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Mr. Beaks Assumes The Position For NARC!!
Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I love this movie. I wish I could have been at the premiere Sunday night, but I was chained here to the desk at the Labs, working. Lucky Beaks. Lucky, lucky Beaks.
NARC (w. & d. Joe Carnahan)
Before NARC blasts out of the blocks at a literal full sprint, the film pauses briefly to capture a tortured-looking Detective Nick Tellis braving the cruel, mid-winter winds slicing off of the Detroit River. Though he’s yet to be introduced to the audience, his suffering is not only palpable, but textured – embodied by the expressive brilliance of Jason Patric, as criminally underused an actor as there may be not-working-enough today. Absent from the big screen since 1998’s YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, Patric’s ability to evoke despair through those piercing blue eyes so inexplicably full of sadness and regret has not left him. It’s a great moment demonstrating how clearly the film’s writer and director, Joe Carnahan, gets character.
Then again, Joe Carnahan apparently gets cinema; how else could one explain this stunningly brilliant sophomore effort that so ferociously jumps off the screen in even its quietest moments? A follow-up to his Rodriguez-budgeted BLOOD, GUTS, BULLETS & OCTANE, Carnahan has clearly ingested a steady diet of uncut Friedkin, Ferrara and Stone, among other practitioners of high velocity filmmaking; however, stripped down entirely of its sturm und drang, NARC is essentially a classically structured crime melodrama with a straightforward plot owing largely to the great police corruption dramas of Sidney Lumet. But while Carnahan has reinvigorated the genre with a stroke-inducing shot of adrenaline, he’s retained the 70’s-era filmmaking icon’s generosity with his actors, resulting in a pair of lead performances from Patric and Ray Liotta that rank among the best work of their careers.
Patric’s Tellis is a disgraced undercover narcotics officer being groomed to rejoin the department to help close the slaying case of Michael Calvess, a fellow narc killed in the line of duty. Still recovering from the psychic scarring of the incident that put him on hiatus (and depicted in the energetically shot, graphically violent opening that kicks off the film), Tellis yearns to leave the streets behind for a desk job, where he can collect a paycheck and be a regular husband and father to his wife and ten-month old son. When this Shangri-La is dangled in front of him, dependent upon the arrest and conviction of those responsible for Calvess’s murder, Tellis takes the assignment, but with the following condition of his own: Calvess’s superior and friend, Lt. Henry Oak (Liotta), must come on board as his partner.
First glimpsed working over an abusive husband via the always persuasive sock-and-pool-ball combo, Liotta’s Oak is introduced as a phenomenally successful detective forever on the verge of an Internal Affairs investigation, which understandably renders him suspicious of his sudden reinstatement onto the Calvess case at Tellis’s behest. Oak comes right at Tellis with his concerns in a moodily staged mutual inquest over a cup of coffee at a dingy, dimly lit diner that allows both men to get a bead on each other’s intentions and, most importantly, character. Illuminated solely by a dangling overhead lamp, Carnahan sticks with static over-the-shoulder angles, resisting the urge to emulate Mann’s classic De Niro/Pacino face-off in HEAT, and allowing Patric and Liotta the space to fill in the emotional blanks, expressing with each line reading and reaction a remarkable degree of psychological information even when the exchanges are tentative and, in Tellis’s case, less than forthcoming.
This simple, unfussy sequence is immediately followed by the film’s most brazen cinematic gambit. Returning home from his tête-à -tête with Oak, Tellis slips under the covers next to his wife, who knows she’s about to lose her emotionally fragile husband to the job one more time. As Tellis falls asleep next to his wife and child, Carnahan shrinks and splits the screen, contrasting this tenuous marital situation with scenes of the newly reinstated officer hitting the streets with Oak, shaking down informants for leads. Eventually, these squares of activity move to the corner of the screen and multiply; suddenly, it’s the ol’ Figgis Quadrant, but with an actual, organic purpose: to depict the widening chasm between Tellis’s personal and professional life.
As their investigation lurches forward, Tellis immerses himself deeper and deeper into Calvess’s life, drawing alarming parallels between the deceased officer’s predicament and his own. But recognizing these similarities and acting on them are two wildly different things, and Tellis is too far gone to see his own impending familial disaster. Staring for hours at the crime scene photographs of the freshly murdered Calvess, Tellis develops a hunch that the slain officer might have also hovered too closely above the narcotics flame, and likewise submitted to their destructive seduction. As he begins to dig internally, Tellis unexpectedly runs into blocked files and, most suspiciously, finds Lt. Oak unwilling to follow up potentially damaging leads, including possible police corruption when they stumble upon a SWAT rifle in a dead perp’s apartment. Is Oak knowingly ignoring evidence that Calvess was dirty? Or, more disturbingly, is Oak only involved in this investigation to cover up his own involvement in his protégé’s death?
As the intense, bullying Oak, Liotta has summoned the menace of his earlier malevolent turns in SOMETHING WILD and UNLAWFUL ENTRY, and infused it with his calmly paternal work in BLOW. Physically, the performance is a revelation; Liotta has never been this hulking before, and he uses this newfound bulk to scarily intimidating effect. He’s also blessed with Carnahan’s best monologue, a heartbreaking rumination about how his wife’s death made him a better cop, and what doing his job means to him now. Delivered inside a car during a stakeout, Carnahan places the camera outside of the automobile, slowly circling around to the windshield as snow flakes periodically float into frame, beautifully evoking Oak’s chilly sense of emotional isolation. It’s a wonderful instance of a director and actor’s craft dovetailing to achieve something almost holy.
This same symbiosis is present with Carnahan and Patric, though the tightrope walk here is doubly precarious. Perhaps because he’s repeatedly and, most likely, intentionally sabotaged his several opportunities for genuine stardom, Patric has always had trouble connecting with audiences, which is probably why his most fondly recalled performance to date is his creepy work as the predatory misanthrope in Neil La Bute’s YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS. What’s so wonderful about NARC is that Patric has finally found a film gripping enough to offset his withdrawn, somewhat remote charm (and I use that term loosely). The shadings he brings to the tragically sympathetic Tellis are deftly drawn, and though the character is a bit of an open wound, Patric resists the urge to emote, letting those eyes do a good deal of expressing all on their own. A marvel of subtlety and range, Patric’s is the single best performance I’ve seen all year.
So when these actors are seated in the Kodak Theater next March as Academy Award nominees, they’d better be thanking the supreme deity of their choice for ever running across Joe Carnahan, one of the few recent Sundance discoveries who actually translates to lower altitudes. For a burgeoning, second-time filmmaker to display such a command of the filmic vocabulary is not entirely unheard of; Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher, to cite the few recent examples, showed this level of proficiency, too. I’d gladly place Carnahan in their vaunted company. He’s a keeper.
Faithfully submitted,
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I won't be the only one making the comparison. Patric played a strung-out undercover narc already to great effect in Rush (a film criminally forgotten nowadays). However, Narc also sounds really solid with Liotta along for the ride. An earlier super-long trailer for Narc was online and gave the whole plot away. I guess that's why it's been 86'ed. After Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane I thought we'd never hear from Mel Carnahan again and I wasn't too broken up about it, but maybe he went and got his shit together to make a decent film.
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I really enjoyed him in "Sleepers," and I guess there are obvious comparisons to be made between his character in this film and his drug-addled Raynor in "Rush." By the way, whatever happened to that "Three Days of Rain" or whatever it was called that was based on Chekov? Was that ever released?
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Because no one on this site writes with such prose and articulation as this guy. Its odorus emination is of something green and stuck in the ground....
Like a plant. -
I have to point out that Carnahan is from Sacramento, CA and I always have to remind people how we do it out here on the westside. This movie is gonna own.
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Oct 08, 2002 1:48:18 PM CDT
Jesus! NARC?!? I want X2 news! I'll even settle for Matrix:
by man_of_kerioth
What the fuck is wrong with this site recently? There hasn't been ANYTHING noteworthy for well over a week (except for that kick-ass LOTR: TTT trailer, but that wasn't exactly an AICN exclusive, was it?).
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I'm definately checkin' this one out.
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Plants haven't written over 35 articles for AICN. Beaks is a great writer and I can only hope one day I'll come close to his quality of work.
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Gonna check it out soon as I can get my grubby fingers on it. Can someone tell me if it was shot on video or not? 7300 budget for 16 is impressive, a la Rodriguez. 7300 for any kind of video isn't nearly as interesting. I'll check it out either way, just curious.
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Mr Beaks gives want to give the director head or jason patric?
"shadings of character"?
who are you? some film school reject? -
He's got more passion and talent than anyone in Talkback, including myself. Plus, the guy took it from a gorilla and survived. Remember, he'll rip out your eyes and piss on your brain. NO MORE GODDAMN JERKY BEEF!
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is there no pleasing some people "beaks is a plant" "beaks gives the director head" "who cares about this shit give us more Matrix" That's what is great about this site, it isn't just comic book new or just Tan and A action adventrue crap. It's a combination of indie, high budget, genre and mainstream films. This site is based on a love of films and if you don't like it, you don't have to visit this site. My word some of you bitches are picky. And I know that maybe some of you are just trying to 'talkback' i.e. make jokes, slam the reviewer, etc. But if you are it's a pisspoor attempt. See the Mega Madonnafan review for that...that's true 'talkbacking' But anyways...moving on to NARC, sounds espically good...hope I get to see it.
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For the love of Lucifer, you people accuse EVERYONE of being a plant. It's really sad. Next you'll be saying Harry's a pla-
Oh wait...never mind. -
You can read his review at thehotbutton.com for monday oct 7. This one is going on my Must See list which is getting way too big over the coming months "Too many good movies, too little time"
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After reading this review, you'd think NARC was the next Citizen Kane. Settle down.
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Who knew there were so many snippy former pro athletes hanging around in talk back?
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Sounds like a really good flick!
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Sounds like a really good flick!
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Interesting... truly, interesting. Does he get laser vision as well? Able to leap tall fax machines in a single twirl of the pen?
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It's one thing claiming to have seen a movie you haven't seen. It's another altogether stealing someone else's review and claiming it as your own. This review is an almost word for word copy of the review posted last week at Hollywood Bitchslap.com.
God, at least credit the original writer before you steal from them shamelessly. -
maybe not quite word for word but let's take a close look. narc review comes out on efilm early oct. a full two months before the release, then coincidence, here comes aicn review. efilm critic review mentions Michael cimino's Deer Hunter and intense opening scene. Aicn mentions intense opening scene and directors from the 70's. Efilmcritic mentions the split screen sequence, aicn news same sequence, efilmcritic mentions best work of actors careers, aicn same. Efilmcritic mentions Requiem for A dream, guess who mentions Requiem for A Dream. Efilmcritc predicts Oscar wins for Liotta, guess who predicts Oscar win. Finally, efilmcritic mentions Oliver Stone and says director Carnahan has moved into category of best directors US has to offer. Guess what aicn said. A little too close for comfort in my opinion especially considering the timing. The film's not due for months. Hmmmmmm!
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