Showtimes for all movies in the area. Click here!

By Cole Smithey

‘Street Kings’

Movie Trailer

Based on James Ellroy’s novel, “Street Kings” is set in LA’s blood-soaked streets, traversed by widowed LAPD veteran Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) whose carte blanche methods of obliterating suspects with his service revolver are threatened when his former partner Terrence Washington turns Internal Affairs informant. Accustomed to having his violent “missions” smoothed over with the help of Captain Wander (Forest Whitaker), Ludlow thumbs his nose at the inclosing IA officers, in order to find the gunmen responsible for shooting Washington down during a convenience store heist. A combination of implausible plot-points, and the miscasting of television’s Hugh Laurie as Internal Affairs chief Captain Biggs, hampers a convoluted crime thriller that is nonetheless entertaining for its grotesque action sequences.

Writer/director David Ayer made a splash with his “Bad Lieutenant” inspired script for “Training Day.” It was a thoroughly modern version of a corrupt police mentality that Americans continue to see reflected in the newspapers. Unarmed suspects get shot with 50 bullets, and cops go free after lip service trials allow communities to wring out their tears before moping away with little sense of justice being served. It’s this dire state of affairs that Ayer addresses with a comic perversion that views cops and criminals as not just the same brand of monster, but part of the same entity.

From the looks of Ludlow’s squalid apartment, you’d never guess that he was once married. It makes sense that his wife died while committing an act of adultery because this isn’t the kind of guy to make a woman feel safe and secure. He’s a career cop concerned with keeping his gun clean for its perpetual use. And if Ludlow familiarity with racist viewpoints allows him to verbally belittle every Tyrone, Ernesto, Nam and Ethan he comes into contact with, so much the better. Whether or not he’s really a racist at heart is beside the point. Like Denzel Washington’s character in “Training Day,” Reeves’ Ludlow exists to strategically execute bad guys who, like him, frequently wear body armor and are armed to the teeth. He doesn’t have any grand aspirations beyond humiliating, injuring and killing criminals with impunity.

There’s shock value in the ripe dialogue between Ludlow and the three Korean crooks attempting to purchase a machine gun from him in a parking lot deal that leaves him bloodied on the ground-his car and gun taken in exchange for his salty prattle. But Ludlow’s bruises are a small price to pay for him to follow the suspects to their fetish-fueled cathouse. What follows is a one-man guts-and-glory mission that leaves brain matter splattered on walls and pints of oozing blood pooled on the floor. The subtext here is that you don’t have to look to Iraq to witness combat-style assaults.

“Street Kings” gets a tonal shake-up from its mix of surprise casting for secondary characters. Talent typically thought of for their comedic skills hold their own, with the exception of Laurie, whose television persona follows him like a vile odor. Jay Mohr (“Suicide Kings,” “Go”) and Cedric “The Entertainer” give credible dramatic performances in plot-mapping roles that help mask the film’s glaring disregard for realism.

However, if “Street Kings” seems overtly alienated from reality, it serves to make a backhanded point about the surreal nature of police-committed massacres like New York’s Amadou Diallo case, and the recent murder of Sean Bell. That’s not to say that the film is pro or con on either side of the men in blue, merely that we are living in a time of heightened violence that taunts all logic. The film’s chain of brutal climax sequences blurs so many lines that you come away from it believing that anarchy in the streets is just a dirty little byproduct of democracy. Nobody eats “freedom fries” anymore. CV

‘Shine a Light’

Movie Trailer

Martin Scorsese returns to the rock ‘n’ roll concert documentary genre that he helped develop in 1978 with “The Last Waltz,” to capture an energized performance by The Rolling Stones at New York’s Beacon Theater in the fall of 2006. Sparsely augmented with brief interview and performance segments, “Shine a Light” (the film’s title was taken from the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” album) provides an incredibly intimate look at rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest living band performing a slew of timeless favorites and a few lesser-known songs. Buddy Guy, Jack Black and Christina Aguilera make memorable duet guest appearances on several songs, but it’s Mick Jagger’s famous athleticism that captures your imagination. Even in his ’60s, Jagger never stops moving like a juiced-up Iggy Pop as he drives the band to the far reaches of sonic space. The level of musical sophistication on display is divine, and Scorsese seals the enchanting event with a closing bit of camera virtuosity that puts it all in context.

We get a taste of the boisterous working dynamic between Jagger and Scorsese in a phone message clip from Jagger about confusion regarding the stage set that’s already being built before being entirely approved. There’s plenty of tension and personality in Jagger’s concerned voice, as Scorsese’s good-humored ability to make carefully tilled snap decisions enables the crew around him to carry out his will.

Where Scorsese’s focus for the “The Last Waltz” was on capturing a cultural zeitgeist that supported a generational shift of musical ideas, here he goes after the incredibly honed inner-workings of the Rolling Stones’ performance style and musical delivery. A horn section, a pair of back-up singers and a mobile percussionist adds rhythmic and harmonic textures to Jagger’s precise yet spontaneous phrasing. The communication that goes on between the musicians is nearly always on display, and it’s inside this happy convergence of rock orchestration that we experience the Rolling Stones as a musically refined group running on pure instinct.    

That might sound odd considering the unimaginable amount of songwriting, rehearsal, and performance experience the band has accumulated over its 46-years, but the Stones are so marinated in the joy of making music together that the story their songs tell can’t help but be refreshed.

More than a DNA sampling of the band’s endurance gene, the film is a wide-open celebration of the Blues music that the Stones have expounded on with as much invention as any Jazz artist alive. When Jack White joins Jagger on “Loving Cup,” the two singers harmonize from different registers. Both men strum away on acoustic guitars, and the effect is an eerie and whiny country-inflected sound that digs under swamp tree roots to extract a rough and rugged pearl. Keith Richards gets some well-deserved centerstage time with “You Got the Silver” and “Connection,” his tobacco-bruised voice stretching even at moderate interval leaps.

There’s just enough use of interview footage from the ’60s and ’70s to give an informal sense of Jagger’s ironic honesty that engulfs the audience on songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” and the rare Muddy Waters’ classic “Champagne and Reefer,” for which blues icon Guy trades choruses. In one hilarious clip, Jagger gets out of a helicopter, after just being released from jail on drug charges, to walk across an English estate lawn for a group discussion with a clergyman and other community pillars. Like a schoolhouse rebel being brought before a British PTA meeting, Jagger revels in the negative attention. After all, he knows something that they never will — utter liberation through rock ‘n’ roll. One look at “Shine a Light” and you can see how the Rolling Stones eclipse every other rock act around. This could just be the most intimate concert experience you could have, even if you were at the show. CV

Comment on this story | Return to top