Author Topic: Jake Gyllenhaal's 'End of Watch' by David Ayer Opens TODAY Friday, Sept. 21  (Read 9502 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/end-of-watch-film-review-jake-gyllenhaal-367930






End of Watch
Toronto Review

David Ayer returns to his home turf with a Jake Gyllenhaal-led
pro-cop story set in South Central Los Angeles.


The Bottom Line:
Macho swagger is justified by some adrenaline-producing
encounters in cops vs. cartels drama.


by John DeFore
11:00 AM PDT 9/8/2012






TORONTO — David Ayer's South Central-set cop film End of Watch  feels like the work of a man who, after relishing venal and brutal policework in his scripts for Training Day  and Dark Blue,  has come to identify with, and maybe love, the L.A.P.D. Here, L.A.'s finest may work in a world of cut corners and bad attitudes, but they're the good guys, and damned if you're not going to accept it. Vigorously capturing the tension of walking into situations that could be deadly, horrifying, or both, it has a strong commercial appeal despite some shortcomings.

It's hard at first to figure out what Ayer thinks of his protagonist Officer Taylor,  (Jake Gyllenhaal), a macho "ghetto street cop" whose plan to make a documentary about life on the force (he carries a camera along on his beat and in the police house, to the chagrin of colleagues) looks less journalistic than narcissistic. The voiceover with which he opens End of Watch  starts off street-tough, then pivots: "beyond my badge is a heart like yours," he says, continuing to speak of his inner yearnings. David Sardy's score turns melodramatic alongside him, sounding like ironic commentary on this self-aggrandizement, but eventually it's clear Ayer's film buys what Taylor's selling. Viewers may too, as Gyllenhaal thoroughly inhabits this problematic personality.

Michael Peña's Officer Zavala, though matching his partner for general wiseassery, has a much smaller chip on his shoulder. (As in World Trade Center,  where he was married to a Gyllenhaal instead of manning a squad car with one, Peña shows he has mastered the "Latino partner loyal to Caucasian hero" role. It's time for him to graduate.)

Having just returned from leave after killing two subjects in the course of duty (it was a clean shooting, everyone agrees), Taylor and Zavala are even higher-profile at the precinct house than usual. A pair of no-nonsense female cops (America Ferrera and Cody Horn) resent their attitude; a disgruntled veteran (David Harbour) resents their self-satisfaction. But though the energy and direction of some patrol encounters might have viewers expecting these cops to be (or soon become) involved in something crooked, the worst you can say about them is, like practically every cop in film history, they don't play by the rules.

Here, ignoring the rules -- following up on leads that should be passed along to detectives -- opens a window into the grisly north-of-the-border activities of a Mexican drug cartel. "The cartels" hover unseen above the action here (until the third act), raising a question: If they decide to expand their presence, can they wreak as much havoc in the States as they have in Mexico? Nobody voices that concern, but way they say the words suggests they don't assume an easy victory.

While we don't see the cartels, we do meet some American aspirants to their level of terror-fueled success as the film eavesdrops on some Latino youths called the Curbside Gang. If these killers look more like sketches for post-Cartel gang stereotypes instead of believable humans, that irritant is compounded by the fact that they, too, are filming everything they do. Scenes of self-documentation are so common in the movie's beginning (is End of Watch  a misnomer when everybody's watching himself?) that we expect Ayer to make something of it in the end.

Ayer drops that ball, if he ever meant to carry it somewhere. And in the last 15 minutes of the film, he burns up some of the credibility he established by not pushing extreme situations too far earlier on. But he has managed to involve us in the lives of his characters -- whose storylines may be familiar (as in Taylor's romance with smart outsider Janet, played charmingly by Anna Kendrick), but are played out in a world that for the most part feels real.



Production companies: Exclusive Media, Le Grisbi, Crave Films

Distributor: Open Road Films

Cast: Michael Pena, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez, America Ferrera, Cody Horn, Frank Grillo, David Harbour

Director-screenwriter: David Ayer

Producers: David Ayer, John Lesher, Nigel Sinclair, Matt Jackson

Executive producers: Randall Emmett, Stepan Martirosyan, Remington Chase, Adam Kassan, Chrisann Verges, Guy East, Tobin Armbrust, Jake Gyllenhaal

Director of photography: Roman Vasyanov

Production designer: Devorah Herbert

Music: David Sardy

Costume designer: Mary Claire Hannan

Editor: Dody Dorn

R, 108 minutes



"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Jake Gyllenhaal's 'End of Watch' by David Ayer Opens TODAY Friday, Sept. 21
« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2012, 03:22:20 pm »


http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/movies/end-of-watch-with-jake-gyllenhaal-and-michael-pena.html?_r=0



Movie Review
Cops Who Tote Guns
and Video Cameras

End of Watch
With Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 20, 2012



Michael Peña, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal play cops who patrol the tough streets of South
Los Angeles in “End of Watch.”



An ode to beat cops and the expansive literature on them, David Ayer’s “End of Watch” is a muscular, maddening exploitation movie embellished with art-house style and anchored by solid performances. As visually kinetic as it is politically dubious, it sings the song of two Los Angeles police officers, Brian (a good Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike (an equally fine Michael Peña), brothers in blue who roll in a black and white. Like the cops in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1970 novel “The New Centurions” they are soldiers amid, in Mr. Wambaugh’s roll call, “whores, flimflammers, paddy hustlers, hugger muggers, ex-cons of all descriptions, and anybody else with a kink of some kind or other.”

The villains in “End of Watch” are less flamboyantly diverse (and quaint sounding) than those rattling around “The New Centurions.” Here the baddies are primarily Latino gangbangers (and their cartel masters), men and women with neck tattoos, dead eyes and names as blunt as their violence: Demon, Wicked, Big Evil.

Their ethnicity partly reflects changes to the neighborhood that the cops patrol, identified in the movie as South Central, but since 2003 officially known as South Los Angeles. The new name was an attempt to distance the area from the civil disobedience that has convulsed the city and the more localized violence that, depending on your take, has been immortalized or exploited in films like “Training Day,” which Mr. Ayer wrote.

As with “Training Day” this movie pivots on a fundamentally decent cop, Brian, who endures a crucible of violence and experiences something of a moral education. A former Marine (Mr. Ayer was in the Navy), Brian is ambitious and taking prelaw classes for which he’s making an epically long video. This plot device allows Mr. Ayer to tell the story through Brian’s hand-held camera, the mini-cameras he pins to his and Mike’s uniforms, the surveillance camera in their squad car and images shot by other characters, including the gangbangers. Mr. Ayer was clearly after a hyper-verisimilitude of the sort deployed in some contemporary horror flicks, an unmediated realism that’s meant to suggest the truth of the image but, as it does here, only confirms its entertaining artifice.

Mr. Ayer has said he wanted “End of Watch” to look like something on YouTube; happily, it just looks and plays like a mainstream multi-act movie with a lot of super-shaky, run-and-gun imagery. After a while Mr. Ayer’s visual gimmickry calms down or simply ceases to distract as the episodic story takes Brian and Mike from the city’s mean streets to their homes and women, Janet (Anna Kendrick, sexily cast against type), and Gabby (Natalie Martinez). The women are unsurprisingly secondary figures, although each puts in quality domestic time with the guys.

There are also a pair of tough-chick cops (America Ferrera and Cody Horn), and their rabidly violent gangbanging counterpart (Yahira Garcia). Mostly, though, this is about men loving each other and fighting the evil that other men do.

Some of that wickedness is grimly familiar from the news and other films, and almost all of it is committed by the black and mainly brown people on the other side of the blue line. Mr. Peña’s sympathetic performance and likable character help keep the movie from coming across as a kind of freakout over the specter of a Latino Nation.

At the same time Mr. Ayer exhibits a curious nostalgia for the hood’s good old bad and blacker days, notably in the use of a Public Enemy song and a scene in which a middle-aged African-American tough (a vivid Cle Sloan) favorably compares the cops to original gangsters. It’s a moment that registers as a plea for authenticity, although less on behalf of the characters than the director.



“End of Watch” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Extreme violence.


End of Watch

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by David Ayer; director of photography, Roman Vasyanov; edited by Dody Dorn; music by David S. Sardy; production design by Devorah Herbert; costumes by Mary Claire Hannan; produced by John Lesher, Nigel Sinclair and Matt Jackson; released by Open Road Films. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.

WITH: Jake Gyllenhaal (Officer Brian Taylor), Michael Peña (Officer Mike Zavala), America Ferrera (Officer Orozco), Anna Kendrick (Janet), Natalie Martinez (Mrs. Zavala), Frank Grillo (Sarge), Cody Horn (Officer Davis), Cle Sloan (Mr. Tre) and Yahira Garcia (La La).


"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Mandy21

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Re: Jake Gyllenhaal's 'End of Watch' by David Ayer Opens TODAY Friday, Sept. 21
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2012, 07:58:21 am »
Thanks, John, for always keeping us in the loop.  I'm looking forward to seeing this Monday afternoon while everybody else is at work.

"Wiseassery" -- loves it, must use in sentence.
Dawn is coming,
Open your eyes...

Offline Mandy21

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FINALLY got around to watching this on DVD yesterday morning, and very much enjoyed the camaraderie between Jake and Michael Pena.  My fave scenes were all the buddy-joking ones in the patrol car.  I thought Jake did a good acting job as a cop, seemed to have the moves and the mood down just right.  Was very surprised by the ending, won't give it away here, though.  Overall, 6 out of 10 stars, I'd say.  Would watch it again.

P.S.  I know this is twisted, but I was really hoping for a close-up of the knife in that dick cop's eyeball.  Not that I condone violence of any kind, let alone to those brave people who protect us.  But my point being, why even show it from a distance a couple times and leave out a close-up?  And why stick it straight through his eye -- why not somewhere else?  I found that scene weird.
Dawn is coming,
Open your eyes...

Offline CellarDweller

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P.S.  I know this is twisted, but I was really hoping for a close-up of the knife in that dick cop's eyeball.  Not that I condone violence of any kind, let alone to those brave people who protect us.  But my point being, why even show it from a distance a couple times and leave out a close-up?  And why stick it straight through his eye -- why not somewhere else?  I found that scene weird.



Hey Mandy.....did that "dick cop" look familiar at all?  ;D

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Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Mandy21

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NO.
EFFIN.
WAY.


Chuck, how in the world did you find that out?  In a bazillion years, I wouldn't have recognized him.  In his first scene, I thought 'who the hell is that actor, never seen him in anything' and then I thought ' boy, he sure plays a dick well'.  And I was secretly, sickly happy karma came back to bite him after being mean to our Jakey.

Gotta say it again --

NO.
EFFIN.
WAY.


Gonna be shaking my head all day long at that one....
Dawn is coming,
Open your eyes...

Offline Monika

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Hey Mandy.....did that "dick cop" look familiar at all?  ;D

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OMG

Randall is one persistant guy

Offline CellarDweller

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OMG

Randall is one persistant guy


When End of Watch was released I searched it online and saw the name "David Harbour" and I thought it was very familiar, but couldn't place where I had seen it before.

I Googled him, and found his role in Brokeback, so I went in knowing what role he was playing.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Sophia

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NO.
EFFIN.
WAY.


Chuck, how in the world did you find that out?  In a bazillion years, I wouldn't have recognized him.  In his first scene, I thought 'who the hell is that actor, never seen him in anything' and then I thought ' boy, he sure plays a dick well'.  And I was secretly, sickly happy karma came back to bite him after being mean to our Jakey.

Gotta say it again --

NO.
EFFIN.
WAY.


Gonna be shaking my head all day long at that one....


Rolling on the floor in laughter....  :laugh: :laugh:  lol. :laugh: :laugh:

O

M

G

!!!!

 :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Offline Sophia

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7 years and they finally did it. Now I just hope they get their butts up to Lighting flash and get that farm going.  ;D