Brooklyn's Finest - This ain't New Jack City

If I were to say to you I’ve got a cop drama starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, and Wesley Snipes that takes place in Brooklyn and is directed by the guy who did Training Day you’d probably think I had a pretty good movie for you to watch, right? On those merits alone it should be a solid, if not necessarily stellar, movie. It’s a good cast, in a great setting, and it’s dealing with the same type of world that Training Day took place in, and that was a great movie that won Denzel an Oscar. Sounds good, right? Unfortunately Antonine Fuqua’s latest directorial effort is another in a series of passable at best feature films.

Cribbing just a little bit from better films like Crash and Traffic, Finest follows three different and seemingly separate plotlines that center around men in or tied to the Brooklyn Police force. The problem with Finest is that, unlike Crash or Traffic, the varying plots never tie together in any sort of satisfactory or revelatory way. There is a passing attempt at having the main characters interact, but it literally comes down to something like Richard Gere bumping into Don Cheadle on his way out of a convenience store. That’s it. That’s all the intertwining we get from an audience standpoint, and that’s pretty meager.

Beyond the complete lack of interconnectivity, none of the characters in the movie have any redeeming features to speak of. There is little to no effort put into making the audience care about anyone they see on screen. Consequently, when things start to go south for everyone, we as the audience don’t particularly care. Is it a shame that Ethan Hawke has a pregnant wife and three kids at home living in a house that has a toxic mold problem? Sure it is, but we barely see those characters, and he’s such a shady character that when things start to go sour we can’t really feel for him. Is it unfortunate that Don Cheadle is going through an apparently messy divorce? Yep, but again, we never see her character and he’s not exactly the most savory of guys so why do we care about it? Why does the nature of his divorce get any screen time at all? We don’t even know why he’s getting divorced. I guess we could assume that his commitment to the job has led to the divorce, but it’s never even given lip service. He could just say, “Hey you know this job already cost me my marriage!” and then we’d at least have that much backstory but no, it doesn’t happen.

To be honest, the necessity of Wesley Snipes’s character is almost a complete mystery. I guess we are supposed to assume that he is a complete bad guy street hustling gang banger, but we never see any of that in the movie so why is he in there at all? Why make allusions to him being such a badass if you’re never going to make good on them? What’s the point? Furthermore there is no consistency whatsoever with his character. One moment he’s making a choice that would have you believe he’s turned over a new leaf and has renounced his (alluded to) violent past, and the next he’s moving full steam ahead with a big drug buy. For a guy not wanting to risk breaking his parole how does buying 10 bricks of pure heroin fit into that picture exactly? There are instances like these shot through the whole movie, characters make appearances or statements that have little or no bearing on the story being told. They just take up screen time, while at the same time I felt like some of the crucial backstory and exposition might have been left on the editing room floor. I’d be curious to see what the Director’s Cut of the flick will look like, but I don’t think I’m willing to subject myself to it again.

One thing I will give the movie credit for, it does a good job at painting the world that these men live and work in. It’s a dark, mean, gross place and these men have been beaten down by the continual onslaught of despair that’s present in their everyday existence. Richard Gere is just a guy who’s trying to make it to his retirement, and you feel for him at points. But in “just trying to make it to retirement” his character makes some pretty cowardly choices for 90% of the movie, so once again he doesn’t engender much good will. (Never mind the plots of the 2 rookies he gets paired with who vanish from the screen about 5 minutes after they make their entrance, never to be heard from again....)

The movie basically comes down to a scattershot mess of a plot. You can’t care about the characters since none of them is a decent person to begin with, and the plot meanders from point to point without building any real tension. Give this one a pass. Stay home and rent Training Day and New Jack City instead.

Daybreakers...um....breaks the mold.

Long story short, it’s a really solid movie that actually asks the viewer to come along for the ride. Good performances and an interesting story dynamic make it one to see. The plot is a little bit uneven at points, and the cinematography gets a little bit hokey (as are almost all of Willem Defoe’s lines, but hey, he’s Willem Defoe so who cares?!) but all around it’s an interesting entry into vampire lore. Reminded me, at a couple of small points of Gattaca (getting by as a flawed individual in a basically perfect world) and The Matrix (people as a source of power/food.) What’s funny is that it almost feels more like a vampire drama than it does a horror movie. Part of me wonders what the first draft of the script looked like and how many actual scary or action scenes were in it. I had the sense that the studio might have looked at the Spierig Brothers at one point and said, “We need you to throw in a couple more fight/action sequences so that the previews will be a bit more enticing and we can get butts into the theaters.” Kind of a shame honestly, some of those scenes feel a little bit tacked on and don’t quite flow with the narrative being told. Not a huge loss though. Sam Neill is really good as the corporate villain and I always enjoy Ethan Hawke, though he isn’t much different here from his character in Training Day or Gattaca. Get out and see it.

If you’ve got interest in seeing it with a completely blank slate, and no idea what the plot is about then you should stop reading now. It’s going to be impossible for me to talk about this movie without giving away the basic premise of the plot.

For those of you who don’t mind knowing what the plot of the movie deals with, read on!

SPOILERS AHEAD

I liked Daybreakers. I mean, I really liked Daybreakers. Is it a “great” movie? No, it isn’t. Will it be on anyone’s Top Ten lists at the end of 2010? Probably not. But the movie packs a heck of a punch on a lot of different levels, and I think that it deserves a little bit of recognition for that.

The set up of the movie is this: It’s 2019 and a vampire epidemic that broke out in 2009 has led to an Earth that is ruled by vampires where humans are hunted down as a food source and “farmed” for blood. You know how we keep thousands of chickens at farms where their sole purpose is to make eggs and eventually be turned into our dinners? Yeah, now replace the chickens with people, and the farmer with a vampire. Get the picture? Look at the picture up there, those are all humans, now imagine that the picture is actually a window that you’re looking through and guess what? You’re the vampire.

What’s so interesting about this movie is the vampire dynamic it establishes. The vampires presented here are just like you and me. They have jobs, they go to work, read the paper, watch the nightly news (with vampire newsmen and women), and they get their daily coffee fix at the local Starbuck’s (complete with a couple spoonfuls of blood.) Now, that’s not to say that the traditional “vampire” rules don’t still apply to them. We all know vampires can be killed by exposure to sunlight, so what we have here is an entire movie that exists more or less in the dead of night. Everyone goes to work at 8pm and gets off at 5am, before the public service announcements pumped through the city on loud speakers tell us that sunrise is an hour away, so that we can get home to our completely shuttered suburban home where we’d make dinner before catching some sleep for the day.

What the movie presents so well, and is so fresh to see, is this dynamic fleshed out from top to bottom. Every car is retrofitted with shutters so that, if you find yourself driving during the day, you’ll be protected and can still see the road through the use of a roof mounted 360º camera feed to the interior monitors in your car. Cities have put in “subwalks” or tunnel systems in place of sidewalks, allowing for passage between buildings and streets during the day if needs be. Every single element of dark/light is handled with complete care and utter faith, and it’s really interesting to see how those relationships play out as the movie develops. Imagine you’re a human being and the only place you might find to safely meet other surviving humans is in the middle of a wide open field at high noon with a sky full of sunlight. Weird, right?

What about the other vampire truths? Let’s say you’re married and have a couple of kids before the epidemic. Now let’s say that you and your husband/wife are infected but you’re kids aren’t. What do you do? Do you go through the unpleasant business of “turning” your kids? Knowing that the alternative is that they will be hunted and farmed? What will your kids think of the idea? Vampires are immortal, but they never age. So would your kids want to stay 8 and 10 forever? Aging while stuck in a child’s body?

Then there’s the blood. That’s the hitch in the whole thing. Humans are basically a finite resource as they’re being farmed and, in this world, the supply is quickly running out. Without blood vampires die, but before they die, this movie posits that they devolve into the more typical winged, bald, grotesque, malformed, bat-like creatures seen in tons of other vampire flicks. They lose the power of speech, their appearance degenerates, and their only purpose is to scavenge for blood. With supplies running out the population of these devolved creatures begins to skyrocket. And suddenly the movie adds another layer of commentary as the still normal, healthy vampires are forced to begin mass exterminating these creatures by rounding them up with military death squads and dragging them out into...you guessed it...broad daylight. What if you’re a parent who can’t feed their children? What then? Watch them burn? Or find food any way you can?

Lastly there is the question of corporate greed in this new world. As if vampires weren’t enough to deal with, the mega corporations are still around. Let’s just try on the idea that Exxon, Shell, BP, and Wal-Mart have gotten into the “people farming” business. And as blood supplies decrease the demand soars, which means more money in the pockets of the guys at the top. Now, why would these companies ever want to find a “cure” for this disease of vampirism? Wouldn’t it serve to keep the population hooked on blood? Or something similar?

Moreover, why would any vampire want to find a cure? I mean, you’re never going to get sick, you’re never going to die, you have almost otherworldly strength, and you’ve learned to enjoy the dark. It’s ultimately not so bad, as long as there is blood to sustain you.....

I realize, after writing this, that I talk too much, and will work on shortening these up in the future. Thanks for your patience. Leave a comment!

Let's talk about Avatar, and 3d...

It’s simple for me to say that you’ve never, in your life, seen anything like James Cameron’s return

to cineplexes with his newest film Avatar. The truth of the matter is that I’m probably too close to the film at the moment to have a proper perspective on what I saw in order to write up a decent review. But I want to write a bit about it while it’s still fresh in my mind, so bear with me, and I reserve the right to recant some of my thoughts later if I change my mind. There are some generalized spoilers below, but I won’t go into specifics, and I will label them so you know when they’re coming. Cool?

First things first, the movie is an absolute wonder to behold from a visual spectacle standpoint. All of the hype that this film is getting for being revolutionary, changing the way we will see movies in the years to come, amazing CGI, and everything else, is well deserved. Cameron has put together a feast for the eyes that is second to none. It’s like the best Thanksgiving dinner you can remember, the most amazing Christmas of your life, and the most insane Times Square New Year’s Eve, all for your eyeballs. Seriously, the old cliche of wanting a cigarette after spending some special time with that special someone? I felt like, if my eyeballs could smoke, I would have run to the nearest 7-11 and bought a pack for each of them after I walked out of the theatre.

The magic of his world of Pandora is in the exquisite detail down to the smallest of minutiae. Yes, we’ve seen good CGI before in films like King Kong or The Lord of The Rings, and numerous other big budget flicks of late. But none of them have come close to this level of detail. Every single thing in this universe is painstakingly realized, and given extreme care. From the biggest of creatures, to the smallest of plant life, it’s all a treat to look at. The more amazing feat, is that I didn’t find myself thinking “Oh, that’s CGI. And so is that. And yep, that is too.” It all looks incredibly believable. And the giant blue people from the previews? Yeah, they’re the main characters more or less, and to see crowds of them running, fighting, interacting with one another and the actual human actors is pretty amazing. They have pores, fingerprints, wisps of hair coming separated from their dreadlocks, facepaint that rubs off, and they’re all individually distinct from each other. The motion capture of the actors is really excellent, if you thought Gollum was good in LotR, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s like the entire production team sat in a room and James Cameron said, “I want to make as many cool animals, amazing plants, ridiculously slick robots and spaceships, planets, action scenes, fight scenes, and things blowing up scenes as possible and I want to put them all in a single flick, I want to include people, and I want to make sure that no one in the audience can tell where the real people stop and the computer graphics take over.” I can’t even fathom how much time was spent in post production putting the finishing touches onto every single frame of film. It must have been absolutely exhausting, and I can see why it’s reported to be the most expensive film in Hollywood’s history.

If you’re going to see it, I can’t stress enough that you should see it on an IMAX, and you should see it in 3D. Really. That’s the way the movie was meant to be seen, so do yourself a favor and throw down the extra few bucks to see it properly.

But.... You knew there was going to be a “But” didn’t you?

Minor, vague, non-specific spoilers ahead....

It’s the plot/story that I’m really stuck on. For my money, the plot is where the movie struggles. There are some really amazing action sequences, reminiscent of some of the classic action of Cameron’s earlier works like Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies. But around the big action scenes are a lot of big chunks of not terribly interesting story/plot scenes. The movie runs 2:40 long, and the last 40 is one big, long, ridiculously fun action set piece, But the plot is kind of a plodding, uneven, lumbering, all over the place....bore. I’m not sure why that is honestly. I don’t know if it’s trying to do too much, with too many threads of story, so that it doesn’t ever really hone in on one thing specifically. I just don’t know. It’s an amalgam of some Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Star Wars, and Romeo and Juliet(?). Then sprinkle in a morality discussion about human and corporate greed, sidelong commentary on the plight of the Native American’s(?), more allusions to the “West’s” need for oil and it’s relentless determination to have it by any means necessary, and you’re getting a rough picture of what the story is all about. Does it sound complicated to you?

The complexity of the plot and the fact that the majority of the movie is spent with the giant blue natives, don’t really help one relate to anything that’s going on on-screen. Yes, you’re sorry for the events that are going on at points, and yes, you even find yourself caring for the (completely CGI) natives...at points, but those points are few and far between. And I think the fact that I just didn’t really feel like I connected with anyone/anything in the movie, is my biggest issue. The spectacle is all really great, but if I don’t care about what’s going on or the people involved in it then, ultimately, the movie isn’t a success. It’s actually easy for me to relate this to the field that I work in currently. Yes, you can put a fantastically elaborate, decadent, well designed, and aesthetically pleasing opera on stage, but if the story is weak or not terribly compelling, then what are you left with? You’re left with saying, “It sure did look pretty.”

Is it a movie worth seeing? Yes. Especially if you can see it on a huge screen, and in 3D. I don’t really know that I would have been quite as impressed if I’d seen it in regular 2D. I’m just not quite that sold on the story, or at least the way the story is told. I’d love to hear some other thoughts...

AND WHAT ABOUT 3D?

Ok, I’m almost done, as I know this has gone on too long. A couple last thoughts....

If you didn’t know it already, the first 3D televisions are set to start hitting the markets at the end of 2010 or so, and are expected to ring in at a cost of somewhere above $3500 a piece. As I’m an avid gamer I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little interested in this new technology coming into the home. Sony has already stated that 3D games will be a major part of their Playstation gameplan in the years to come. So that’s cool. And watching Avatar today, and the onslaught of 3D movies around the corner, I can definitely appreciate the technology and the opportunities it gives filmmakers. And for video games, well the more “in the game” you can feel, the better.

But I have to wonder if it’s absolutely necessary that we switch all future movies to 3D? Is it really necessary? Sure it’s great for action, sci fi, animated, and horror flicks. But is it really necessary for dramas like the recent Precious? Or The Blind Side? What is gained by the 3D in these scenarios? What about classics? Do we need a Gone With the Wind or Citizen Kane in 3D?

In bringing the technology home I can certainly see the appeal for gaming, or the aforementioned genres of films, and I’ve got to think that the Super Bowl or the NBA Finals would be awesome to watch in 3D from the comfort of your living room. But do I need to watch Friends or The Office in 3D? I don't know. Thoughts?