The next time you're rolling around in a sea of Mountain Dew cans and
Burger King wrappers bemoaning your own obscurity, remember, at least
you're not Sylvester Stallone.
I've grown to love him, but there was a time--for a lot of us, I
think--when having his name attached to a movie was a sure sign of
something I ought to avoid like refried poison. But blind prejudice
has its perks. Once you find out what you've been missing out on, you
get to go back and discover all the things your past self rejected out
of hand. Prime example, and this week's entry for Cop Month: 1997's
Cop Land.
In the sleepy Jersey suburb where NYPD officer Harvey Keitel and many
of his precinct live, sheriff Stallone is supposed to turn a blind eye
to their local wrongdoing. But when a coverup for Keitel's nephew
involves fake deaths, a visit from internal affairs officer Robert De
Niro, and mob violence, Stallone finally prepares to take a stand.
It was a real shock to me when I watched Rocky for the first
time a few years back and discovered Stallone doing something I'd
never seen him try before: acting. In Cop Land, he's
successfully cast against type as a pushover and a loser, a guy who
couldn't win over Annabella Sciorra even after he saved her life,
which a) I think is pretty disrespectful and b) means I should
probably rethink my plans to find a wife by camping out under the 240
and littering the overpass with banana peels.
Then again, maybe Stallone just got into a crazy act-off with the rest
of the cast. Cop Land's billing is as stacked as the Yankees
lineup: along with De Niro and Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert Patrick, and
Janeane Garofalo pitch in. Never thought I'd say this, but none of
them quite match up to Stallone.
Better yet, writer/director James Mangold knows what to do with them,
building a tangled world of big-city corruption around small-town
relationships that carry the weight of years spent hanging around the
same diners and bars together.
It makes for an air of quiet menace that reminds me of a lot of the
great California noir. Then, like those, it boils over, dousing the
town in hot steamy crime and driving Stallone on a lonely but
triumphant crusade against it in an echo (or, since this happened
first, a reverse echo) of Mangold's recent 3:10 to Yuma. Cop
Land is one of the surprises of my movie-watching career, a piece
I expected to be trash but which ended up a minor treasure.
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'One for the Money'
'One for the Money'
On today's edition of "Smart Women, Stupid Choices": Katherine Heigl! She left a halfway decent medical soap opera for a string of increasingly mediocre, decreasingly romantic "comedies" pairing her with increasingly bland leading men.
'Real Steel' rocky sock 'em robots
'Real Steel' rocky sock 'em robots
Here’s the premise. Set in the near future, Hugh Jackman is a loser robot boxer working fairs and rodeos with a robot destined for the scrap heap.
More con than kind, Jackman’s Charlie ends up signing the parental rights of his son, Max, over to the boy’s mother’s rich sister to finance his endeavors. He’s estranged from the boy anyway and doesn’t know him at all.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Noisy dogs
Noisy dogs
I've lived in a neighborhood in Kennewick for about 15 years now. Not one day of any of those years has been very peaceful due to neighbors letting their dogs bark all hours of the day or night, at anything. By golly when they go out to have their morning smoke or cough up their last one, Rover is right there to bark the day to life. These fine neighbors emerge from their slumber anywhere between 5:30 and 8 a.m. No matter what time we have our alarms set for, too bad, it's time to get up. Rover says so, all day long while their "masters" are out doing their "thing."
There have always been one or two who don't get it. I've left nasty-grams on their doors, screamed at them and their dogs in my jammies, threatened to call the cops, all to no avail. I'm left wondering which is the stupider species.
Please, inconsiderate neighbors, give the rest of us a break. Stop letting your stupid dogs out to bark all day until you return from wherever. Put a shock collar on them if they can't keep quiet. I don't work "
Fast Focus: Raise taxes to balance state budget? Finding a way
Fast Focus: Raise taxes to balance state budget? Finding a way
There's only one tax that is fair to everyone and that is sales tax. It's paid by everyone who purchases anything so that rich or poor are taxed the same.
The one thing that is exempt from sales tax is food. What about putting that tax back on?
Raising taxes now is a cop-out. Last week's Fast Focus about the school buses -- some of the opinions were right on. When I attended high school, I lived across town, but the city buses were available and I took that to school -- there were no "school buses" for kids in town even if you were several miles away from your school. You walked or took the city bus. I would have to recommend it if it would mean saving the state a considerable amount of money.
Fast Focus: Finding a way
Fast Focus: Finding a way
There's only one tax that is fair to everyone and that is sales tax. It's paid by everyone who purchases anything so that rich or poor are taxed the same.
The one thing that is exempt from sales tax is food. What about putting that tax back on?
Raising taxes now is a cop-out. Last week's Fast Focus about the school buses -- some of the opinions were right on. When I attended high school, I lived across town, but the city buses were available and I took that to school -- there were no "school buses" for kids in town even if you were several miles away from your school. You walked or took the city bus. I would have to recommend it if it would mean saving the state a considerable amount of money.
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