Dennis Hopper has directed a thoroughly exoteric movie, accessible to anyone, with not a sign of any psychedelic trappings. An occasional line sounds improvised but otherwise it's conventionally done. It's not bad, either, and might be especially illuminating for people who live in isolated little towns like Deming, New Mexico.
It's a story of two cops -- a youngish hothead and hard charger (Penn) and the more laid-back and experienced man on the brink of retirement (Duvall). Both of them get the job done.
The plot has Bloods and Crips prominent in the first half. That's to introduce the good folk of Deming to the idea of rival gangs in Los Angeles. But the emphasis shifts to an unnamed barrio gang of Mexican youths led by Trinidad Silva, who calls everyone "Homes", as short for "home boy" or "home boys". It doesn't matter to Silva whether the term of address is used as a singular or plural. Everybody is "Homes." Silva is fine in the role. He has an ambiguous relationship with Duvall's cop. He helps keep the barrio relatively peaceful, seeing to it that his Homes don't do much more than smoke some grass, do some crack, maybe boost things once in a while, and run up more than a dozen parking tickets. He keeps Duvall informed of what's up, while Duvall occasionally does him a favor in return. Trinidad Silva is fine in the role, but it's hard to tell how much range he had. (He's gone now.) He may have been a one-shot deal like Alfonso Bedoya, "Gold Hat" in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The production design is outstanding. This isn't downtown LA. Nobody drinks cocktails and lives in Malibu. These are seedy, shabby, desolate neighborhoods, alive with people in the way that some kitchen cabinets seem to be alive with cockroaches. And the graffiti is everywhere and in a multiplicity of form. Some is nicely organized into epic murals, if obvious. These are, after all, in the tradition of Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, and David Siqueiros.
Maria Conchita Alonso, a Cuban singer, is pretty, vivacious, and dispensable. There is a black preacher, Troy Curvey, Jr., who mightily deplores the drugs and violence that affect the neighborhood. He and the audience at the funeral have the call-and-response pattern down pat. The ritual is interrupted by a drive-by machine gunning. There is one other drive-by shooting and one or two climactic shoot outs. As I said, this movie is commercially oriented.
Not as bad as I'd expected but I hope by now we don't really need this Introduction to Gang Warfare 101, not even in Deming. And, it's a little sad -- watching this, seeing the hills and the palms and the warm sunny climate -- I kept thinking of how tranquil and accommodating the Los Angeles basin was before the city got there. The Chumash Indians lived in nearby Santa Barbara. If you dig through their ancient garbage dumps, you find that they didn't change their way of life for more than three thousand years. Why should they? They had everything they needed. Now we couldn't do without a fleet of patrol cars, that palladium of civilization.
It's a story of two cops -- a youngish hothead and hard charger (Penn) and the more laid-back and experienced man on the brink of retirement (Duvall). Both of them get the job done.
The plot has Bloods and Crips prominent in the first half. That's to introduce the good folk of Deming to the idea of rival gangs in Los Angeles. But the emphasis shifts to an unnamed barrio gang of Mexican youths led by Trinidad Silva, who calls everyone "Homes", as short for "home boy" or "home boys". It doesn't matter to Silva whether the term of address is used as a singular or plural. Everybody is "Homes." Silva is fine in the role. He has an ambiguous relationship with Duvall's cop. He helps keep the barrio relatively peaceful, seeing to it that his Homes don't do much more than smoke some grass, do some crack, maybe boost things once in a while, and run up more than a dozen parking tickets. He keeps Duvall informed of what's up, while Duvall occasionally does him a favor in return. Trinidad Silva is fine in the role, but it's hard to tell how much range he had. (He's gone now.) He may have been a one-shot deal like Alfonso Bedoya, "Gold Hat" in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The production design is outstanding. This isn't downtown LA. Nobody drinks cocktails and lives in Malibu. These are seedy, shabby, desolate neighborhoods, alive with people in the way that some kitchen cabinets seem to be alive with cockroaches. And the graffiti is everywhere and in a multiplicity of form. Some is nicely organized into epic murals, if obvious. These are, after all, in the tradition of Diego Rivera and Jose Orozco, and David Siqueiros.
Maria Conchita Alonso, a Cuban singer, is pretty, vivacious, and dispensable. There is a black preacher, Troy Curvey, Jr., who mightily deplores the drugs and violence that affect the neighborhood. He and the audience at the funeral have the call-and-response pattern down pat. The ritual is interrupted by a drive-by machine gunning. There is one other drive-by shooting and one or two climactic shoot outs. As I said, this movie is commercially oriented.
Not as bad as I'd expected but I hope by now we don't really need this Introduction to Gang Warfare 101, not even in Deming. And, it's a little sad -- watching this, seeing the hills and the palms and the warm sunny climate -- I kept thinking of how tranquil and accommodating the Los Angeles basin was before the city got there. The Chumash Indians lived in nearby Santa Barbara. If you dig through their ancient garbage dumps, you find that they didn't change their way of life for more than three thousand years. Why should they? They had everything they needed. Now we couldn't do without a fleet of patrol cars, that palladium of civilization.