Amoeba Music

In 1950s Los Angeles, three cops with very different styles, try solving a multiple homicide. Along the way, they face off against each other, as well as the corruption that runs rampant in the City of Angels.

The screen adaptation by Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland (Payback), beautifully translates a very complex multi-layered story, based on the crime novel by James Ellroy. The characterization is very strong, the dialogue is razor-sharp, and the plot structure is intricate, but aptly realized. The two men won an Academy Award for their efforts.

As a follow-up to director Joe Carnahan’s crazy action indie Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, he chose to write and direct one of the grittiest, low down cop flicks in recent years, if not ever, Narc. It’s the story of two cops (Ray Liotta and Jason Patric) investigating the death of one of their colleagues. The investigation leads them deep into the heart of Detroit’s brutal drug trade (though most of the film was actually shot in Toronto). Each has their own heavy cop baggage and demons that they must tote with them through the brutal streets.

Over the years Carnahan has been linked to a number of high profile projects that have either vanished or come to fruition with other directors at the helm (ranging from Mission Impossible III to adaptations of Killing Pablo and James Ellroy’s White Jazz with George Clooney). In recent years he made the overly hyper action comedy Smokin’ Aces and the decent but forgettable restaging of TV’s The A-Team. Narc has been the peak of Carnahan’s career; it’s the film that is still getting him attached to so many high profile projects. It showed so much potential; time will tell if he is ever able to match it in quality. He was able to bring an arresting visual style, emphasizing the cool blue streets of Detroit in winter (similar to the hues Steven Soderbergh shot Detroit with in Out of Sight). The city is made to feel frigid, not just in the air, but also in the hearts of the players on both sides of the law.

Not to be confused with the awful swell of stunt man flicks that arose in the late '70s and early '80s (Hooper, Stunts, Stunt Rock, etc), nope, Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a genre all itself. It's a playful film about the magic of movie making, but its depiction of a film set is closer to the episode of The Flintstones when Fred becomes Stony Curtis's stand-in, then, say, Francois Truffaut's on-set Day For Night. Like a Christopher Nolan film, it's a puzzle in a box, but unlike Inception the characters never stop to explain it to you. What's real and what's make believe is up to the viewer's imagination, like film itself.

Vietnam vet Cameron (Steve Railsback) is on the run from the cops, stumbles onto a film set, and may or may not be responsible for the death of the movie's top stunt man. The film's egomaniacal director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), takes the fugitive under his wing, agreeing to hide him out but Cross will have to replace him as the film's stunt man. While shooting a ridiculous looking WWI flick at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado (the location of Some Like It Hot as well) Cameron's view of reality becomes more blurred (as does the audience's). Cross puts him in more and more dangerous situations (just like that Flintstones episode). Is Cross trying to kill him? Did Cross have Burt, the former stunt man, killed? Besides stepping into Burt's stunt shoes, Cameron also takes up with his girlfriend, Nina (Barbara Hershey), the film's leading lady. And again, a sexual relationship with a self-centered actress can also blur the lines of reality, maybe even more powerfully.