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 the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated