Change Your Image
devaryap
Reviews
Narc (2002)
glorified bilge
The gatekeepers of middlebrow culture were rapturous about this movie, because it was "gritty," "gritty," and well, "gritty." I never thought of grit as an encomium; I thought that grit was dirt. Setting the uncertain definition of "grit" to one side, I think what Ebert, Salon, and the NY Times are trying to say is that "Narc" is an unflinching and soberly realistic portrayal of street police. The inference is that most crime procedurals are glorified fairy tales. So, the pressure is on to like Narc and indeed to the movie's governing assumptions.
And what are Narc's governing assumptions? Essentially: COPS GOOD, MINORITIES AND "SYSTEM": BAD.
Every right-wing fantasy from Death Wish regarding the thin blue line's anguish is poured into the giant cinematic cement mixer, from whence it is spewed out on the screen. There is the cop tangling with a) a system run by bureaucratic mediocrities who care more about rules than life DAMMIT; b) a wife who can's understand that crime takes priority over dirty diapers and laundry DAMMIT; c) the ghosts of his past, including drug addiction and the accidental shooting of a newborn(of course, to balance the equities, the movie shows what a loving father this guy really is... "bad" cops cannot be bad people... they must be mislabeled cannot be bad people, only mislabeled as such by the patently unfair system... also known as the Dirty Harry axiom).
Incidentally, this first character would be played by Jason Patric. Mr. Patric's acting consists of either looking blank-faced, severely constipated, or, taking the middle ground, in the middle of a bowel movement.
Then there's the damn-fool loose-cannon cop who believes in right and wrong and letting the chips fall where they may. Well, if you think he pushes it over the line, well, you try walking in his wing-tips, and you might get disgusted with technicalities like the the bill of rights, equal protection of the laws, and that ole' bug-a-boo --- innocence. Incidentally, Ray Liotta plays this character, appropriating Raymond Burr's beard and some of his weight too.
What brings these two wacky kids together? The chance for hot sweaty sex, ala Brokeback Mountain? No, that's another movie for another day.
No, what brings these kids together is....cue music ....
... the murder of a good cop, who was mixed up in the drug rackets, but who was good, and Liotta's friend to boot, DAMMIT.
But what's the carrot that's dangled. For Patric, its the chance to get BACK ON THE JOB DAMMIT, his real love (the old ball-and-chain runs a distant second). For Liotta, its about payback, son.
So, all the heroes are cops. Okay. But who are the bad guys? Basically, anyone black or Latino. And if you think I'm kidding, check out the scene where Patric and Liotta basically stop random black people on the street and hassle them in order to learn where some associate of the dead cop is. Oh, and by the way, the screen splits into four subpanels, so you can ignore the racism and admire the "art."
Like so many other "tough and gritty" police procedurals, this movie treats minorities as an undifferentiated mass. This movie essentially says: look how those blacks are really a secret community, wink wink, nudge nudge, just like the Freemasons or the Comintern or Al-Quaeda.
For the director, the murder of the dead cop properly gives the Patric and Liotta characters carte blanche to bust into poor people's homes, bash their heads in, and basically violate their constitutional rights so that they'll talk. And we, the consumers of this idiocy, are supposed to chew on our popcorn and think, hmmm, gosh, a technicality like the United States Constitution really shouldn't get in the way of a crime being solved.
What's really repellent is the way that the movie treats poor people like some undifferentiated mass of sociopathic impulses. Its hostility towards the poor is really something.
This movie demands admiration --- using hand-held cameras, fast edits, cheesy 70's clothing and droopy mustaches and New-Yawk accents.
Well, I don't care how many retro fashion choices this movie makes. Its the worst sort of statist crap, pure and simple. Personally, I'm sick and bored by movies that glorify the war on drugs and justify bashing black and brown heads in so that misunderstood cops, always crying macho tears, can win a few battles in that war. And I'm even more sick and tired of movies that white cops can be funky too when they speak some pseudo-street lingo (dreamed up by a committee of screenwriters) and hassle minorities. Even Chi McBride, doing a "faithful black lieutenant" number, cannot save this turkey.
One might plausibly ask why there is not a movie shows the toll the drug war has taken on society --- evidenced by the fact that we have the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world, by far. Answer: the "liberals" in Hollywood would never go for it.
Elizabethtown (2005)
languor masquerading as art
"Middle-age crisis" is a subject that should be dealt with seriously. Achievement of the goals that I set at 20 do not satisfy me at 40 because the 40-year-old me is simply different than the 20-year-old me. I think that this is a serious topic, but does not treat this seriously, it treats it lazily. Thus, Elizabethtown is a lazy film, and thus, a non-serious film. The result is a compost heap of clichés and tedium.
It begins promisingly enough. The narrative unspools in flashback as Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) is on his way to meet Phil DeVoss (Alec Baldwin), the the pharaoh of a "Just Do It" Nike-style pyramidal hierarchy. Drew has spent, or perhaps wasted, 8-years of his life trying to invent the perfect shoe. Evidently assured of his place in a Nike Corp style hierarchy, his shoe is announced to great fanfare.
For reasons the film omits --- cleverly, I thought--- the shoe flops, costing DeVoss nearly 1 billion dollars. Drew gives a media mea culpa to a business magazine, evidently exonerating DeVoss.
But, his career is derailed, The despairing Drew returns home, jerry-builds a suicide machine out of his exercise bike and a handy knife to cheat the obloquy that will run at him when the business magazine reveals him to be a ... FAILURE.
Evidently, we must infer that Drew is a naive and sheltered youth who simply does not know that, as our President, his cabinet, and our corporate chieftains demonstrate every day, one can fail upwards and indeed, bad press is better than no press.
To compound matters, Drew's father has died, and he must arrange for the funeral. In doing so, he will meet relations in Tennessee that he barely knows. These relatives are depicted as droll, albeit vulgar, yokels.
Now, these initial scenes, black as they are, are played for laughs and were, I thought, quite good. When Drew walks into corporate HQ, the working stiffs greet him as an escaped leper which, to the corporate pharaoh, he is. The flashbacks show that, in the corporate hall of mirrors fun-house, yesterday's wunderkind is today's unterkind (or, not wunderkind), and one must read the palm of the marketplace to understand why. Drew unhappily if perspicaciously concludes that merit and success are not interchangeable (the 50 Cent phenomenon as I like to call it). Thus results a spiritual crisis.
Now, I'll bet dollars to donuts that a lot of people can identify with being laid off or not having their potential realized. And therein lies the humour... within the truth of the situation. So, initially, I thought, good stuff here --- early mid-life crisis, the alienation of labor, thwarted ambition --- and maybe a great film if Cameron Crowe had the courage to explore these initial observations wherever they take him.
Instead, more plot machinations --- Drew goes to Tennessee to arrange his beloved father's funeral. En flight, he meets a perky stewardess (Kirsen Dunst). On the ground, he meets the Tennessee kin(if they are from the South, they must be a "kin") are just lovable, plain ole folks who may not have much book learning but have plenty of horse sense.
Still, amidst this narrative mess, there is one cliché after another hurled at us: "Love will save the day," "There's nothing like family," "Got to git on that horse and ride again," "If it swims, eat it." (I made that last one up). I'm pretty sure that amidst this drollery, there was a group hug somewhere, a visit to a therapist, somebody probably played music on a jug, and there was an admonition to recycle and pray.
Towards the end of this movie, Drew takes a road trip, and discovers that beyond the world of shoes and Phil DeVoss, there is America, where trees grow, salmon spawn, and Kirsten Dunst is waiting. The movie ends with a salmon metaphor ("They swim upstream, forever beating the odds, and yes you too..."). In between, there is the music, exactly on cue to tell me how to feel and how to react.
If I could ask Cameron Crowe about what becomes of Drew after end credits roll, Cameron would say that Drew will grow up to have 2.5 children, have sex in the approved fashion (no sodomy), vote Democratic (perhaps with a Barack Obama for President sticker on his SUV), recycle his garbage, respect his wife for who she really is, begin therapy to get in touch with his feelings, find another place in the corporate hierarchy with perhaps 3 or 4 underlings, send his 2.5 children to an Ivy League school (one a lawyer, the other, and artist, and as for 0.5.... some sort of confinement in a nice institution with white walls), and go to his grave humming Tom Petty's "Free-falling." And that early mid-life crisis will fade into his rear view just like Elizabethtown, Tennessee.
And in the real world, you and I, having watched this two and a half hour bit of nonsense, are again left feeling a bit dissatisfied after having seen something that neither illuminates our own lives nor the corrupt culture that we live in nor offers an alternative vision. Of course, the same could be said for escapist art. But, at least when you watch some shoot-em-up, you get to see people shot, or things 'splode, or at least spontaneously combust. Here, there is a cut-and-paste imitation of art. It is weary languor masquerading as art.
Night Falls on Manhattan (1996)
a hot steaming turd of a movie
Sure, Ebert and other failed-novelist intellectuals will cream over this movie ---"Roger, a big thumbs up, its a tough insightful look into the criminal justice system." All it gives you an insight into is the right-wing hysteria of that noted auteur of the courtroom, Sidney Lumet. Once again, he sets up a bogus straw man into order to wax rhapsodic over the forces of law and order. This time, its a monstrous drug dealer (black, of course) who is on trial for killing three police officers. His flamboyant, crazed-radical criminal defense lawyer(is there really any other kind in the world of Hollywood?) whines that the baddie had no choice but to gun down the cops since they were involved in the drug rackets with him and they were aiming to blow him away first.
Of course, this is an absolutely ludicrous argument, but Lumet urges us to take it seriously so that when the conviction comes down, we can rejoice, Himmler-style, in the grandeur of the thin blue line. Old Lumet sets up the old straw man and knocks him down. What a hack.
Probably the most offensive moment in the film comes when our fearless young protagonist, assistant DA Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) meets with the crazed-radical criminal defense attorney Vigoda (Richard Dreyfuss). While they are both in a steam room with wet towels draped over their shoulders (a Roman motif or a bit of unacknowledged homo erotica?), Vigoda confesses that he too has a deep affection for LAW AND ORDER and he solemnly intones, "Sometimes I think that we have to give up on an entire generation and lock them up and throw away the key." Well, you don't need to read to carefully between the lines for the answer to "A generation of whom?" Why those bad minorities of course who Vigoda and Casey agree, sotte voce, must be dealt with harshly, given that their naughty drug dealing and assorted criminality upset National Security State, which of course putters along fine in the face of corporate scandals. The day that Sidney Lumet whines about the corporate scandals that have engulfed our society is the day that I begin to take him seriously.
Sidney Lumet, in The Verdict, Q and A, Prince of the City, and now Night Falls on Manhattan, along with other "tough and gritty" movies, has demonstrated that he a vulgar buffoon is incapable of or unwilling to learn about the American legal system. He fawns upon power, and unspools magic theories about the careful deliberations that attends its use. Our packed prisons are eloquent testimony to the just how much deliberation the powerful exercise when it comes to the lives of the weak.
It the meantime, he endlessly denigrates the criminal defense bar and by extrapolation, those hapless suckers too poor and unconnected to avoid criminal prosecution. No doubt, he is considered part of "liberal Hollywood," and would self-identify himself so. If he is indeed a liberal, the governing assumptions that he buys into show just how little discourse there is in our society, particularly on the criminal justice system.