Update 2019: Another viewing, and the sensibility of The Warriors intrigues me even more than last time. While Walter Hill’s film feigns late ’70s New Hollywood realism at times, it’s a mislabelling, and perhaps an intentionally teasing one. Rather than presuming access to the “reality” of the lives of these youthful characters, Hill creates a world out of time, a big, poisonous apple that animates its characters’ interior psychologies – their aspirations to stave off the doldrums of youth by abstracting their own identities and turning themselves into heroic caricatures – but seems to keep the protagonists at a melancholic remove. It’s as though the city is their playground, but it can’t be their home.
The excessively affected, even stilted milieu of the film stands totally at odds with the presumption that it will offer a ragged portrait of gritty street-level realism. Instead, Hill offers an effusion, perhaps, of the inner abstractions these characters use to authorize their own sense of play. The film’s poetic weave drops them into this world and characterizes them via their actions, not references to the lives external to the world the film has created; it offers no sense of what they might be doing when the camera is not upon them. The elegiac tone of the film traps the characters, suggesting, tragically, that these wayward youths are embalmed in a tableaux, locked into some eternal struggle, or one they imagine to be eternal, that seems to deny them a sense of life outside this caricature.
It is as if the film is aware that its flattening of emotion, the way it stages the characters in a predetermined theater, robs them of the ungovernable beauty of human spontaneity. This New York is a purgatory of riddles, conjured as a vampiric entity that Hill sketches with a disturbed, almost demented aura, sucking the characters’ possibilities dry even as it scaffolds their imaginations. This is the diametric opposite of a Cassavetes picture, in other words, but The Warriors leans into its limits, and thereby exposes them, and perhaps transforms them into a strength, a sorrowful portrait of characters who seem doomed to the fate that the world, and the film, has dealt them.
Original Review:
There are all manner of things to begin with when discussing Walter Hill’s vigorously urgent 1979 comic book dissection of youth culture (read: action movie focused on gangs in the inner city), but I will choose to begin as the film does: with its opening titles. Fading in on a stark, abstract image of the neon lights of a ferris wheel off in the distance, alighting the blackness with a sickly, neon-tinged purple spinning around, the image then cuts to a similarly stark, darkened shot of blue lights moving across the screen which soon reveal themselves to be the windows of a subway train. A train, a ferris wheel…everyday objects both, but the film distances them from us, suffuses them with an unholy aura, and elevates them with an alien quality, displacing them into a world we do not, and possibly can never know. It’s haunting, a shockingly mellow, plaintive, introspective opening gesture for what is by all means a surface-level blast of energy, but it signals the film’s eye for cinematographic abstraction and its fable-like, neo-classical texture where characters are less people than figures in an icon painting.
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Pacific Rim
End of Watch
Where-as most film series tend to decline in quality with age, time has been kind to Tom Cruise and his chosen cash-cow, the Mission Impossible films. While this 2011 entry lacks Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s deliciously bored villain, no small part of why III was the best entry in the series up to that point, it’s an improvement in just about every other way. Above all, and most surprisingly, it has a sense of humility. In its treatment of its characters less as too-kewl-for-school icons and more as confused, kinda-wacky cartoon personalities defined less by their self-serious gloom than much smaller, much more affecting and endearing character moments, it finally approaches a sense of identity for a series that often seemed happy-go-lucky to ape other franchises. This is a “big” film, but it doesn’t feel “big” in the way other blockbusters do – it has a lived-in quality, less about one man doing stunts than a team struggling to get along and admit they’re enjoying themselves while doing it (although it certainly has plenty of the former as well). At times, it even mocks the self-seriousness of other blockbuster franchises, and implicitly, itself in the process. It would appear what they say about looking back on your misfortune with a smirk is true. At the least, MIIV believes it is true, and it wants us to know it too. 
Star Trek is so light on its feet and cheerfully reckless it is almost impossible to dislike. Except that it does a whole lot worthy of disliking. This is a film wholly dedicated to lean, mean, efficient summer-blockbuster filmmaking. And if it is a decent entertainment for this reason, it sure isn’t interested in doing away with many of the flaws found in modern mainstream blockbusters. Yes, when it came out in 2009 it was the perfect fix for weary summer movie goers tired of sequels and superhero films, and, as the icing on the cake, it filled a void for Star Wars fanboys who couldn’t get over George Lucas’ recent efforts. Except…apparently what they wanted was a rather competent blockbuster so concerned with action it fails to concern itself with anything else. This achieves the rather depressing goal of creating a fairly solid and sturdy action extravaganza, while also somewhat sapping the film of most of its heart and soul. 
In my month-long look at British cinema, the one figure I could not even dream of avoiding wasn’t David Lean or Michael Powell (the nation’s two greatest filmmakers), but a big man known around the world in the smug, terse way he cannot help but introduce himself to everyone he meets: Bond, James Bond. In many ways, he is the modern pop-culture symbol of Britain, and he’s far more popular today, 52 years after his first cinematic outing, than his humble beginnings in 1962’s Dr. No would suggest. He, in a sense, personifies many things commonly associated with Britain, both the good (intellect, wit, sure-faced chill, dogged tenacity), the bad (misogyny, macho-post-colonialism, distant militaristic sense of a dehumanized and mechanized order hidden under aristocratic airs, dogged tenacity) and the both (smarminess, standoffish cool, dogged tenacity). Above all, he captures that sense of unending existence, that notion of always being there and recovering from whatever ails him, which Britain loves to see in itself. And plenty has gone wrong with the Bond series over the years, but as his films are wont to declare, Bond will always return. You just can’t keep a (maybe not so) good man down.
Watching Prometheus provokes more of a shrug than anything, but it’s not an entirely hopeless shrug. It misses the mark, but it’s reasonably entertaining in doing so, has at least one terrifying scene, and ponders big questions about the nature of the world and the relationship between science and religion. Thankfully, it doesn’t give easy answers either, but that comes off more as a result of not addressing the questions as much as it could have.
Fundamentally, I like The Raid more than the The Raid 2. The former film was more assured and confident in achieving its stated goals. It was lean, mean, efficient, and it boiled action filmmaking down to its brutal basics while elevating the genre to a ballet of human motion and brutality. It was about construction, form, filmmaking, and camera movement above any conception of character or narrative, and it was entirely aware of this.
The Long Take 