Years go by and I watch movies a second or third time, making me wonder why it isn’t more highly regarded, didn’t do better at the box office. James Mangold’s Cop Land, originally released in 1997, is exactly that kind of film. Roger Ebert’s review, for instance, damns the film with half praise but aside from one or two things I disagree with him and the conclusion he made.

To me, the gold nugget is Sylvester Stallone. I know, I can hardly believe it either. Other than Demolition Man, which I think was more impressive to me for the science fiction angles and Wesley Snipes, and the first Rocky Sly’s had a great career but never shown us quality acting. In Cop Land, though, I’m reminded of Tom Cruise playing the grey haired bad guy in Collateral, that Stallone’s heavy-lidded, slumbering physicality is perfect to the role.

Some not-so-nice New York City cops have finagled a loophole in the residency requirements and set up a little enclave in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, houses with nice yards and quiet streets. Being not so nice, though, generally catches up to movie characters and indeed happens here. Plus, they totally underestimate Stallone’s sheriff, condescendingly assuming because he’s deaf in one ear and not able to qualify for the NYPD that he’s not a good cop.

And maybe at the start of the film he isn’t. That growth is the driving arc here. Mangold’s made a couple of good ones since, Identity and Girl, Interrupted. He wrote and directed this movie, to me the messy bits around the edge give the picture life and energy. Mangold has two releases this year according to IMDB: Joaquin Phoenix in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (November 18) and modern western 3:10 to Yuma (no announced production or release dates), definitely looking forward to them.

Lots of star power here, Stallone is the sleeper in the crew: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel (always a good bad guy), Ray Liotta (twitchy, line crossing), Janeane Garafolo, Robert Patrick (give him a mustache and a short haircut and he’s much badder than in X Files), Annabella Sciorra, Peter Berg, Michael Rappaport, Cathy Moriarty, John Spencer, Malik Yoba, Edie Falco, Debbie Harry and Method Man.

definitely recommended

Had been recommended this 1965 French movie some time ago in a long and windy AskMefi discussion of classic, forgotten non-English language films and put it in the request queue at the Mountain View Public Library since, fortunately for me, they own a copy. Took a couple of months, guess we have quite the artsy crowd here in town. TS1 brought it home the other day and it turned out to have three discs! So I threw disc one in the player early afternoon wondering how long all of it would take but only 117 minutes for the movie itself, the other two discs are bonus features and related documentaries from The Criterion Collection.

The Battle of Algiers is first and foremost a political film, sort of a docudrama, made only a couple of years after the final events of the struggle it captures. Shot in black and white, little concern for plot coherence, very much about characters; the dialog is in French and Arabic so I had to read the subtitles. The battle is the post-WWII fight between the FLN, Algerian freedom fighters, and the French colonial government in the city of Algiers from 1952 to 1960 but mainly 1954-57 and a voiceover aftermath explaining that independence was finally achieved in 1962.

I’m not familiar with this period of French history, before my time and got wiped away by the Vietnam War, but seems to have been one of the two key conflicts that shaped modern French politics along with their defeat and withdrawal from Viet Nam. Wikipedia has a useful entry on the film and some of the individuals involved.

Director/co-writer Gillo Pontecorvo, working in Rome and Algiers, does a frankly amazing job. Completely ignoring conventional filmmaking and using only one professional actor (Jean Martin as Col. Mathieu, commander of the local French military), Pontecorvo must have had to walk an emotional tightrope filming the crowd scenes. I wonder if there were moments when the recreated riots almost turned into real ones and how many of the people in the crowds were present at the original events.

The film jumps in time every few scenes. The narrator is the only channel holding things together, there is no protagonist or antagonist though the Algerians a given the positive framing and the French negative but not unmixed. Both sides are shown committing abominable acts of violence against civilians. Main characters are composites of real people or just have the name changed. Very powerful emotional impact by the end.

recommended

At the time of its initial release two years ago this John Grisham novel-sourced film got such bad reviews that even though I’m a big John Cusack fan and had enjoyed the novel quite a bit I completely ignored it. Silly me. So early evening Saturday and late afternoon Sunday I finally sat down and watched Runaway Jury.

Basic plot: New Orleans stockbroker (Dylan McDermott in a cameo) is shot, along with 10 co-workers, after a recently-dismissed colleague goes postal first thing one Monday morning. Two years later his widow’s (Joanna Going) civil suit against the manufacturer of the gun used to murder her husband is coming to trial. Dustin Hoffman is the old-fashioned southern lawyer who will plead her case, with a bit of support from jury consultant Jeremy Piven. The corporate defense is much more extravagent, with Bruce Davison as lead counsel and Gene Hackman leading a high-tech, low integrity team of jury consultants. Cusack is the fly in this ointment, a member of the jury, in cahoots with girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz) to throw the verdict to the highest bidder.

Director Gary Fleder is the hero in my book. Although highly criticized for changing the industrial villain from Big Tobacco, this seems a reasonable choice to me given the way that industry began losing lawsuits, and losing them badly at many levels, between the book’s publication and the movie’s production. Gun makers, on the other hand, are still nearly always victorious at court. And Fleder moves what could have translated into a plodder, with lots of talky court scenes, into a well-paced thriller. With a twist ending, with only a hint or two as to the outcome, just enough so that one wouldn’t feel cheated by something pulled out of thin air.

recommended

After seeing Heat again the other day, I noticed Mann’s 1981 similar themed Thief coming on one of the movie channels and put it on the Tivo’s to do list. Yesterday I sat down to watch the movie and was surprisingly disappointed; so much so that I deleted it after only 40 minutes.

The elements that Mann would go on to develop in Miami Vice, Heat and most recently Collateral are all present: dark but sharp visuals, quickly cut; ambiguously good or bad man as protagonist; and pulsing, pounding synthesizer music. One significant improvement in his later productions was adding a substantive contrasting character, here James Caan has no real mirror to work off and so is left dangling like a boxer alone in the ring punching at air.

Further, even at the 40 minute mark I wasn’t even sure of the movie’s central conflict. James Caan’s character is the titular criminal and is his problem the fact that a bigger fish in the Chicago criminal scene (Robert Prosky) wants to assign Caan work? If so, Mann made a big mistake devoting a single scene to this after a full third of the movie has passed.

Further, what’s the story with the waitress Jesse (played by Tuesday Weld) relationship? I turned off the film after Caan’s long autobiographical soliloquy to her in a coffeeshop. Perhaps we’re being told that Caan wants to get out of a life that has given him little pleasure but setting it up by having Caan physically drag Weld out of a bar–he’s two hours late and she’s lost interest–and throw her into the car completely destroyed my sympathy/empathy for him.

Enough. Mann’s made better and spend your time watching those. One good thing, can’t finish without mentioning, is the soundtrack. Though he turned to Jan Hammer and a smoother, more commercial take for Vice, German art rockers Tangerine Dream deliver a great soundtrack to Thief.

not recommended

We were a bit restless after dinner last night and planning on seeing this Vin Diesel comedy sooner rather than later, so TS1 and I got off our duffs and went to the 9:00 showing. Despite generally poor reviews, we both enjoyed The Pacifier and thought it compared well to, say, Arnold’s Kindergarden Cop (reasonably similar warnings about suitability for children under, say, nine too), which we also enjoyed.

As I proclaimed in my review of xXx, I think Diesel has the charisma to be a major action star; this is really his first comedy, though, and he needs to develop a better understanding of the difference in rhythm and timing if he wants to break out of that genre. Director Adam Shankman, following up the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah Bringing Down the House, manages to smooth around the edges and writers Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (partners on Comedy Central’s Reno 911, last year’s Jimmy Fallon English language remake of Taxi, cult troupe The State) thrown in a bit more creative whackiness than we often get in big studio fish out of water comedies.

For instance, there’s a subplot pitting Lt. Shane Wolfe (Diesel) against Vice Principal/Wrestling Coach Murney (Brad Garrett) over the behavior of oldest son Seth (Max Thieriot). Even lightly-used romantic interest Lauren Graham, playing the school principal, is taken in when Seth dyes his hair blonde and a Nazi armband is found in his locker. Lennon and Garant pull this one straight out of their lower body opening, so unexpected that I refuse to spoil it, but suffice to say much laughter ensued when Diesel’s bus chase on a little girl bicycle uncovered the reasoning. Later on, Wolfe and the Murninator settle their differences on the wrestling mat that also yields a couple of good laughs.

Laughter, after all, is the only useful measure of this type of movie. The Pacifier is entertainment, not art, and though there is a bit of the subversive via the scripters we’re after something different in watching this than, say, Heat or The Station Agent. Judged in this light, let’s list it as moderately successful.

recommended

Amusingly, this film beat out the favored Be Cool at the box office by over 25%, $30.2M v. $23.5M.

Released in 1995, Heat established Michael Mann as masterful film director. Mann was, of course, already famous for creating TV series Miami Vice, but his previous movies were respectable at best; after this he delivered The Insider, Ali and Collateral. Of all of those, Heat is most similar to Collateral and not only because both revolve around a criminal racing against the clock and the cops to finish a job and get out of town. While at the end of the day different, both movies are:

• Set up as a face-off between one main criminal against one main pursuer;
• Set all over Los Angeles, the incredible variety of landscapes combined with saturation of light and color breaks out of typically cramped urban visualization;
• Set to a pulsing, complex electronic soundtrack that throbs and beats; and,
• Set in motion by an outsider, a ponytailed Jon Voight here and a voice on the end of a phone for Cruise.

Hard to say which is better, really. The newer one is a bit crisper and more tightly focused, 120 versus 188 minutes, which might explain the differences in box office and overall reception. Not really any need to choose, both are well worth watching. Perhaps because film is considered a director’s medium, Mann’s writing ability seems often overlooked–he also wrote all four of the movies I mentioed–but I think his scripts and skill with dialog are excellent as well.

Heat pits two of the great modern American actors against each other, Robert DeNiro as the leader of an experienced criminal crew and Al Pacino running the LAPD Major Crimes Unit. But Mann cast recognizable, talented actors in almost every role. DeNiro’s crew are Voight, Val Kilmer, Dennis Haysbert, Tom Sizemore, and Tom Noonan, his girlfriend is Amy Brenneman, Kilmer’s wife is Ashley Judd, and Hank Azaria has a bit as Judd’s lover. Pacino’s squad includes Ted Levine, Mykelti Williamson, Wes Studi with Diane Venora as Pacino’s wife and a very young Natalie Portman as his troubled stepdaughter. Also featured are William Fichtner as a sleazy financial type, Jeremy Pivens, Xander Berkeley, Farrah Forke, Brad Cort and Tone Loc.

Heat has three major highlights: two honest conversations between DeNiro and Pacino discussing their substantial similarities and a midday gun battle between the cops and the crooks in which an awesome quantity of bullets are unleashed. But there are many smaller quality bits too, some that stand out to me are: Judds’ signal to Kilmer, DeNiro’s reaction to a barely noticeable sound during a preliminary robbery, Pacino’s disposal of a TV set, Brenneman’s realization that DeNiro is a crook and not a salesman, Haysbert’s on the spot decision to join DeNiro, and Pacino’s tenderness when Portman’s troubled nature is laid bare.

absolutely recommended