Streaming tip--Netflix's Ayer/Landis BRIGHT: It's more fun than most critics have suggested

Yes, you have to be willing to accept a tale of Los Angeles cops -- good ones and bad ones -- that also involves fairies, elves and orcs (the latter will be lost on older audiences unfamiliar with those Lord of the Rings movies), but once you do, BRIGHT, the latest Netflix-released movie to find its way onto the streaming miasma, is actually a lot of fast-moving-if-silly fun that simultaneously offers its own ever-timely look at and lesson on racism and prejudice. For some nonsensical reason, our critical establishment, who just loved Wonder Woman, has seen fit to pillory David Ayer, first for giving us the more-fun-than-you've-heard Suicide Squad movie and now this fantasy follow-up that traffics equally in make-believe and mayhem.

As directed by Ayer (shown at right) and written by Max Landis, Bright makes good use of both the director's past abilities regarding cop movies (Training Day and Dark Blue, which he wrote, and the fine End of Watch, which he wrote and as directed) and his newer-found ability to offer up comic book stuff in the style that it deserves: not taking it at all seriously while making it move and amuse. One can only laugh in utter derision at critics who accused Ayer of making Suicide Club unbelievable -- as though any of these goddamned super-hero/stupid-hero movie were even remotely believable? Well, "great minds" do think alike.

Meanwhile, Bright posits one of those alternate-universe L.A.s in which elves have taken over as the elite, mere humans are relegated to underling status, fairies simply fly around and occasionally get swatted, and orcs are clearly at the bottom of the food chain: think Blacks.

There is one scene in the movie in which cops descend and beat practically to death an orc that will put you immediately in mind of Rodney King. Will Smith and Joel Edgerton (above and further above, left and right, respectively) play the usual unlikely cop partners (with Edgerton as the first orc ever allowed on the L.A. police force). Smith seems more relaxed and willing to let his easy charm shine brighter than in recent films, while Edgerton (of Animal Kingdom and Loving, even under very heavy make-up and/or CGI, manages to grab us and move us, as ever.

The minimal plot has to do with a, yes, magic wand (called exactly that), the getting of which seems awfully important to various elves, cops, gang members and everyone else on view. Our two cops manage to meet and protect a lone woman elf named Tikka (Lucy Fry, above) who seems to have changed sides from bad girl to good, and now needs to keep that wand under her wing.

The leading naughty elf is played by Noomi Rapace, above, a talented actress with a great face who is wasted here. Much of her role must have ended up on what we used to call the cutting room floor, or she was simply given too little to do in the first place. In the very large supporting cast are actors like Ike Barinholtz and Margaret Cho (as dirty cops) and Edgar Ramírez (below) as a sexy federal-agent elf.

All told, this one's a time-waster, but it is a lot of fun and not at all difficult to sit through -- if you've a mind to and are in mood for fantasy and action.  From Netflix, Bright, running just under two full hours, began streaming this past Friday, December 22.

BASKIN: Can Evrenol's Turkish horror film (in more ways than one) makes theatrical debut

Your first question -- once you calm down your vomit response and slide back into normalcy as this very ghastly, ghoulish horror/slasher/fantasy frolic ends -- might be, "So who is BASKIN, the person, place, thing or idea for which this new Turkish movie was presumably christened? Tell you one thing: It sure as hell ain't Baskin Robbins. Directed (and co-written along with three other screenwriters) by Can Evrenol, who is shown below, the film begins with that evergreen scene in which a young child, in this case a pretty little boy, hears his parents going at it in the bedroom and of course can't help but wonder what is taking place. Before he can find out, the scene turns into something out of a horror movie.

Cut to a coffee-house/restaurant in which a bunch of Turkish cops are bantering and making with the faggot jokes and generally behaving so very badly that you quickly realize you're not going to care what awful stuff happens to these creeps. It does end up as pretty awful, and yes, you don't care much -- even though one of those cops turns out to be the adult version of that pretty little boy. The first sign that something is amiss takes place in the restroom, as one cop, below, sees a frog and goes a little "off."

Frogs turn out to be a continuing motif here, so of course we think biblical plagues and such. Later other worse things also point a bit toward the Bible or maybe the Quran, or simply something mythic and not very nice. However, if your are someone who wants explanation with his horror, give it up now. You're mostly going to get circularity, hand-held camerawork that makes you think you've seen something scary, little actual "plot," and finally a whole bunch of torture, gore and glop.

Our cop buddies go out on a call, or maybe it's a mission, or anyway something that takes them into the "old dark house." Along the way they meet some odd gypsy types (frog hunters!), a few "service" people, and our pretty boy cop and his older mentor have some flashbacks that explain little but serve to connect the movie enough so that we don't throw up our hands and say "fuck you."

Along the way there is a lot of atmosphere, a little up-chucking now and again and some very interesting special effects, the best of which seems original and has to do with a little man drowning and being rescued by a huge pair of hands. There is also much sleight-of-hand visual stuff that lets our imagination do the work.

What's it all about? Well, sex and death and sex and violence. (Will we ever again see some sex and fun?) Beyond that there is some mumbo-jumbo from a fellow identified in the credits as "Baba/The Father (played by one, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, making a memorable debut). I found myself wondering if maybe the movie might stand for the state of the Turkish nation today? Or could it be some nasty karmic payback for the Armenian genocide? Or could this be the Turkish idea of hell? ("You carry hell with you at all times," that Baba guy intones at one point.)

Your guess, should you see this movie, will be as good as mine. Maybe it's all just a dream. Oh, wait: It's actually real. Or, as one cop tell another, "Not everything has a clear answer."  Baskin does have a certain creepy, all-stops-out craziness. And also a lot of slo-mo that extends the movie well past its sell-by point. Finally it seems as much an endurance test as anything else. The end credits, however, are artful and beautifully rendered.

From IFC Midnight and running a too-long 97 minutes, Baskin opens theatrically tomorrow, Friday, March 25, in New York City at the IFC Center (for midnight showings only). In Los Angeles, look for it at the Arena Cinema come Friday, April 1. For those of you not living on either coast, the movie is also simultaneously being made available via VOD.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña light up David Ayer's hero-cop film END OF WATCH

What a pleasant surprise it is to watch unfurl END OF WATCH, the new movie about a couple of naturally heroic cops who work Los Angeles' South Central area. The surprise is especially meaningful as the film's writer/director, David Ayer (shown below), has also given us some other movies about cops in Los Angeles -- Training Day (screenwriter), Street Kings (director), Dark Blue (screenwriter) -- in which many, if not most, of the police were dirty and dirtier.

TrustMovies grew up in the Los Angeles area, and his understanding of and experience with the police there tend toward the darker side of things, so while he had no trouble believing much of Ayer's sleaze-filled scenarios, he found it unexpectedly bracing, even moving to see the skill, intelligence and camaraderie that seem second-nature to the two fine actors playing the cops-at-work here: Jake Gyllenhaal, (below, right) as the rowdy, smart, white-bread Brian Taylor, and Michael Peña (below, left) as his quieter but no less savvy Mexican-Ameri-can partner, Mike Zavala.

Mr. Ayer has constructed his movie mostly as a kind of day (or several of them) in the life of these two cops, as they patrol South Central, an area that was once almost entirely black but has, over the past decades, changed its complexion to a lighter brown. Now, Black and Hispance gangs fight it out, using high-end weaponry (notes Mike, about one amazing instrument, shown above and on the poster, top, "It looks like it belonged to Liberace").

As the two take some hits (and yes, kill a few people, too), spar verbally with each other (this interplay is beautifully written and acted) and occasionally get serious (this, too, is well presented), we learn a little about each of the men but never so much as to overload the narrative with undue baggage. As a writer, Ayer seems particularly adept at this kind of balance.

As a director, he and his cinematographer, Roman Vasyanov, use hand-held to nearly the breaking point, putting us up close to the people and action about as well as I have seen done so far. We're with our guys at work, chasing criminals, rescuing a family from a fire (above: this is one of the high points of the film), and getting into some major trouble (below) -- all of which keeps, toe-wise, the cops on theirs and us on ours.

Interspersed with all this is the love-and-family life of the two. Brian has begun dating a girl he really likes (for a change), played by Anna Kendrick (below, right), with her usual charm and flash.

Mike is married, with a pregnant wife -- the lovely Natalie Martinez, shown below, post-birth. If the film were simply all these guys, all the time, it would have been one of the best cop flicks ever, I believe. But Ayer has a real problem with the construction of his movie, particularly regarding point-of-view. The POV initially is all about -- and with -- our boys. Suddenly, there's a scene in which they do not appear at all, and we're driving along with a nut-job Latino gang. This plays itself out, a little oddly, for obvious plot purposes down the line, no doubt. Sure enough, that's what happens. But it thoroughly breaks our concentration and attention -- while calling unwanted attention to itself and its rather ham-handed entrance.

But this is nothing compared to what is to come: Toward the end we get an out-of-the-blue (via some green/nighttime video footage) conversation from an upper echelon member of a drug cartel, whom we haven't seen before and will not see again, ordering a hit. This is pure, dumb exposition of a sort that belongs in some other movie -- and not one as well-made as End of Watch often is. These two instances do hurry the plot along but they are so clunky and out of place that they destroy, for a time, the film's veracity.

Surely Ayer could have found a way to work this stuff in more organically, the way he did a scene in which our guys stumble upon a storage site for human trafficking, and they (and we) learn a little about what is going on from a much higher-level member of government law enforcement. That scene works because our cops are part of it and we're experiencing it along with them.

Certain other things rankle. Are Latino gangs made up of simply the world's worst marksmen-and-women? It would seem so, on the basis of what we see here. As the movie draws to a close, the cliches begin to pile up. The finale of the film only works because of its two lead actors, who are here giving career-best performances. Because of this, we'll expect, I think, a whole lot more out of them in the years to come.

End of Watch, from Open Road Films, opens this Friday, September 21, all over the place. In Manhattan alone, the film will be playing in ten theaters. But try to find any listing of playdates and theaters on the movie's web site, or that of Open Road, and you're out of luck. But keep looking. For all its flaws, this movie is very much worth experiencing.

DVDebuts: Sylvain White's swift THE LOSERS; Kevin Smith's funny COP OUT

Two mainstream movies from Warner Brothers, the company that's never had a clue what to do with anything a little different, debut this week on DVD. Each surprises because it manages to stand out a bit from the pack -- which undoubtedly accounts for neither's ringing the bell at the box-office.  Cop Out, Kevin Smith's nod/ode to buddy cop movies, garnered but 19 per cent positive on RottenTomatoes, while Sylvain White's The Losers managed a middling 47.  Both are better than you might think.

With COP OUT, popular indie filmmaker Kevin Smith goes mainstream -- but in his own pervy manner. Instead of giving us "bromance buddies" who hate-each-other initially only so they can love-each-other eventually, Smith has his stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in love from the get-go. Sure, they squabble, but what couple doesn't? Both actors are surprisingly relaxed, especially Willis, and for every joke or scene that doesn't work, there's another that does. While this is not an ideal comedy ratio (it ought to be at least two to one), the scenes that work, work beautifully.  This is often due to a still-far-too-unsung hero named Seann William Scott, who has maybe his best-ever role here, as a yappy, scrappy practitioner of paltry parkour who entertains his captors (and us) royally. His scene in the jail cell approaches the classic. Smith and his writers Robb and Mark Cullen achieve a loosey-goosey, silly but often satisfying tone
and a movie filled with odd, sometimes endearing (and, yeah, occasionally stupid) events.

THE LOSERS -- fast-paced, stylish and relatively intelligent (for the action genre) -- on the other hand, offers comic book style guns and fun, some major explosions, and a particularly nasty villain in Jason Patric (just wondering: was it Mr. Patrick's inability to project warmth that has kept his career in check? No matter: He's fine in this role). The crew of mostly good guys, joined by one maybe-good woman are made up of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, the very hot Óscar Jaenada and Zoe Saldana. The film moves quickly, gathering little moss; the dialog is passable and sometimes clever; and the PG-13 rating in this case guarantees that, despite a contin-
ually rising body-count, there's barely a trace of blood, not to men-
tion guts 'n gore. In the mood for action? You could do a lot worse.