The Screengrab : training day

Sundance Roundup: Day Three

Scott Von Doviak — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Spike Lee makes his first trip to Sundance this year with Passing Strange, his filmed record of the Broadway hit. But we don't care about that. Today it's all about the hat. This tragic, tragic hat. Where to start? The white-on-white Yankees logo? The ring of white fur that doesn't appear to have any actual warming value? Come on, Spike, even A-Rod wouldn't be caught dead in that thing. "“I’m not taking a poll,” he told the New York Times. “I’m just trying to stay warm.” Try harder.

The first major deal of the festival has been sealed. "Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest closed a deal on Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival, with North American rights going to Senator Distribution, Inc," Indiewire reports. "Buzz began building around the film after Friday night’s world premiere at the Eccles Theater in Park City. The story of 'cops and crooks' (ala Training Day), Finest stars Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes and Ellen Barkin." Movie City News expresses some surprise at the deal, " given the reportedly hostile reception it received at the film’s premiere, especially to an ending that shocked and angered many." Not to worry, though! The distributor assures us the ending will be cut.

Last week I picked Spread, the Ashton Kutcher gigolo movie, as one of five movies to skip, but if Salon's Andrew O'Hehir is to be believed, I am no Nostradamus. "This guilty pleasure premiered to a packed house on Saturday night and was pretty much a smash...Kutcher turns out to have terrific acting chops well beyond the doofus self-mockery of his TV-host and pitchman personas." Well, I'll say this for Kutcher: I don't think even he would be caught dead in Spike Lee's hat.

Sundance 2009 Non-Competition Lineup

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we brought you the competitive lineup set for next month’s Sundance Film Festival, and today it’s time to run down some of the notable films playing out of competition. The festival opens on January 15, 2009 with the claymation feature Mary and Max, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette and narrated by Barry Humphries. It’s “the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York.”

Premieres that caught my eye include:

500 Days of Summer. “When an unlucky greeting card copywriter is dumped by his girlfriend, the hopeless romantic shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days 'together' in hopes of figuring out where things went wrong.” OK, maybe that doesn’t sound so promising, but Zooey Deschanel is in it and that’s worth something in my book. (That’s my book Zooey Deschanel, You Will Be Mine, coming to a bookstore near you once she lifts the restraining order.)

Brooklyn’s Finest. “After enduring vastly different career paths, three unconnected Brooklyn cops wind up at the same deadly location.” Training Day director Antoine Fuqua gets back to the nitty-gritty.

Manure. The Polish brothers present a “comic tale centered on manure salesmen in the early 1960s.” Billy Bob Thornton stars. What, you’re not intrigued?

And the Gun to My Head Award goes to Spread, starring Ashton Kutcher as a handsome young man who survives in Los Angeles by seducing wealthy older women. Why, Sundance? Why?

Documentaries of interest include James Toback’s Tyson (about the boxer, not the frozen food) and It Might Get Loud, “a history of the electric guitar from the point of view of three legendary rock musicians.” Who are they? Find out that and much more here.

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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