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Crime + Punishment (2018)
An exposé of a system that rewards arrests above impact
I saw this film yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival.
It starts off a little slow, we're trying to figure out what exactly is happening, and the story takes a bit of time to get clear. However, by the end, the film is telling a powerful and clear story, and we're focused on the most compelling characters.
It traces two parallel stories-twelve NYPD officers who decide enough is enough and choose to speak up against a system rewarding police officers to make arrests, and the second story of a 17-year old boy who's one of these people arrested for a crime he didn't commit.
The story of the boy is painful to watch because he's held in prison at Rikers island for a whole year, because his family can't pay the bail. Part of the problem is the police system, but the other part is that bail, as it's designed, keeps people held in prison for crimes before there's a trial.
At the screening, we had the pleasure to have former NYPD officer Adhyl Polanco, one of the 12 officers who chose to speak out against the system, introduce the film and stay afterwards for questions. Adhyl relayed a very interesting story at the screening. He said he wanted to give up speaking out about the policy sometime earlier, like in 2012. The reason? The NYPD was retaliating against him in ways such as poor job performance reviews and being sent on more remedial assignments. He was going to throw in the towel. Then he gets a call from Frank Serpico, the famous NYPD officer in the late 1960's who exposed corruption in the NYPD. Serpico told him to hang in there. And he did. Adhyl ended up forming together with other police officers that became the NYPD 12, and found the policy of promotion based on number of arrests to be wrong, and formed together with other officers to publicly bring to light these problems. He's a hero, ever modest, and if you see the film, you might have a chance to meet him.
Credit to Stephen Maing. He's the unsung hero of the film. Shooting this over 4 years, Stephen clearly worked tirelessly to tell this story. It's not one that's easily forgotten, and it's a powerful story.
The film is like a real-life law and order. I know that sounds cheesy to say, but there's an element of suspense as you try to figure out how the trial is going to go for the 17-year old, as well as how the NYPD 12 will succeed or fail in their case. Their argument: this policy of encouraging arrests ends up hurting minority communities as officers are encouraged to go to "high-crime" neighborhoods to find someone to arrest to meet their monthly expected quota.
It's a poorly designed system that rewards arrests over impact, locking up people over helping people.
Retaliation is real and present in corporations, academia, any institution where someone speaks out and goes against the flow. It's easy to do nothing. Just go with the flow and you're your head down. I'd rather go down fighting then be a sheep.
You'd think that more officers would speak out, but only 12 were willing to put their careers on the line to do so. It's a shame more officers didn't, even though, as the film mentions, over 90% of officers believe there's a quota system in place to meet targets. Hopefully the film gets the system to change, and reward officers based on how the impact they make in their communities, instead of how many bodies they throw into a jail.
The problem is someone in the institution that is the NYPD got lazy and said, let's just promote people based on the number of arrests, doesn't matter if those arrests end up getting dismissed and we're arresting innocent people. It takes more effort to come up with a policy to measure impact, and these brass at the NYPD, like in many organizations, don't want to try to be creative to come up with a better system.
An independent board might help, that's something suggested in the film.
The NYPD would benefit from using an OKR system (Objectives and Key Results) that would align individual officers with a broader mission and allow officers to improve their motivations and set a high bar for everyone from the top to the bottom of the system.
Go see this film. You won't regret it.
The Cage Fighter (2017)
Sometimes you see a film that feels like it's fiction
Sometimes you see a film that feels like it's fiction, and then you discover at the end, it's true.
I remember sitting at the end seeing the end credits roll through and seeing the name "Joe Carman" and then the names of all of his four daughters all with the last name "Carman", and part of me couldn't accept that this film was real.
Joe is an amateur UFC fighter, who just turned 40 in the film. This film will appeal to anyone who's interested in mixed-martial arts and wants to see what goes on behind the flashy fights we see on Pay-per-view, what we don't see—the intense training before sunrise, the belittlement from coaches, the ups and downs of family life, and interesting hobbies of the fighters (Joe maintains a couple goats).
But the real story is the family story. Director Jeff Unay puts us into intimate spaces like the living room, the kitchen, and the doctor's office. He makes it feel shockingly close. He made us feel like we were in the cage during the fight. And in the audience of the fight. And in the bathroom after vomiting because we had just been punched in the gut. He shot this so well, it was ridiculous.
Joe's family wants him to quit fighting; they have trouble understanding why he continues to do it. Joe is conflicted himself – he deeply loves his family, but he can't stop putting himself and his health at risk, because of the feeling of independence he gets being in the ring, one on one, with a competitor.
It's not just Joe. Every character in this film is two people at once – Joe's wife is angry and resolute, and then she's troubled and scared. Some scenes with the daughters and you think it's the happiest family in the world. Other moments you think it's the most difficult family in the world. Opponents in the ring are portrayed as brutish mutes, and later in the film, we discover that they're kind and empathetic.
I couldn't believe that the people in this film weren't actors. I studied acting, and studied boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. These were ordinary people but they had extraordinary presence on screen, whether it was Joe's mom pleading with her aging husband to stop yelling at her 40-year old son, or Joe's teenage daughters fighting among themselves whether to confront dad or accept dad. In one scene, we see three of Joe's teenage daughters in a parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, arguing about whether or not to bring up at home the pain their dad's fighting was causing them. It was like Unay knew exactly where to be, exactly when to be there, and exactly when to focus the camera and when to zoom in.
Joe's captured rolling around in the grass with his daughters in a park, seconds later, he's beating the hell out of a punching bag on the ground at his training gym. You decide the type of man he is.
I saw this at the world premiere, and during the Q&A, one woman after a couple of questions had been asked, shouted out of turn at Joe and his family on stage, "Stop fighting!" Immediately afterwards, a man from a different part of the crowd, and there were some MMA guys in attendance, shouted, "Keep fighting". It was an awkward moment, not because they were both wrong, but because they were both right.
For anyone looking to understand why Joe does what he does, I recommend reading, "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" by Sebastian Junger, for answering what it means to be a warrior in the modern world.
There's also beautiful footage of the Pacific Northwest here so anyone from this region will be sure to enjoy that too.
Overall, I strongly recommend seeing this film. There's some aspects of it everyone will relate to, being passionate about something, having difficulties with one's families, and ultimately leaving us raw. 10 out of 10.
Boyhood (2014)
A massively ambitious project, but nowhere near the best film I've seen
There are three things about this film, which I saw yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival, that I didn't enjoy. First, Mason is boring. He plays an apathetic teenager. When Mason is with other people his age, like his high school girlfriend, the scenes are drawn out and tiresome. I found myself checking my watch for the time.
Mason's apathy becomes interesting only when we see the reactions from the adults in his life - his father stops the car on the way to a baseball game and asks his young children to share more details about their lives; later, Mason's high school photography teacher preaches to him about work ethic. These conversations are thrilling to behold as audience.
Secondly, the film is over-sexualized, a Hollywood exaggeration of real life. The mom's psychology teacher uses sexual attraction as an example when explaining Pavlov's famous dog experiment. At the end of the film, a colleague of Mason's mother, a woman more than twice his age, makes a sly comment about offering to "drop Mason off at college." The female dishwasher at Mason's first job at a restaurant tells him that "she won't kiss him, but she'll blow him." Do moments like this happen in real life? Sure. Do they happen with the frequency that Linklater suggest? No. As a result, the film's verisimilitude suffers.
Finally, the film's main characters don't give us a convincing display of nostalgia. In real life, time moves linearly but our memories are always reaching back. After a minor individual reappears in the film to thank Patricia Arquette for something she said that changed his life, she gives a blank stare. We don't see her mind buzzing, as we might see from a person who was racking her memory for who this stranger was and what she might have said. Furthermore, the camera cuts away from Patricia Arquette and presents the conversation to us at a mid-range distance. This is one of multiple instances where the film misses an opportunity to show characters reaching back into themselves for memories of scenes we saw earlier.
Despite these flaws, there were some truly brilliant things. Time passes very quickly in the film. This mirrors how many of us feel in our lives. The two hours and forty three minutes running time feels more like fifteen short films, each poignant and beautiful. People who are so important in our lives at one point in time - our teachers, our siblings, our parents, our roommates - are gone the next moment. This is beautifully done after Mason and his sister grow quite close to the children of his mother's new husband, only to never see them again after their mother leaves him.
The aging of Mason is obvious, the aging of his parents - played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke - is far more subtle and in my mind and far more powerful. It's not just their ability to act a new role. Patricia Arquette begins as an exasperated, high-energy young mother and ends as an almost zen-like woman full of wisdom with a steady job. Ethan Hawke brings tremendous energy to the film when we first see him, he's just returned from a year and a half in Alaska. By the end of the film, he's a suit and tie professional at an insurance company. The real actors grow older, mirroring the aging of their characters. We can tangibly see the energy drain out of Ethan Hawke's face with each passing year. This is unlike anything you've ever seen. It's subtle, but extremely powerful.
Overall, Boyhood is a massively ambitious project, and an enjoyable film, but nowhere near the top films I've ever seen. Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life", a similar coming of age story also set in Texas, was a work of art that appealed on many levels. Boyhood is not a spiritual journey. It's a genuine story, but it only moves in one direction. I think the film could have been more powerful had Linklater asked the characters to convey nostalgia for the younger versions of themselves. Such direction would have added a dimension to the film.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)
Emotional, Heart-Wrenching and Beautifully Shot Film
This is an extremely emotional film. I'm not one to tear-up, but I could simply not stop wiping tear after tear off my face throughout the film. Thomas Horn brilliantly, brilliantly plays the role of a 9-year old boy who cannot possibly understand why his father was taken away from him on the morning of September 11th.
Like any other 9-year old, Oskar Schell has tantrums, made all the more heart breaking knowing that he has lost his father for reasons that he is unable to comprehend or accept. He hurts himself, sometimes pinching so hard as to bruise his skin.
This film belong to Horn. He deeply affects the audience, as well as the characters around him. We see one man who can't stop giving hugs to Horn, and in another scene, a girl who lets Horn ride her horse and pecks him lightly on the cheek after expressing her sorrow for his loss.
We also see glimpses into the lives of dozens of different New Yorkers, as Horn goes on a journey from Fort Greene to Far Rockaway and up and down the island of Manhattan.
If you love New York and thinking about the stories from each of the 8 million people here, this movie will be a delight.
The shots of the city are wonderful. Not overly grand, but reliably familiar. We see Midtown from Sheep's Meadow, the brownstone apartments in Brooklyn and the train shuttling back and forth from the Rockaways.
Overall, I strongly recommend you see the film. Because each of us has coped with 9/11, this film stirs deep emotions. We witness Schell's struggle and it evokes our own struggles with the memory of that day.