Brooklyn's Finest

Cop Drama. Basically. Your old-school, multi-threaded cop drama, focusing on
three cops who work in Brooklyn, whose lives are coming loose at the seams, and
which all finally blows apart one night.

You've got stereotype Irish Catholic cop Ethan Hawke who's got like a billion
kids, two more on the way, and living in a tiny mold infested house that's
killing his wife and unborn twins. He's got to get some money together to buy a
house, and there's all this cash lying around while he's making drug bust...

You've got undercover cop Don Cheadle, who's in deep, deep, deeeeeep cover with
a local drugs gang, and going a bit native. He's got a shot at getting promoted
and getting out of undercover, but he's got to set up the guy who saved his
life when he was undercover in prison...

You've got beat cop Richard Gere, who's never been a very good cop, is days
from retirement, has lost his nerve, and has being turning a blind eye to some
pretty bad stuff.

There's not a lot more to it than that, really. These three guys, and the
people around them, go about their business for a day or so, as things get out
of control, leading to a dramatic conclusion.

Richard Gere's good. It's been a while since he's been in a film without the
express purpose of moistening the knickers of women of a certain age. Here he's
a flawed, cowardly, compromised man, and he does a great job of conveying a lot
without saying much. It's been a while since he reminded us that he's actually
an actor.

Don Cheadle's also very good. He, Wesley Snipes and Michael K. Williams (Omar
from The Wire) are the core of a New York drug gang, and they lend their
section of the film a pretty hefty weight, much like The Wire (only obviously
without the *density*.)

Ethan Hawke's kind of the weak link, as is his section of the movie. In that
he's got all these kids, all this Catholic guilt, this looming deadline, and
all this sweaty angst. It's just too, too much. I'm sure there's plenty of
people with this kind of problem, but he's just so twitchy. He's overplaying
it, and the script lays it on way too thick. Which is not to say it's not quite
good, but it's a tad silly.

Overall, it's pretty good, not the most original film in the world, you've
probably seen everything in the film done before, and better elsewhere. But
it's certainly absorbing enough that you're happy to see it again.

Please Give

This is a film that is difficult to review. In that I'm about to tell you what
happens in it, and you're going to think "well, that sounds crap." But it
really isn't.

So, on with the plot. There are two families. One is a a man, a woman and their
daughter. They are pretty wealthy New Yorkers, they have a business where they
do house clearences, and sell the furniture at a fat markup as modern antiques
to monied hipsters. The woman feels pretty guilty about this. The man doesn't.
The daughter is a bit self-obsessed, because she's a pretty normal teenager.

The other family is an old lady and her two grown up granddaughters, who come
by and look after her. The other family live next door, and have bought the old
woman's flat; she gets to live there until she dies, then afterwards, they can
knock through and have a really big apartment. One of the granddaughters is
lovely and selfless, looking after her grandmother, the other is more in it for
herself, though as the grandmother is a pretty horrible woman, you can see why.

Aaanyway. This is a plot-light, character-heavy slice of life, as the two
families kind of rub along. The mother is guilty about being wealthy, and tries
to assuage her guilt by donating money to homeless people in the street, and
attempting to find a charity to volunteer in; the father is feeling his age,
and starts an affair with one of the granddaughters, the other granddaughter
tries to spread her wings and get a life of her own, the old lady is basically
just crabby with everyone, the teenaged kid basically just tries to deal with
being a teenager. No major drama. Lots of minor drama. It's not all building to
some terrible conclusion, it's just a slice of life.

Thing is, it's very good. It's well acted. We've got Catherine Keener as the
mother, desperately seeking some kind of meaning to her life. Oliver Platt
feeling himself becoming old and trying to grab on to his youth. Rebecca Hall
quietly trying to find a life outside being a carer, and feeling guilty about
it. Amanda Peet being a beautiful girl who's very afraid that as she approaches
40, her looks won't carry her anymore. These are all great, underplayed,
intertwined performances. The plot's not really going anyplace, but that's
hardly the point. This is everyday life, or the uptown New York equivalent, and
it's the characters who count.

I've heard it said that this is the week where films for women are air-dropped
into the cinema to attract the non-World-Cup audience. I'm just glad that in
between the steaming piles of Sex And The City, there's some gems like this.

(Oh, and I'm glad to see Oliver Platt looking well. I saw him about a year ago,
and he looked just about to die of lard poisoning.)

Wild Target

Well, that was weird.

What we're essentially looking at here is a peculiar cross between Leon, and
a British, Ealing-style comedy.

Bill Nighy plays Victor Maynard, who's the best in the business, utterly
ruthless, and also incredibly stuffy and henpecked by his mother. He
lives an incredibly solitary life, and only gets out of his house to kill
people or to visit his mother.

This changes when he is assigned to kill Rose (Emily Blunt) and can't bring
himself to do it, because she's basically very perky and cute (as well as being
a screwed up kleptomaniac). So rather than kill her, he elects to protect her,
bringing along Tony (Ron Weasley), who's essentially an idiot kid who gets
embroiled in it all, who Maynard decides to take under his wing as a protege.

Meanwhile, the guy who wanted her killed in the first place (Rupert Everett)
engages another hitman (Martin Freeman) to kill the lot of them.

In structure, it's very like Leon, in that there's an exciting bit at the start
where the whole situation goes pear shaped, a domestic idyll in the middle
where everyone gets to know each other, then another exciting bit at the
finale. There's something actually a little creepy about the whole thing, as
Maynard and Rose are deeply weird and broken in their own special ways, neither
of them generally able to have normal relationships with people, as they get to
like each other in a very strange and fucked up way.
Bill Nighy is great as a really stiff necked weirdo with no idea about human
relations at all. Emily blunt is quite fun as a cute con artist and thief who's
practically no better, trusting no-one. Rupert Grint really
is just Ron Weasley who's just wandered into the wrong movie and decided to go
along with it. Martin Freeman plays very well against type, also, mixing his
trademark "oh for heaven's sake" eyeroll with a great turn as a sadistic
killer.

There's something a bit off with the structure and pace, somehow. I
occasionally fidgeted and thought "oh, get on with it", though that might have
been down to the fact I'd been mainlining sugar during the trailers. But
otherwise, a good old fashioned British comedy, with a delicious swirl of
macabre, which didn't blow me away, but highly enjoyable nonetheless.

The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom are, apparently, the world's greatest conmen. The younger
one, Bloom (Adrien Brody) has retired, and his older brother Stephen (Mark
Ruffalo) persuades him to come back for one last con, conning a million dollars
out of a wealthy heiress called Penelope (Rachel Weisz) by convincing her she's
taking part in an an international antiques smuggling adventure.

Penelope, who's been a recluse all her life, gets caught up in the adventure
and romance, and Bloom finds himself falling in love with her. Also involved
are Stephen's sidekick, a mute Japanese girl (Rinko Kikuchi) who's an
explosives expert (actually not so much mute as apparently not that interested
in talking to anyone) and a mysterious Belgian (Robbie Coltrane). Against them
is set Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell), the boys' old mentor, and arch enemy.

The whole thing degenerates into a series of cons and counter cons, with
nothing ever very clear whether it's real or another con. Ultimately, the whole
thing might be looked on as Stephen trying to grant Bloom his independance and
give him a better life, the only way he knows how, through a very elaborate
con.

The film's a bit surreal, and a lot nuts. It's pretty funny, and reminds me of
the kind of whimsical 50s comedies involving Cary Grant, in which people spend
a lot of time running in and out of railway carriage compartments. I don't
think that it's nearly as clever as it thinks it is, mind, but it's a highly
amusing and charming film that's a real breath of fresh air.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Nicolas Cage. There, I said it. Nicolas Cage is in this film. The man who has
not starred in a good film since the year started with a 2. This film has a lot to
prove.

Also, it's "based on" the '92 Abel Ferrera film, Bad Lieutenant, a fact which
apparently Ferrera isn't too pleased about, and which Werner Herzog, the
director of this film, claims is neither here nor there, since he never saw the
original film. I can kind of believe that. Because beyond the fact that both
films feature as the main character a cop, who is a lieutenant, and who has a
problem with drugs and gambling, there's very little to connect the two.

In this film, Cage plays a cop who's injured saving a criminal from drowning
during the New Orleans flood, ends up on painkillers, and moves on to more
harder stuff. As he makes progressively worse decisions, and loses control due
to the effects of drugs, his life spirals out of control as he pisses off a
series of people it would be best not to piss off. He then makes some even
worse decisions attempting to wriggle out of the shit he's got himself in.

The film's directed, as I mentioned, by Werner Herzog, a man with such serious
arthouse credentials that he once directed a film called "Werner Herzog Eats
His Shoe." In which he eats one of his shoes. Apparently he lost a bet meaning
he had to do so, but the fact that he decided to make a 20 minute film about
the experience tells you what kind of man we are dealing with here. It's an odd
film, oddly shot. Hard to say in what way, but this in no way feels like a cop
movie. There's a bit where some cops are on a stakeout, and while we're waiting
for something to happen, the camera decides to take an interest in a couple of
iguanas that are (for some reason) in the scene. Then, we snap back into the
action, no explanation. It's full of these odd little moments, which I suppose
are indicative of Cage's deteriorating mental state. Or maybe they're just
peculiar diversions.

Cage is actually really good, portraying the general mental breakdown of a man
fucked up on painkillers, heroin, cocaine and crack. By the end he's really
lost it, to great effect, in my view.

What I like about this film, and why I prefer it to Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant is
that it doesn't moralise. We're not here to see this man redeemed or punished
for his actions, we're just witnessing the events, and seeing whether or not he
will get through it all. You're not told what to think, so you get to walk out
of the cinema and ponder it for yourself. Having been greatly entertained in
the process.

The Losers

"A crack commando unit is framed for a crime they didn't commit. They promptly
escape into the Bolivian underground..."

...aaand it's not The A Team, it's The Losers. This must be killing Twentieth
Century Fox. All that money sunk into an A Team movie, and Warner beat them to
the punch by about a month, with an offering, I have to say, that I don't
anticipate them bettering.

Based on a DC/Vertigo comic book, The Losers are a CIA black ops team who (as
is inevitable in these situations) get screwed over by their boss, narrowly
escaping getting killed off when their evac helicopter is blown up.

Initially blending into the background in Bolivia (where their mission was),
they are approached by a mysterious woman who offers to get them back to the US
if they'll help her hunt down their old boss.

Ok, so it's not exactly the most original film in the world. It's a summer
action blockbuster, and so the question is really on whether this specific
iteration of the well worn plot is entertaining and amusing. And yes, it really
is.

The cast is really good. The team is Jeffery Dean Morgan (Team leader, badass),
Idris Elba (Serious badass), Chris Evans (Smartass hacker/recon guy), Columbus
Short (Wheelman/Mechanic/Gadget guy) and Oscar Jaenada (Latino Uber-cool
sniper). And these guys banter and interplay really well; it's not long before
you're absolutely familiar with these guys, what they're about, and rooting for
them all the way.

Up against them is Jason Patric as the quirky CIA Mastermind guy, Max. It's the
kind of psycho role they tend to hand directly to John Travolta these days, but
I'm glad they didn't, because Patric nails it way better than he would have.

Overall, I wouldn't go around saying that the plot made a lick of sense or
anything. What I would say is that the vital ingredient that
was missing in Prince of Persia was present here.

This is a film created by people who clearly love the genre. Everyone relishes
their roles, the director loves what he's doing, the effects shots are all
"wouldn't it be cool if..." moments, the whole bit. This film wears its heart
on its sleeve, and I love it for that. I hope it does well enough to score a sequel.