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Blanket thanks to everyone who left comments here yesterday. I’ll think hard about the therapy option, though I’m really not sure drugs are the right way to go for me—I took a brief course of antidepressants some years ago, after a bad break-up, and was taken aback by the way that they completely turned off my capacity to enjoy things like writing and/or sex. Yes, it was probably good to get “stable”, but I suddenly couldn’t express myself at all (or was so comfortably numb, maybe, that I didn’t see the point of doing so). And given that being able to tell stories is pretty much the only thing in this life that’s fully mine…um, no. We’ll find another way.
Anyhow. Woke up this morning feeling like I’d been thrown down and kicked, that I’d been grinding my teeth so hard in my sleep that I’d scraped my lower left-hand back gum raw, etc. Got Cal off to Daycare nonetheless. He seems in good spirits. None of these physical ailments is exactly surprising, since I spent much of last night in the grip of violent diarrhea and shoulder-spasms—but I did enjoy finally catching up with David Ayer’s Street Kings while waiting to get tired enough to go to sleep, which almost made up for the whole thing.
Adapted from a legendary James Ellroy screenplay—The Night Watchman, which I actually bought and read, back in the day—this is far less L.A. Confidential than Blood on the Moon (first book in an early Ellroy trilogy, later made into a crude but fascinatingly venal film called Cop, which stars James Woods), and suffers more than a bit by comparison with stuff like The Shield (which would probably admit to yoinking a lot of Ellroy’s philosophy/moves/storytelling devices, yet always gets a lot longer than two hours to develop the greyer areas of the equation). Keanu Reeves. looking well-travelled, is used to good effect as the main character, LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow, a torpedo who exists to subvert due process. He’s pretty much Bud White updated—good at only two things (finding and killing those he considers bad guys, with emphasis on the latter part), joylessly working his addiction like a nine-to-five, a department-sanctioned hitman whose boss/mentor/Daddy figure Captain Wander (Forrest Whittaker) calls him “the tip of the spear”.
In Tom’s world—a very To Live and Die in L.A. fever-dream of sunglasses, dust, somnambulist nightscapes, Infernal sunrises and –sets—all relationships are strictly functional. His “girlfriend” is the local EMT who fixes him up whenever he gets shot (ER visits as foreplay), while everybody else in his unit mainly exists to clean up after Hero Cop Tom, and resents it. A bleak glamor does seem to attend him, eventually leading a fresh young Detective (Chris Evans) assigned to investigate the “robbery-in-progress” execution of Tom’s ex-partner to well and truly Dark Side himself, but the details of his grind are both mundane and awful; Tom wakes each day with a gun already in hand, pukes in the toilet, then reloads and grabs a bunch of airplane vodka bottles at the corner store, which he chugs on the way to the massacre du jour. The two key phrases in his vocabulary are “exigent circumstances” and “first on the scene”, and you hear them a lot during the film’s first half-hour—which does eventually pay off, albeit a little further down the line.
So: The ex-partner, a reborn former racist disgusted by Tom’s profiling-heavy methodology, has been snitching Tom out to IA Captain Briggs (Hugh Laurie, doing one half of Ed Exley from White Jazz, while Whittaker does the other); Tom starts stalking him, witnesses/is complicit in his murder, gets reassigned to taking police brutality complaints and mounts his own after-hours campaign to avenge the guy who supposedly wanted him bounced in the first place. It’s typically perverse “logic” on Tom’s part, and though figuring out what’s really going on isn’t exactly a brain-teaser—it probably only takes Tom a while to crack it because he’s A) unused to thinking beyond his next bullet and B) so fucking drunk all the time—the “fun” lies in watching things spin out (of control, heading downwards, like an express elevator to Hell). Final verdict: For all that people roundly shat on this one in the theatres (surprise, surprise), it’s a nasty little joyride full of bad procedure, smack-talking, macho theatrics and neo-noir snap which probably plays far more efficiently shrunk down to TV size anyways; there’s a reason we haven’t really seen this sort of thing much onscreen since HBO took off, buddies. But there ya go.
“Whatever happened to just locking up the bad guys?” “We’re all bad, Tom.” Word!
Anyhow. Woke up this morning feeling like I’d been thrown down and kicked, that I’d been grinding my teeth so hard in my sleep that I’d scraped my lower left-hand back gum raw, etc. Got Cal off to Daycare nonetheless. He seems in good spirits. None of these physical ailments is exactly surprising, since I spent much of last night in the grip of violent diarrhea and shoulder-spasms—but I did enjoy finally catching up with David Ayer’s Street Kings while waiting to get tired enough to go to sleep, which almost made up for the whole thing.
Adapted from a legendary James Ellroy screenplay—The Night Watchman, which I actually bought and read, back in the day—this is far less L.A. Confidential than Blood on the Moon (first book in an early Ellroy trilogy, later made into a crude but fascinatingly venal film called Cop, which stars James Woods), and suffers more than a bit by comparison with stuff like The Shield (which would probably admit to yoinking a lot of Ellroy’s philosophy/moves/storytelling devices, yet always gets a lot longer than two hours to develop the greyer areas of the equation). Keanu Reeves. looking well-travelled, is used to good effect as the main character, LAPD Detective Tom Ludlow, a torpedo who exists to subvert due process. He’s pretty much Bud White updated—good at only two things (finding and killing those he considers bad guys, with emphasis on the latter part), joylessly working his addiction like a nine-to-five, a department-sanctioned hitman whose boss/mentor/Daddy figure Captain Wander (Forrest Whittaker) calls him “the tip of the spear”.
In Tom’s world—a very To Live and Die in L.A. fever-dream of sunglasses, dust, somnambulist nightscapes, Infernal sunrises and –sets—all relationships are strictly functional. His “girlfriend” is the local EMT who fixes him up whenever he gets shot (ER visits as foreplay), while everybody else in his unit mainly exists to clean up after Hero Cop Tom, and resents it. A bleak glamor does seem to attend him, eventually leading a fresh young Detective (Chris Evans) assigned to investigate the “robbery-in-progress” execution of Tom’s ex-partner to well and truly Dark Side himself, but the details of his grind are both mundane and awful; Tom wakes each day with a gun already in hand, pukes in the toilet, then reloads and grabs a bunch of airplane vodka bottles at the corner store, which he chugs on the way to the massacre du jour. The two key phrases in his vocabulary are “exigent circumstances” and “first on the scene”, and you hear them a lot during the film’s first half-hour—which does eventually pay off, albeit a little further down the line.
So: The ex-partner, a reborn former racist disgusted by Tom’s profiling-heavy methodology, has been snitching Tom out to IA Captain Briggs (Hugh Laurie, doing one half of Ed Exley from White Jazz, while Whittaker does the other); Tom starts stalking him, witnesses/is complicit in his murder, gets reassigned to taking police brutality complaints and mounts his own after-hours campaign to avenge the guy who supposedly wanted him bounced in the first place. It’s typically perverse “logic” on Tom’s part, and though figuring out what’s really going on isn’t exactly a brain-teaser—it probably only takes Tom a while to crack it because he’s A) unused to thinking beyond his next bullet and B) so fucking drunk all the time—the “fun” lies in watching things spin out (of control, heading downwards, like an express elevator to Hell). Final verdict: For all that people roundly shat on this one in the theatres (surprise, surprise), it’s a nasty little joyride full of bad procedure, smack-talking, macho theatrics and neo-noir snap which probably plays far more efficiently shrunk down to TV size anyways; there’s a reason we haven’t really seen this sort of thing much onscreen since HBO took off, buddies. But there ya go.
“Whatever happened to just locking up the bad guys?” “We’re all bad, Tom.” Word!
