest you.  You have broken the law.  I did not write the law.  I may even disagree with the law.  But I will enforce it.  No matter how you plead, cajole, beg or attempt to stir my sympathy, nothing you do will stop me from putting you in a steel cage with gray bars.  If you run away, I will chase you.  If you fight me, I will fight back.  If you shoot at me, I will shoot back.  By law I am unable to walk away.  I am a consequence.  I am the unpaid bill.  I am fate with a badge and a gun.  Behind my badge is a heart like yours. I bleed, I think, I love, and yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who would die for me and I for them.  We stand watch together.  The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.

And with that, the law of the film is layed down.  The dash-cam goes away and the camera goes into cinema verité, the camera pointing from inside Taylor's locker as he goes through basic introductions—himself, his partner Mike Zavalla (Michael Peña, never better), his equipment (and a conversation from Rio Bravo pops into one's head: "That all you got?"  "That's what I got."), and the beginning of the look inside—the harsh joshing, the tensions, the coolness and coldness and camaraderie of the corps. Joseph Wambaugh had an apt phrase for them in his book (and subsequent film), "The New Centurions."  But Rome was never like this.

The turf in South Central is tough and hard-scrabble.  Poverty is on display on every street corner, and behind the boarded-up windows of the houses in various states of disrepute are secrets for the outside world not to know, but will see the light of day once the front door is kicked in.  The war is in the streets, but inside cook the warning signs that something is about to explode, the stakes rising, the limits of human degradation dropping, the calibers of the weapons increasing, the risks increasing and the only good side of it being that they're not increasing exponentially.

It's a tough film, directed and written by the guy who wrote Training Day and the original The Fast and the Furious, David Ayer, who has a knack for keeping things on the down-trodden path no matter who's behind the camera or what the subject matter is.  It's not a film for continuity buffs, who will be driven crazy if they think "Okay, who's taking that shot?" with every change of perspective.  Very quickly, the strictures of the snatch-and-grabbed shot are forgotten to gain perspective.  The film would have been a pretentious (and claustrophobic) confusion if the conceit was maintained throughout, (I can see the review headline now: "The Blair Watch Project"), but as it is, breathes enough air into it while maintaining a feeling of impromptu recording—keeping the spirit of the law, rather than the letter of it.  That, along with the ad-libbed spark of the dialogue gives it an edgy immediacy that, again, "seems" right, while never fully escaping the feeling of planned manipulation (not that it ever could).  Game try, though.  And manages to show the life—long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of terror—that one imagines the life to be, even though blown up with steroids to fulfill the needs for melodrama and tension.

Fury (2014)

Are you Saved?
or
"Here I Am; Send Me"

There is no good day in war, just like there's no good day in Hell. "Good" days are only for the immature and the vain-glorious. Or for those who merely observe and report. "The only glory in war is surviving, if you know what I mean" wrote Samuel Fuller in his screenplay of The Big Red One. There are no gradations in the conditions of war. It's all bad. But if you want the worst days, look to the end of a war, where communal desperation mixes in with the carnage and the nearly complete rubble of what used to be civilization. No holds are barred. No one is safe. It comes down to numbers and bodies, and the second of our 20th Century "world wars" was emblematic of that, in all theaters of combat, but, most desperately, in the battles taking place in the center of what was to be an aborted "Thousand Year Reich," Hitler's Germany. They put helmets on kids and told them to do their duty for the fatherland, a Children's Crusade, and as successful as all the others. The last sacrifice in war is always the future. And that is the world of David Ayer's' new film, titled simply Fury.

Ayer's last movie (of note—in between he did an Arnold Schwarzenegger DEA movie, as long as we're talking about desperation—was the run-and-shoot End of Watch about L.A. cops in a drug war-zone. The camera-work has settled down and become more professional and traditional, but the shooting only intensifies in Fury, his film about a WWII tank platoon during the final stages of World War II.

The Allies have made their way to Germany and Hitler is down to using children as fighters. But, they're only a few years younger than the grizzled vets who have been years at war. The 66th Armor Division is limping along amid the rubble of battles and one Sherman Tank, nicknamed "Fury" by its crew (Brad Pitt in command, Shia Labeouf, Michael Peña, and Jon Bernthal) who have been together since North Africa, has just lost their co-pilot/bow-gunner "Red" in the last battle—there are parts of him still in the tank when they roll into a bivouac. The men are exhausted and Sgt. Don "Wardaddy" Collier (Pitt) is barely keeping it together. So, it's not good news when he gets a new gunner/driver straight out of the typing pool (Logan Lerman).

Life inside a tank

This is just another bad piece of news for Collier who comes by his name "Wardaddy" quite literally. Things are already going badly and he gets a raw recruit, barely better than the kids Hitler is sending out, to work with the men he has diligently tried to keep alive (so that they can do the same for him) since Tunisia, and he has to employ the toughest of tough love to whip him into (or bend him out of) fighting shape. It's Blood n' Guts 101 and it would seem like hazing if it weren't a matter of life and death. The kid learns all too quickly the "simple math" (as Collier calls it) of combat—"You kill him or he kills you"—and pushes him beyond the tolerances of physicality and morality, of body and soul, and into the Practical and the Now.

Pretty typical war movie stuff. The tank crew is ethnically diverse, besides Pitt's father-figure and the waif, there's a bible-thumper (who is presented not ironically or cheaply and played by La Beouf in one of his better performances), an ethnic type (Latino division) and an "okie"-type, the kind of diversity (for the time) that represents the melting pot that is America, in visual contrast to the uniformly blonde soldiers of the Nazi forces. Where the American crews are rag-tag, the Nazi soldiers are tightly grouped, and more often than not faceless and indistinguishable from one another.

What's different is the savagery and conditions. Yes, the tank-crew is typical, but their behavior is anything but—they're all exhausted and in various shades of stunned PTSD as walking and rolling wounded. The guns spew out tracers that look like they've zapped out of a "Star Wars" movie and the casualties are quick and final—limbs and heads are vaporized in an instant by rocketing shells, and not contemplated or mourned—they just are and then are not. And that "simple math" is pretty basic—you either shoot an enemy soldier or you stab him or you club him, just so long as he is dead, dead, dead. Then you shoot them again, just to make sure. "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.." blah blah blah.  

But he also never won it on a slow learning curve, either. And "Wardaddy" takes the clerk under his wing...and beats him with it. It's survival out there (if you're lucky) and stragglers usually need to be buried. Or, as in one vivid image from the film, they're crushed into the mud until they're indistinguishable from just another stretch of bad road. If the kid doesn't learn—and learn fast—he'll be the weakest track in the tread and every member of the crew will die for his hesitancy. 

One thing that distinguishes Fury from most war-movies (and it checks off very very many of the tropes from the list) is its sense of history: there is none.   Nobody talks about home. Nobody talks about what they're going to do after the war. This is an existential war movie. These guys are living in the moment, because, for all their efforts to survive, they've enough experience to know it is unlikely. The only time "Wardaddy" reveals anything beyond the Here and the Now is when he pulls out a grenade container to reveal that it contains eggs that he has commandeered from a farm. There was enough fore-thought to think that he may use them someday.

But, that's it. There are very few war films that don't sentimentalize the state with the hope of a future. Fury is one of a handful that is pure nihilism and reflects the grunt's perspective of being there in a permanent temporary basis.