Tag Archives: police

Dennis Hopper’s Colors

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Colors movie poster

 

Den­nis Hopper’s Col­ors may be a buddy cop flick on the sur­face, but it’s hardly typ­i­cal high-concept Hol­ly­wood mate­r­ial. It does have a token over­ar­ch­ing plot (involv­ing a mis­matched pair of cops trac­ing the per­pe­tra­tors of a drive-by shoot­ing), but it’s merely a loose thread to hold the movie together. If nei­ther a char­ac­ter study nor a plot-driven thriller, Col­ors is a por­trait of an issue, a set­ting, a problem.

A pro­to­type for the HBO series The Wire, Col­ors is actu­ally a por­trait of the dete­ri­o­rated, hope­less sit­u­a­tion in a failed Amer­i­can city lost to gangs and the drug trade. But unlike The Wire, which deeply explores the eco­nom­ics of how and why gangs func­tion as orga­ni­za­tions, Col­ors doesn’t offer much detail on how they oper­ate and what they do. How­ever sen­si­tive and bal­anced Col­ors may be, it still takes the point of view of pre­dom­i­nantly white law enforce­ment. As such, it’s easy to see why film­mak­ers shortly turned to films like Men­ace II Soci­ety (read The Dork Report review) and Boyz N the Hood (read The Dork Report review), which would look at some of the same issues from the other side of the milieu.

Sean Penn in ColorsSean Penn in Col­ors: “You don’t wanna get laid, man. It leads to kiss­ing and pretty soon you gotta talk to ‘em.”

The inter­est­ing title most obvi­ously refers to the term for a nation’s flag(tying in with the themes of war and the insti­tu­tion that wage it) or the sig­na­ture col­ors of three major war­ring L.A. gangs: the Bloods (red), Crips (blue), and a Latino gang (white). The real col­ors that divide these groups are, of course, race. The one sign of equal­ity in late 80s L.A. is that nearly every­one calls each other Holmes.

The nar­ra­tive is loosely hung on sev­eral cliches, most notably the trope of vet­eran cop sad­dled with rookie part­ner. Offi­cer Hodges (Duvall) is bit­ter at being drafted into the L.A.P.D. C.R.A.S.H. anti-gang pro­gram, after a life­time of ser­vice that ought to have qual­i­fied him for sen­si­ble hours, a safe desk job, and more time with his fam­ily. Offi­cer McGavin (Penn) is an aggres­sive, preen­ing dandy, eager to attack the gang prob­lem with the blunt tool of incarceration.

Robert Duvall in ColorsRobert Duvall in Col­ors: “you got a prob­lem with the whole fuckin’ world, and I’m in it.”

But it’s not long after the movie sets up these cliches that it begins to knock them down. The osten­si­bly wiz­ened Hodges makes a crit­i­cal mis­take, set­ting free a young gang­banger on the assump­tion that a brush with the law would scare him straight, while simul­ta­ne­ously intend­ing it to be a les­son to the head­strong book ‘em-type McGavin. The punk turns out to have been a major player in the shoot­ing. Another cliché short-circuited: McGavin romances a local girl from the bar­rio (Maria Con­chita Alonso), but she turns out to be far from the madonna he imag­ined. Not only that, she rejects him anyway.

Col­ors ends on a very down beat, not just the death of a sig­nif­i­cant char­ac­ter, but what comes after. McGavin is forced into the posi­tion of impart­ing wis­dom before he’s earned much him­self. The film ends with a long shot held on his face (echoed much later in the final shot of mind Michael Clay­ton — read The Dork Report review) as he most likely pon­ders his ineffectiveness.

Of note are early appear­ances by Don Chea­dle and Damon Wayans, the lat­ter fea­tur­ing in a stand-out sur­real sequence in which his char­ac­ter T-Bone is out of his mind on drugs. Her­bie Hancock’s score has not dated well, nor has the vin­tage rap sound­track, includ­ing the angry theme song by Ice-T. The open­ing cred­its are set to “One Time One Night” by the local L.A. band Los Lobos.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Homicide

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Homicide movie poster

 

Detec­tive Bobby Gold (Joe Man­tegna) comes to see him­self as torn between two dis­crete worlds in David Mamet’s Homi­cide (1991). Only when maneu­vered into a posi­tion in which he must choose, the dual­ity unrav­els and he finds he is no one spe­cial and belongs nowhere in particular.

Gold’s part­ner Sul­li­van (William H. Macy) has an unre­served man-crush on him, tak­ing every oppor­tu­nity to pub­licly but­ter him up and extol the ther­a­peu­tic plea­sures of police work. He reminds their peers that his revered part­ner is “Bobby The Ora­tor,” so-called for his skill at nego­ti­a­tion. Indeed the moniker is deserv­ing, for he is called on to calm a rabid dog with mere words, and later sweet-talk a fero­ciously stub­born mother into betray­ing her son. But Gold is cer­tainly no action hero, con­firmed in a early scene as he is beaten up and dis­armed by an over­weight civil­ian, in the sanc­tu­ary of the police sta­tion. By the end of the film, he has lost his sidearm a sec­ond time and is quickly phys­i­cally bested again by the crook Ran­dolph (Ving Rhames). Is it too much of a stretch to link his fail­ure to con­trol his weapon with impo­tence and cas­tra­tion? He cer­tainly feels per­pet­u­ally aggrieved. At each unfair turn in these very unfair events, he repeats his refrain: “What did I ever do to you?”

William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna in Homicide“You got some heavy trou­bles on your mind? Huh, babe? We’ll work it out. We’ll play some cops and rob­bers. We’ll bust this big crim­i­nal. We’ll swag­ger around.”

Bobby acci­den­tally comes across a seem­ingly mun­dane mur­der while chas­ing down the sex­ier Ran­dolph case (the kind of unam­bigu­ous, action-packed police work, with mea­sur­able results, that grants Gold and Sul­li­van exis­ten­tial sat­is­fac­tion). Elderly Jew­ish woman Mrs. Klein has been found mur­dered in her inner-city candy shop. Every­thing points to a sim­ple rob­bery, “every­thing” being, of course, the sup­po­si­tion that poor neigh­bor­hood African Amer­i­cans have robbed a rare white busi­ness. Klein’s son, not quite griev­ing but resigned to a life­time of per­se­cu­tion, sighs “It never ends.” When Bobby asks “What never ends?”, grand­daugh­ter (Rebecca Pigeon) coldly clar­i­fies for him: “On the jews.” Already the mur­der esca­lates from a rob­bery to a hate crime, and this is a strong whiff of cat­nip for a man who also believes him­self to be per­pet­u­ally put-upon and aggrieved. As the Klein fam­ily cor­rectly infers, Bobby is a Jew. But he wears a 5-point star as a cop. His sub­li­mated Jew­ish pride only comes out in defense against the occa­sional pro­fes­sional flare-up in which he is called a “kike.”

Fit­tingly for a detec­tive cel­e­brated for a mas­tery of words, pur­su­ing the Klein mur­der case is more an act of lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship than one of police pro­ce­dure. Gold’s inves­ti­ga­tion brings him to a Jew­ish research library where he senses deeper mys­ter­ies encoded in his ances­tral Yid­dish. His sin­gle best clue is the tan­ta­liz­ing deriva­tion of the nonsense-seeming word “Gro­fatz.” All of this leads him into a con­fronta­tion with a decades-old group of Zion­ist war­riors (who may be or may not be the Mossad, although the name is not men­tioned in the film) who awaken him to his venge­ful Jew­ish iden­tity. Hun­gry for the rush of pos­i­tive action that his cop side is cur­rently deny­ing him, he elbows his way into their ranks and becomes addicted to vio­lent action.

Rebecca Pigeon in Homicide“Hey, you’re bet­ter than an aquar­ium, you know that? There’s some­thing hap­pen­ing with you every minute.”

But Homi­cide is a policier on the sur­face only. Like most of Mamet’s plays and screen­plays, the plot is struc­tured around a deep, com­plex con­fi­dence game. House of Games, The Span­ish Pris­oner, Glen­garry Glen Ross (read The Dork Report review), Spar­tan, and Red­belt (read The Dork Report review) all fea­ture a long con of one form or another at their cores. A sucker is a sucker because of the tru­ism that if one looks hard enough for some­thing, one will find it. Most of Gold’s appar­ent clues and leads evap­o­rate into mean­ing­less hap­pen­stance. What is at stake is not what he thinks, and he finds him­self used and abandoned.

Spe­cial men­tion goes to fine cin­e­matog­ra­phy by the great Roger Deakins. The decay­ing Bal­ti­more pro­vides for two spec­tac­u­lar chase scenes, one along the rooftops and another below the asphalt. Each coils into a labyrinth, spi­ral­ing down and in, deeper and deeper, until Bobby encoun­ters phys­i­cally pow­er­less but immov­able minotaur-like fig­ures the dis­armed man must bat­tle with his words alone.

Must read: Homi­cide: What Are You, Then? by Stu­art Klawans

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Pride and Glory

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Pride and Glory movie poster

 

Pride and Glory was one of the last New Line Cin­ema pro­duc­tions made while still a semi-autonomous com­pany, before being evis­cer­ated by par­ent com­pany Warner Bros. in 2008. For the mor­bidly curi­ous, Van­ity Fair recently related the sad tale in its lat­est Hol­ly­wood issue. Dis­claimer: I worked for New Line Cin­ema through its end times, but had absolutely noth­ing to do with actu­ally mak­ing or mar­ket­ing its movies, and nobody there cared what rank-and-file employ­ees thought about the artis­tic merit of their prod­uct anyway.

For still undis­closed rea­sons, Pride and Glory was com­pleted in 2006, but sat on the shelf for almost two years. Direc­tor Gavin O’Connor (Tum­ble­weeds) pub­licly blamed New Line (and co-head Bob Shaye in par­tic­u­lar) for bury­ing his movie. Stars Edward Nor­ton and Colin Far­rel also spoke out about it in the press, clearly dis­ap­pointed but yet more under­stand­ing (per­haps these sea­soned actors were more jaded, and unsur­prised by stu­dio machi­na­tions). New Line coun­tered that the slid­ing release date was intended to avoid the lead actors’ com­pet­ing projects from dif­fer­ent stu­dios. It was even­tu­ally sched­uled for March 2008, but not actu­ally released until late 2008.

Colin Farrel and Ed Norton in Pride and GloryColin’s a bent copper

This atten­tion helped it become a minor cause célèbre among online movie afi­ciona­dos that couldn’t resist the bait: a scan­dalous tale of a sup­pressed mas­ter­piece. But the sad truth is that Pride and Glory is a god-awful, depress­ing, point­less mess of a movie. Actu­ally, that’s not fair; it’s not poorly made from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. Not to go out of my way to defend the stu­dio, but it now seems likely there was no actual con­spir­acy to bury a mis­un­der­stood mas­ter­piece. Per­haps New Line sim­ply couldn’t slot the film into its slate, fig­ure out how to mar­ket it, or was forced to shunt some projects aside dur­ing the stress of the immi­nent destruc­tion of the entire com­pany. Or maybe even, most unlikely of all, New Line had the sense to real­ize Pride and Glory just wasn’t a very good movie.

Also con­tribut­ing to the aura of con­tro­versy was the bun­gled film­ing of a police funeral scene at the actual cer­e­mony for New York City offi­cer Eric Her­nan­dez, acci­den­tally killed by friendly fire in 2006. The pro­duc­tion report­edly promised the fam­ily they would be respect­ful and stay out of their way, but reneged and clum­sily intruded on the sen­si­tive affair. Hav­ing seen the com­pleted scene, I don’t see any rea­son why it couldn’t have been effec­tively staged with a com­ple­ment of extras in full dress uniform.

Pride and Glory was writ­ten by broth­ers Gavin and Gre­gory O’Connor. As the sons of a police offi­cer, they had unusual access to the New York Police Depart­ment. If their film is sup­posed to be a trib­ute to hon­est cops, its cor­rup­tion plot must feel like a slap in the face. The movie’s fic­tional cor­rupt cops are wholly, utterly evil, with no gra­da­tions of char­ac­ter or moti­va­tion. Jimmy Egan (Far­rel) and a clutch of fel­low cops have been skim­ming money off drug busts for years, and have grad­u­ated to mur­der and sell­ing drugs them­selves. Egan’s brother-in-law Ray Tier­ney (Nor­ton) finds him­self in a posi­tion where he could turn Egan in. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, Tierney’s pop Fran­cis Sr. (John Voight) and brother Fran­cis Jr. (Noah Emmerich, brother to New Line exec­u­tive Toby Emmerich, and type­cast as a cop after his role in Lit­tle Chil­dren) are also in the force. Fran­cis Jr. also knows about the cor­rup­tion, but doesn’t have the courage to man up. If Ray does the right thing, it will not only tear up his fam­ily but the New York Police Depart­ment itself. But events con­spire such that the good guys don’t have to act; three crooked cops self-destruct of their own accord, and the story reveals itself to the press. Jimmy and Ray are freed to set­tle their per­sonal griev­ances as two stereo­typ­i­cal movie Irish cops ought: fisticuffs in a pub.

John Voight in Pride and GloryCheese it, it’s the fuzz!

I sus­pect O’Connor had pre­ten­sions to mak­ing another L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, but his result doesn’t mea­sure up to the stan­dards of such a supe­rior film noir. Note the super­fi­cial resem­blances: police cor­rup­tion, drugs, fam­ily pride. Pride and Glory’s plot only seems com­plex, but is actu­ally stupid-simple. Expo­si­tion scenes basi­cally lay out the plot quite early, drain­ing any sense of mys­tery or sus­pense. The dia­logue is pep­pered with a tor­rent of names that are chal­leng­ing for the audi­ence to con­nect with faces, a tech­nique that pro­vides only a super­fi­cial com­plex­ity to a sim­ple plot.

The tone is absurdly grim and totally humor­less, and devoid of any human emo­tion beyond Ray’s grim sense of duty. The clas­sic film noir ele­ment most notably lack­ing in this boy’s club pro­duc­tion is any hint of women or sex. What few women there are in the cast barely fig­ure into the plot. The most sig­nif­i­cant female char­ac­ter is cancer-stricken Abby (Jen­nifer Ehle), whose sole pur­pose in the plot seems to be to human­ize hus­band Fran­cis Jr. Pride and Glory utterly lacks the sense of verisimil­i­tude of the tele­vi­sion series The Wire, sim­i­larly set in the worlds of inner city drug and police cul­tures. Now is as good a time as any to state that The Dork Report does not apol­o­gize for tak­ing advan­tage of any oppor­tu­nity what­so­ever to evan­ge­lize The Wire.

The set­ting is a ver­sion of New York City that may or may not actu­ally exist. In fact, there’s an unusual dis­claimer before the end cred­its stat­ing its char­ac­ters and events are totally fic­tional. Obvi­ously, if there was an actual case of such mas­sive cor­rup­tion in the NYPD, we’d have heard about it. After the cred­its, there’s yet another dis­claimer I’ve never seen before, stat­ing that no one con­nected with the pro­duc­tion took any money to pro­mote the use of tobacco prod­ucts. This Dork Reporter don’t smoke, and never has, but is offended by the notion that movies are influ­en­tial in this way. Granted, movies are a pow­er­ful art­form, and can affect people’s hearts and minds. The ills of soci­ety are real prob­lems that require com­plex solu­tions, but cen­sor­ing movies is not one of them. It’s a cheap and easy way for right­eous fools to believe they are com­bat­ing a prob­lem. Where’s the cor­re­spond­ing worry that lit­tle kids will watch this movie and be inspired to grow up to be cor­rupt cops?

Offi­cial movie site: www.prideandglorymovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.