What does Michael Bay unhinged look like on celluloid? That’s not a question most of us really need answered; eighteen years spent making glossy, lunkheaded action films, blockbusters based on toy lines, and useless horror remakes speak volumes on the subject of Bay’s auteurdom. But maybe the Transformers mastermind has been done an injustice. Maybe, beneath the frat boy wit and visual chaos of his cinema, Bay has kept his one Big Idea squirreled away for safekeeping, waiting for the right opportunity to unleash his unspoiled artistic vision on his audiences. Or maybe Pain & Gain is just an erroneous high water mark in bad taste filmmaking. Whatever the case may be,…
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G-S-T Review…The Sweeney
Gritty cop yarns aren’t what they used to be, literally. Nearly forty years ago, the notion of depicting law enforcers as imperfect was almost unthinkable, but fast forward to now and that’s suddenly become the standard. That’s the expectation. Police procedural stories no longer demand that their central characters be squeaky clean and pure to a fault; today, we want our television and movie cops to have pathos, to be flawed, and sometimes– maybe oftentimes– do whatever they have to in their pursuit of a crook. Maybe that’s a reflection of modern society, or maybe audiences just grew bored with archetypal goody two-shoes hero cops. Either way, ours is a…
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G-S-T Double Take Review…End of Watch
What’s better than one GST staff writer’s perspective on a film? How about two? For this round of Double-Take reviews, Bill and Andrew crack their knuckles and dig into David Ayer’s latest street cop drama, End of Watch: By Andrew Crump: If insanity can truly be defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, then Einstein would’ve immediately pegged David Ayer as a bona fide lunatic. Since his runaway success with Training Day in 2001, Ayer has done nothing but write and, more recently, direct crime films set in Los Angeles at large or South Central in the specific, crafting narratives that are embedded either…
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The Criterion Files: Homicide
Homicide: Directed by: David Mamet Written by: David Mamet Starring: Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Ving Rhames Cinematography: Roger Deakins Music by: Alaric Jans Released: October 9, 1991 David Mamet might today have greater notoriety as a font of controversy and ideological invective than as a filmmaker (and perhaps even as a playwright). Maybe one could argue that that’s merely a symptom of being a conservative convert in an industry dominated by adherents of liberalism, but the more likely cause for his infamy is his own mouth; Mamet’s anti-left wing diatribes could turn even Ann Coulter a bright shade of red. But common wisdom dictates that we can separate the art…
