Posts tagged policeman
“End of Watch” a Buddy-Cop Movie with a Twist
Sep 29th
“Buddy-Cop Movie With a Twist”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
End of Watch is a powerful, almost traditional buddy-cop movie, but the language is raw, the action is violent, and it has an ending with an unexpected twist to it.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena play officers Brian Taylor and Mike Zavala, who work in the Los Angeles Police Department as partners ane whose area that they patrol is the rough arena of South Central Los Angeles, which Taylor says has three major food groups: drugs, money, and guns.
When the movie opens, it is the first day back on the job for Taylor and Zavala after they were cleared by an investigation into a shooting they were involved in, and once they are out in their patrol car, Zavala says, “Dude, it’s good to be back, Man.”
Taylor has a recording device in his uniform for a class project he is working on, and so a lot of the footage we see is from the point of view of that device, which is called “found footage” these days, but don’t worry. The whole movie isn’t from that POV, but enough is so that at times the movie gets confusing.
So, we watch and listen to the good-natured banter between these two friends as they drive around the city between calls, we learn about their personal lives as they talk and even see some aspects of them at various points in the movie, and we witness many of the calls they go on and see just how rough and dangerous being a policeman in today’s Los Angeles can be, both for them and other police officers who are called in to help.
In addition to the commonplace calls that Taylor and Zavala make, the main story point is a turf war between two rival gangs, one composed of black people and the other composed of Latinos, who have connections with drug cartels operating out of Mexico and who are also involved with the trafficking of illegals being brought up from Mexico and kept in terrifying and dangerous conditions.
In fact, Taylor and Zavala stumble into the ramifications of the main story more than anything else, and once again we see how in movies situations can go from bad to the worst you can imagine.
End of Watch is terrific and get ready for the twist at the end.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.
“Premium Rush” Is Breakneck Fun
Sep 24th
“Breakneck Fun”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Premium Rush is the ultimate chase movie through the streets of New York City centered around a story about Manhattan bicycle messengers.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, an obvious reference to Wile E. Coyote of the Road Runner cartoons, but a more appropriate nickname would have been Road Runner itself, or maybe Double R, or possibly even Runner, but that would have been confusing, because he spends most of his time on a bicycle riding and not running.
However, throughout the movie Wilee is not the chaser, but the chasee. Because of an envelope he is delivering for his service, at one time or another Wilee is chased by a mysterious man in an automobile, by a policeman on a bicycle, and even by a plainclothes policeman in his automobile.
Yes, it is a dangerous job being one of the 1,500 bicycle messengers in New York City, and Wilee even says in a voice-over, “One time or another, we all get hit.”
In fact, the movie starts with Wilee having an accident at 6:33 p.m., and then we get a flashback to 5 p.m. when Wilee picked up the envelope, which was a premium-rush delivery that has to be delivered by 7 p.m.
Once he is outside after picking up the envelope, Wilee is stopped by a man who asks for the envelope with a logical story for why Wilee should turn it over.
However, Wilee is suspicious, because a bike messenger’s rules are after a delivery is put in his bag, it is given only to a person at the address where the package is to be delivered, and so Wilee takes off running–I mean, riding.
Then the man chases after Wilee in his car, and they both tear through the streets, avoiding traffic and pedestrians and even running red lights until we are back at the point of Wilee’s accident at the beginning of the movie.
Wilee is different from other messengers in that his bicycle has no brakes and no gears, and he prefers it that way.
Eventually we get more flashbacks for background explanation as to why the envelope is so important to so many people, and the premium rush of the title becomes a premium rush for the audience, as well.
Premium Rush is breakneck fun for everyone.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
The Guard – Movie Trailer
Aug 31st
The Guard is a comedic fish-out-of-water tale of murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and rural police corruption. Two policemen must join forces to take on an international drug- smuggling gang – one, an unorthodox Irish policeman and the other, a straitlaced FBI agent. Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleason) is an eccentric small-town cop with a confrontational and crass personality and a subversive sense of humor. A longtime policeman in County Galway, Boyle is a maverick with his own moral code. He has seen enough of the world to know there isn’t much to it and has had plenty of time to think about it. When a fellow police officer disappears and Boyle’s small town becomes key to a large drug trafficking investigation, he is forced to at least feign interest when dealing with the humorless FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) assigned to the case.