Review: End of Watch

Film review for the Whistleblower

End of Watch is a cop-drama film with a thrilling difference. Through the use of public surveillance and handheld HD cameras, as well as those attached to the police cruiser, the viewer is thrust into the South Central LA landscapes where there is a real sense that danger is always looming. Written and directed by veteran of the genre David Ayer (Training Day, The Fast and the Furious), it seems that we’re getting something slightly original with this latest offering which really raises the bar for action films such as this.

The streets of LA take officers Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zavala (Michael Peña) on a flash around the city with great pace. Routine traffic stops and runnings with local gang members give us a sense that these are two LAPD officers that can be trusted and liked by those on both sides of the law; holding the law of the street closer to their chest than that of the book. It’s a vision of the LAPD we have seen before from Ayers, a community driven police force which shares the values of the streets it patrols. The tone of the film changes, however, when Taylor and Zavala run up on a car full of drug money, jewel-encrusted weapons and gangsters, which consequently lead them into the world of the Mexican cartel. It is here that the film takes on an element of peril which up until now didn’t exist. Our confident and assured cops are now involved in shoot-outs with a group that operate above the law and, in true heroic fashion, they’re on their own.

Whilst this whistle stop tour of LA takes us to scenes which touch on implausible, a scene in which Zavala puts his gun down to fight with a gang member in order to earn the police respect comes to mind, it does so with such incredible urgency that there’s no time to linger on such trivialities. If the overly dramatic story and themes of friendship and brotherly love get all a bit too much, then you can count on this visceral style of filmmaking to hold your attention as the action unfolds – and with what pace it unfolds!  

Fire and Light: Tracing the cinematic desire

An article for Flash: Lancaster University Critical and Creative Journal

Man has long looked towards light, towards the glowing sun which is the giver of life, for many things – not least for artistic fulfilment. The primordial desire for the moving image which enchants so many of us in theatre houses around the world today is one which can be traced back through our history. Our cave-dwelling ancestors sought entertainment in a distinct form of proto-cinema that involved creating wonderful paintings on their cave walls which, by the light of a flickering fire within the cave, are animated into life. In his awe-inspiring 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, illustrious director Werner Herzog traces “the beginnings of the modern human soul” [1] to the Chauvet cave in the south of France where sophisticated drawings of mammoths, horses and lions hunting caught the imagination of early man.

In these caves there is an uncanny sense of shared consciousness with beings that once seemed so distant to us, twenty thousand years distant to be exact. Light was shown to give life in these caves, providing impressions of reality which aimed to satisfy our cinematic desire. Whilst these cave paintings can hardly be called cinema, they do show a fascination with the moving image that caught human curiosity and was never let go.

Technological restrictions meant that proto-cinema remained just that. The cinematic desire, however, can continue to be traced in our history. The projection of an object reality, that is the outside world, has been focused on by great thinkers such as Aristotle in Ancient Greece and Mozi in Ancient China who both made references to the camera obscura in their writings. This rudimentary ‘camera’ was placed inside a darkened room (where the properties of light can be most practically honed) with a hole in one side which light passed through, creating an inverted image of the object world before the onlooker. As time and technology progressed, an array of inventions was created with the aim of satisfying our cinematic desire; including the zoetrope and daguerreotype to name just two.

 Keith Cohen in Film and Fiction: the Dynamics of Exchange asserts that cinematic desire could only truly be realised “when the two essentials of motion pictures where at hand: the pictures (i.e. the photographic principle) and the motion (i.e. the means of mechanically synthesizing the discrete part of any action).”[2] The gradual perfection of the photographic medium in the nineteenth century gave birth to a cinema which projected movement, albeit within a fixed spatial frame at first, of workers leaving a factory[3], or a train pulling into a station.[4] This documentary style of filmmaking became synonymous with the Lumière brothers (a suitable name deriving from the French word for ‘light’) and led to a wealth of important works rooted in reality, such as Herzog’s film cited here. It was magician Georges Méliès, however, that first understood the creative capacity of cinema. By use of camera tricks and elaborate sets Méliès created a cinema in which time and space were at the hands of the filmmaker. With this came the birth of modern cinema and an unprecedented acceleration in the technology of the medium (sound, colour, widescreen, 3D…) and the symbolic language of film which engrosses us all.

---

[1] Werner Herzog, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Creative Differences, 2011).

[2] Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction: the Dynamics of Exchange (Yale University Press, 1979).

[3] Lumière, La sortie des usines Lumière (1895).

[4] Lumière, L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896).

Preview: The Master

Film preview for The Whistleblower.

The Master sees Paul Thomas Anderson return with his latest film since 2007’s hugely successful There Will Be Blood, a film which cemented Anderson for many as the filmmaker of his generation. With praise already rushing in from early press and festival screenings, this auteur looks to be on course for even more Academy Award nominations with his story of cults, transition and unsettlement in post-war America.  

Anderson’s sixth feature film follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy officer sent home from combat in the Second World War on the grounds of psychological instability. Struggling with settling back into a life chasing the great American dream and developing a serious addiction to his home-made hooch, Quell becomes a drifter looking for something certain in the mysterious modernity of America. All is looking lost for Quell until he finds himself, in a drunken stupor, on the steamboat of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-titled ‘writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher [and]… above all, a man’. In this meeting of chance, Freddie finds cause and purpose, and Dodd finds a volunteer to exercise his psychological theories. Although Anderson denies the film is directly about Scientology, there is a clear connection between Dodd, the leader of a philosophical movement known as ‘The Cause’, and Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard.  

With Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood providing an original score and cinematography being handled by Mihai Malaimare Jr., who has worked with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, The Master is going to be an unmissable film. Especially for anyone who wants an alternative to Hollywood’s latest offerings from a filmmaker who has a complete understanding of his trade.