Brooklyn’s Finest burrows deep into a rough corner of the Borough of Kings, and also into the collective memory of generations of meaty, emotional movies about New York City cops in trouble. The picture is set in the present, though you might not guess as much from the bad-old-days-level body count and the Sidney Lumet (Prince of the City, say, or Q and A) aura hanging around the three suffering, ethically compromised policemen at its center.
The director, Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), takes a packed, hard-working script by the first-timer (and former New York City transit worker) Michael C. Martin, and paints an infernal triptych of panic, defeat and good intentions gone bad. Sal (Ethan Hawke) is a detective whose money troubles — a houseful of kids, twins on the way, a wife (Lili Taylor) with health problems — lead him twitching and sweating down the path of unrighteousness.
It’s likely that Eddie (Richard Gere) has been on that road most of his career, an undistinguished run of flat-footing that’s a week away from ending when we meet him. The first morning of that last week on the job, Eddie wakes up, takes a slug of whiskey and sticks a pistol in his mouth. Cowardice — or perhaps laziness — must be what prevents him from pulling the trigger, since he does not behave like a man who has any reason to live.
Following Eddie around as he glumly helps break in a succession of rookies — a situation that is like a depressive send-up of both Training Day and Gere’s role in Mike Figgis’ Internal Affairs — you wonder if some kind of redemption might be waiting around the bend. You kind of suspect there might be, which is one sign that Brooklyn’s Finest is working in familiar genre territory. But it is a testament to Gere’s discipline and Fuqua’s nimbleness that Eddie’s every action seems grounded in a coherent, if contradictory, temperament. Eddie mopes around, keeping company with a prostitute (Shannon Kane) who kindly acts like a lover, his close-set eyes squinting as though he were trying to recall some vague notion of a better, more upstanding life.
The third strand in this sad braid of blue is Tango (Don Cheadle), who has a clearer ethical sense than Sal or Eddie, but whose undercover work assignment places him in just as much moral and physical danger. His ambition and his sense of professional duty conflict with his loyalty to Caz (Wesley Snipes, sly and dapper as ever), a drug dealer who once saved Tango’s life.
Mostly, Tango, Sal and Eddie take their separate routes to ruin, occasionally crossing paths without acknowledging one another. But they also exist within a thick, sticky web of relationships and alliances, which is also to say in a hive of effective supporting performances. Kane and Brian O’Byrne (as Sal’s dogged, good-hearted partner) are especially fine, but even players who appear in only a scene or two make a strong impression. Fans of The Wire will recognize a few cast members (notably Michael Williams, as one of Caz’s underlings), and at its best Brooklyn’s Finest achieves something like the dramatic density of that series.
Not that the film attains — or, to be fair, really attempts — the kind of novelistic sweep that made The Wire so extraordinary. Brooklyn’s Finest, despite Fuqua’s canny use of real locations, mainly in Brownsville, is hardly a work of realism. Rather, like so many of its models (and like Training Day), it is a melodrama and a morality play, a study of character under pressure using the brute urban facts of greed, violence and fear for background, mood and stage equipment.
Particular scenes are not always entirely credible, but the sheer charismatic force of much of the acting keeps you in the movie. As the machinery of the plot accelerates, however, Martin’s script becomes dangerously overheated. The climax is both chaotically messy and fussily neat, as the bullets fly a little too frequently and hit their targets with clean, hollow thumps of significance.
You know at the beginning — from Hawke’s first act of off-the-books mayhem, from the nervous watchfulness in Cheadle’s eyes, from Gere’s air of disgust — that things are likely to end badly. And they do, but not in a good way. Like Tango, Sal and Eddie, Fuqua and Martin dig themselves into a pulpy predicament, and then find themselves unable to do anything but shoot their way out. The movie is wounded, but it’s also too tough to kill.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
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It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your