(Phil Joanou, 1990)
State of Grace came out in 1990, something of a banner year for mob stories in Cinema. Goodfellas, The Godfather Part III, Abel Ferrara's King of New York and another Irish-Mob movie, Millers Crossing were all released in 1990, and in the midst of those heavyweights, State of Grace got a little lost. But its a great little movie, surprisingly intense, dark and serious, and featuring three terrific performances from its leading men. it tells the story of Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his return to Hells Kitchen, the Irish neighbourhood of New York where he grew up running with teen hoods Jackie and Frankie Flannery (Gary Oldman and Ed Harris). Only now Noonan is an undercover cop, charged with bringing down the burgeoning empire built by Frankie, and Jackie is the neighbourhood psycho. Noonan soon rekindles his relationship with their sister, Kathleen (Robin Wright-Penn) and his loyalties are inevitably torn between duty and friendship. While that sounds like your stock undercover cop movie, its the gravity and intensity of the storytelling that makes State of Grace so memorable. Joanou has never put his visual sense to better use than he does here, with his camera conjuring up a vivid sense of Hells Kitchen in all its seedy glory, the gentrifying elements just beginning to crawl in alongside the taverns and the old tenements. The screenplay, by playwright Denis McIntyre, is resolutely serious and dour - it recalls the work of writer-director James Gray in its unremitting focus on the moral dilemma facing Noonan - and the story drifts inexorably towards a tragedy suggested from the first moments by Ennio Morricone's mournful, beautiful score. While Penn does his young-DeNiro thing and Ed Harris is as magnetic as ever, Oldman delivers what is possibly his best ever performance. If, in recent years, he has played one caricature too many, one shallow villain too many, revealed that manic grin one time too many, here he played a character who demanded such a performance. Jackie Flannery is a force of nature, prone to eruptions of ultra-violence, but loyal and sentimental and charming at the same time. Oldman makes him terrifying and hilarious and real, and he owes every psycho part he has gotten since to this performance. Joanou really gets to flex his directorial muscles in the films climax, an amazing slow motion gunfight in a bar while the St Patricks Day Parade passes by outside. Its a really self-conscious set-piece, the director calling attention to himself in the most obvious fashion possible, but it works brilliantly, somehow retaining the mood and style of the film while simultaneously exploding it.
Showing posts with label Gangs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gangs. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 August 2015
Wednesday, 5 August 2015
LAST MAN STANDING
(Walter Hill, 1996)
Early in his career, Hill was great at balancing genre pictures on the line right between arty abstraction and pulp detail. When he tries the same thing here, he miscalculates somewhat, meaning that Last Man Standing is a one-note trudge through the story of "Red Harvest" (actually credited as a remake of Yojimbo). The arty abstraction doesn't feel arty or interesting, the way it did in his classics two decades prior (The Warriors or Southern Comfort, say).
Instead this just feels like purest pulp, with Hill struggling to infuse it with some sort of poetry. That works to some extent in his film-making. Lloyd Ahern's beautiful dust-and-sunlight coppery photography and Ry Cooder's score are distinctively toned and make the film always worth watching and listening to. The action sequences are thunderous and cartoonish, with awesomely loud fusillades of gunfire filling the soundtrack while bodies tumble in slow motion through the air.
But the script is less successful. Bruce Willis is minimalist and cool as John Smith, a gunman trying to work both sides against each other in a prohibition-era Texan border town, but his hard-boiled narration is leaden and dull, and the tough guy dialogue feels rote and second-hand, without any sparkle or wit, so that he feels a bit like a strong star performance without a strong film around him, or even a strong character to play. In the past, Hill has dealt - well - with archetypes, but here he is dealing with sketches, and the difference is telling.
Other good actors - like Christopher Walken and David Patrick Kelly - enliven things as twitchy gangsters, but for all it's action and incident, Last Man Standing never really takes off. It's minor Hill, and while that means it's still worth a watch, it's frustrating seeing such a master in such a low gear.
Early in his career, Hill was great at balancing genre pictures on the line right between arty abstraction and pulp detail. When he tries the same thing here, he miscalculates somewhat, meaning that Last Man Standing is a one-note trudge through the story of "Red Harvest" (actually credited as a remake of Yojimbo). The arty abstraction doesn't feel arty or interesting, the way it did in his classics two decades prior (The Warriors or Southern Comfort, say).
Instead this just feels like purest pulp, with Hill struggling to infuse it with some sort of poetry. That works to some extent in his film-making. Lloyd Ahern's beautiful dust-and-sunlight coppery photography and Ry Cooder's score are distinctively toned and make the film always worth watching and listening to. The action sequences are thunderous and cartoonish, with awesomely loud fusillades of gunfire filling the soundtrack while bodies tumble in slow motion through the air.
But the script is less successful. Bruce Willis is minimalist and cool as John Smith, a gunman trying to work both sides against each other in a prohibition-era Texan border town, but his hard-boiled narration is leaden and dull, and the tough guy dialogue feels rote and second-hand, without any sparkle or wit, so that he feels a bit like a strong star performance without a strong film around him, or even a strong character to play. In the past, Hill has dealt - well - with archetypes, but here he is dealing with sketches, and the difference is telling.
Other good actors - like Christopher Walken and David Patrick Kelly - enliven things as twitchy gangsters, but for all it's action and incident, Last Man Standing never really takes off. It's minor Hill, and while that means it's still worth a watch, it's frustrating seeing such a master in such a low gear.
Monday, 26 August 2013
THE UNTOUCHABLES
(Brian De Palma, 1987)
The Untouchables was released in the US in June 1987. That marks it out firmly as a Summer Blockbuster, or at least states that it was intended as one by its studio. But it seems to possess an insane pedigree and class for a Blockbuster. Directed by a controversial auteur who has always had one foot in the arthouse (Brian DePalma), written by one of America's greatest living playwrights (David Mamet), with a score by Ennio Morricone, costumes by Armani and a cast including two of the Twentieth Century's great male screen icons (Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro) alongside a couple of then up-and-coming new stars (Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia), the film almost seems too good to be true. And it has the temerity to be incredibly entertaining, with two fantastic DePama set-pieces, while also slyly getting in its digs at the hypocrisy of American political policies, both in the Prohibition and (by extension) Reagan eras.
It is a film of great moments and great scenes, which lessen the impact of its structural problems. After the departure of Connery's character, the narrative never really recovers the same drive, though DePalma's Odessa Steps Train Station sequence distracts the audience in the immediate aftermath of his terrific death scene. But we are buoyed by the numerous brilliant moments we have already witnessed. There is DeNiro's baseball bat wielding "enthusiasms" speech (based on an actual Capone execution of two seditious mobsters), wherein he seems to allow himself to coast and grimace and leer, almost caricaturing his own persona to highly entertaining effect. DePalma ends the scene with a beautiful aerial shot, too. Then there is Connery's selection of Andy Garcia's character for a place on the team, baiting him with ethnic slurs, until Garcia pulls a pistol on him and sticks it beneath his chin with the words: " Its better than you, you stinking Irish pig." Garcia is shy and charming here in a way he never really recovered in his career, grinning as Connery praises him.
Then there is the gun battle on the Canadian border, in which Charles Martin Smith distinguishes himself in a berserker attack on two trucks of mobsters - DePalma depicting shotgun blasts as resulting in pink clouds of blood hanging in the air, Morricone turning in something akin to a Classical Western score, Connery ending a chase-scene with a volley of gunfire into the air and the words "Enough of this running shit." And then there is the exemplary first person POV stalking of Connery before he is assassinated, the director amusing himself with his facility with the medium itself, a filmmaker with enough maturity to take on a project like this, without the auteurist quirks and motifs of much of the rest of his work, and turn it into arguably his best "popular" film.
But the best scene is a brief exchange of charged dialogue between Connery and Costner, sitting in a church-pew, captured by DePalma in a showy two-shot. Because it demands - and gets - the best from Mamet, from the two actors, and from the Director. It sets the tone for what is to come, defines the battle at the heart of the film, and lays out the crucial dynamic between the hero and his mentor. Later, just before they bust down a door into one of Capone's distillerys, Connery tells Costner that once the door is open, there can be no turning back. But really, that moment is already passed. It came when Connery laid out the fight for him and Costner asserted his desire for it.
Mamet is a proud son of Chicago, and there is a lot of that city's working class hard-boiled straight-talking in his dialogue. But much of his work as a Screenwriter for hire feels like the hackwork that it undoubtedly is, his touch barely discernible, as if he is trying to lose what makes him distinctive, subsuming himself for the good of the project. However, there is the sense that he feels something more for The Untouchables, key to the mythic history of his hometown as the story is. So his script is full of great one-liners, most of them given to Connery, and a couple of classic Capone monologues. It is also commendably tight and well-paced for much of its running time, excellent in establishing its characters concisely, and makes its odd conclusion - Ness has to break the rules, by murdering a man, in order to win - a crowd-pleasing moment.
The Untouchables was released in the US in June 1987. That marks it out firmly as a Summer Blockbuster, or at least states that it was intended as one by its studio. But it seems to possess an insane pedigree and class for a Blockbuster. Directed by a controversial auteur who has always had one foot in the arthouse (Brian DePalma), written by one of America's greatest living playwrights (David Mamet), with a score by Ennio Morricone, costumes by Armani and a cast including two of the Twentieth Century's great male screen icons (Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro) alongside a couple of then up-and-coming new stars (Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia), the film almost seems too good to be true. And it has the temerity to be incredibly entertaining, with two fantastic DePama set-pieces, while also slyly getting in its digs at the hypocrisy of American political policies, both in the Prohibition and (by extension) Reagan eras.
It is a film of great moments and great scenes, which lessen the impact of its structural problems. After the departure of Connery's character, the narrative never really recovers the same drive, though DePalma's Odessa Steps Train Station sequence distracts the audience in the immediate aftermath of his terrific death scene. But we are buoyed by the numerous brilliant moments we have already witnessed. There is DeNiro's baseball bat wielding "enthusiasms" speech (based on an actual Capone execution of two seditious mobsters), wherein he seems to allow himself to coast and grimace and leer, almost caricaturing his own persona to highly entertaining effect. DePalma ends the scene with a beautiful aerial shot, too. Then there is Connery's selection of Andy Garcia's character for a place on the team, baiting him with ethnic slurs, until Garcia pulls a pistol on him and sticks it beneath his chin with the words: " Its better than you, you stinking Irish pig." Garcia is shy and charming here in a way he never really recovered in his career, grinning as Connery praises him.
Then there is the gun battle on the Canadian border, in which Charles Martin Smith distinguishes himself in a berserker attack on two trucks of mobsters - DePalma depicting shotgun blasts as resulting in pink clouds of blood hanging in the air, Morricone turning in something akin to a Classical Western score, Connery ending a chase-scene with a volley of gunfire into the air and the words "Enough of this running shit." And then there is the exemplary first person POV stalking of Connery before he is assassinated, the director amusing himself with his facility with the medium itself, a filmmaker with enough maturity to take on a project like this, without the auteurist quirks and motifs of much of the rest of his work, and turn it into arguably his best "popular" film.
But the best scene is a brief exchange of charged dialogue between Connery and Costner, sitting in a church-pew, captured by DePalma in a showy two-shot. Because it demands - and gets - the best from Mamet, from the two actors, and from the Director. It sets the tone for what is to come, defines the battle at the heart of the film, and lays out the crucial dynamic between the hero and his mentor. Later, just before they bust down a door into one of Capone's distillerys, Connery tells Costner that once the door is open, there can be no turning back. But really, that moment is already passed. It came when Connery laid out the fight for him and Costner asserted his desire for it.
Mamet is a proud son of Chicago, and there is a lot of that city's working class hard-boiled straight-talking in his dialogue. But much of his work as a Screenwriter for hire feels like the hackwork that it undoubtedly is, his touch barely discernible, as if he is trying to lose what makes him distinctive, subsuming himself for the good of the project. However, there is the sense that he feels something more for The Untouchables, key to the mythic history of his hometown as the story is. So his script is full of great one-liners, most of them given to Connery, and a couple of classic Capone monologues. It is also commendably tight and well-paced for much of its running time, excellent in establishing its characters concisely, and makes its odd conclusion - Ness has to break the rules, by murdering a man, in order to win - a crowd-pleasing moment.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
GANGSTER SQUAD
(Ruben Fleischer, 2013)
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Gangster Squad plays like somebody saw The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential and thought: I can do that.
Only they couldn't.
Instead what they made was a dumbed-down, simplified version of similar material. This is James Ellroy for the Playstation generation; what it takes from Ellroy and classic gangster pictures are the superficial things - the hats, the suits, the cars, the art deco architecture, the tommy guns. What it misses out is what makes Ellroy so good and so distinctive - the vicious characterisation, the sprawling narratives, the gaudy peppering of sex and violence, the intensity, the wit.
This is a film that manages to do everything it does badly. A massive climactic tommy gun battle is tedious and predictable. The romance between Ryan Gosling's charming detective and Emma Stone's moll is dull and somewhat perfunctory. Ganglord Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn, channelling a villain from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy) intimidating then having inept underlings murdered in creative ways is second-hand and cliched. The scene where Josh Brolin's heroic cop O'Meara rounds up his squad is laughably silly, as is his voiceover narration ("Evil can only thrive when good men do nothing") while his relationship with his pregnant wife is copied more or less verbatim from The Untouchables but lacks the sincerity and charm of the equivalent scenes in that film.
The story follows the establishment of an off-the-books squad of Los Angeles cops in 1949, brought together in order to wage covert war against the massively powerful and ruthless mobster Cohen.
In reality the story lurches along from one middling action scene to the next, doling out cardboard character beats in between. It all looks very slick and pretty; too much so. These cops are immaculately tailored, their cars gleaming, hair beautifully coiffed. Every twist and turn is telegraphed, and Fleischer mainly seems to be showcasing his own ability to handle a big property like this one perhaps in the hopes of landing a big studio blockbuster as his next movie.
The real shame of it is the immense waste of that cast, filled with great faces and huge talent as it is. Only Penn really registers. Brolin is boring, Gosling seems to be parodying himself, and nobody else has enough of a character to really play. Instead they just concentrate on looking good and advancing the plot, much like the film itself.
Monday, 14 February 2011
NEDS
(Peter Mullan, 2010)
Mullan possesses an unusual sensibility as director. His films are fiercely emotional (not just this coming-of-age gang drama, but Orphans, his debut, and the acclaimed The Magdalane Sisters), but contain surreal elements, vivid religious imagery, a fascination with violence; and are models of storytelling clarity and subtle thematic content.
NEDS is probably his best film. A powerfully gruelling story of one young mans near-destruction by his involvement in youth gangs, there are elements of autobiography here, which may explain the emotional wallop this narrative delivers. Mullan was very probably picked on and isolated at school by his cleverness, and joining a a gang has always been a universal, obvious and accepted attempt to fit in. In the film, gang violence is an empowering spectacle, then it is a dangerous insanity, and as our protagonist pushes himself beyond his own limits, it acquires a distorted sort of horror movie edge.
As a writer, Mullan displays much empathy for these people, and the emotional details of so many moments are captured beautifully; from the terror of random bullying to the first thrill of adolescent rebellion.
It's a simple tale, simply told, and all the better for it.
Mullan's feel for place and character is unerring, and he draws some magnificent work from his young cast. And if it all sounds a bit rote and familiar, then the surreal touches and religious imagery may be what lift it - the final scene combines the two into something strange, wonderful and more than a little affecting.
Mullan possesses an unusual sensibility as director. His films are fiercely emotional (not just this coming-of-age gang drama, but Orphans, his debut, and the acclaimed The Magdalane Sisters), but contain surreal elements, vivid religious imagery, a fascination with violence; and are models of storytelling clarity and subtle thematic content.
NEDS is probably his best film. A powerfully gruelling story of one young mans near-destruction by his involvement in youth gangs, there are elements of autobiography here, which may explain the emotional wallop this narrative delivers. Mullan was very probably picked on and isolated at school by his cleverness, and joining a a gang has always been a universal, obvious and accepted attempt to fit in. In the film, gang violence is an empowering spectacle, then it is a dangerous insanity, and as our protagonist pushes himself beyond his own limits, it acquires a distorted sort of horror movie edge.
As a writer, Mullan displays much empathy for these people, and the emotional details of so many moments are captured beautifully; from the terror of random bullying to the first thrill of adolescent rebellion.
It's a simple tale, simply told, and all the better for it.
Mullan's feel for place and character is unerring, and he draws some magnificent work from his young cast. And if it all sounds a bit rote and familiar, then the surreal touches and religious imagery may be what lift it - the final scene combines the two into something strange, wonderful and more than a little affecting.
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