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DVD Tuesday: James Woods... Good/Bad/Psycho Cop
Cop box art courtesy MGM
DVD Tuesday: Good Cop/Bad Cop/Psycho Cop — James Woods is all three in this pre-L.A. Confidential James Ellroy thriller.
I was reading James Ellroy's Hollywood Nocturnes over the weekend and wondering why the success of L.A. Confidential (1997) did nothing to raise the profile of Cop (1988), a brutal little thriller based on his Blood on the Moon. I couldn't come up with a theory, but this week I decided to do my bit.
Cop opened with no fanfare, but I was already a James Woods fan (I don't think I even knew who Ellroy was back then), so I took a flyer on it and I was hooked from the credits sequence: black screen, two voices, a 911 operator and a guy reporting a murder. And it's grimly hilarious, because the good citizen is trying to pussyfoot around the fact that he's a burglar, trying to do the right thing while not admitting that his knowledge of the crime he's reporting was acquired mid-B&E.
Woods, who coproduced the film with director James B. Harris, plays LAPD detective Lloyd Hopkins, whom Ellroy eventually featured in three novels (it preceded Because the Night and Suicide Hill). Hopkins is sleazy, selfish, self-destructive, vice-ridden, obsessive, a rotten husband and a pathological authority-hater — exactly the kind of character the feral Woods excels at playing — but he's also a terrific cop, a devoted (if unorthodox) father and has a real thing about sadistic sociopaths who take out their screwed-upness on women.
He's the guy who gets the 911 case, which involves the brutal murder of a young woman. He's also the guy who connects her killing to a string of murders dating back 15 years, and connects all of them to a feminist poet (Lesley Ann Warren) who runs a small bookstore. I'll refrain from explaining more about the nature of the connection, but it's spectacularly twisted in the classic Ellroy way.
And Cop's abrupt, uncompromising ending is one of the all-time greats: I'll say only that, like the exploding-head sequence in David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981) — see my Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! column — it stunned a Times Square audience into dead silence.
The dark sense of humor established in the credits sequence is evident throughout, as is Ellroy's scathing contempt for righteous hypocrites and authentic familiarity with L.A.'s swamp neon slime. Cop doesn't deserve to be gathering dust in obscurity — check it out.
Things to consider:
How anti can an antihero be before he's contemptible?
How much is an actor — even an extremely talented one — pigeonholed by his or her looks? Could you ever really believe James Woods as a thoroughly nice guy?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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Nov 12, 2007 5:10 PM
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Interesting question about looks. When I was a kid I was convinced that Ed Begley (Sr.) was the scariest man alive-nothing but malevolence behind that off-putting rictus. At the same time I was always a huge fan of Jack Elam who was one of the scariest looking bad guys ever. At one time it would have been hard for me to accept Begley playing against type. While I'm sure he must have done so, I have only dim unformed memories of Begley playing a sympathetic part. It would be different now but as a kid I would have had a tough time looking at him that way.
Conversely, when Elam, a man with a face only a very near-sighted mother could love and who almost always played the most unrepentant of bad guys, just about broke my heart when, as the old lawman and one-time running buddy of Billy the Kid, he leaves the family dinner table to, resignedly, meet his fate in the form of a slug from the kid's pistol.
I don't know for sure but I would bet that other people had the same problem with Elam that I had with Begley and the parts they were given probably reflected a general unwillingness to see them out of type.
The way we see our stars has changed over the years, I think. Who now could imagine Edmund O'Brien or Edward Arnold getting the girl (at least not in an American film)? Or my favorite "huh" moment; beautiful Alexis Smith in Dive Bomber picking Fred MacMurray over Errol Flynn? Even having Flynn play the scientist and MacMurray the test pilot is jarring to modern sensibilities.
Few actors are more likeable than Forest Whitaker. You just want to root for him. He has a winning smile and a big lovable galoot aspect that make you immediately sympathetic. It is almost automatic for me to assume that by the fact of his being cast in a role that the film makers intend for me to look for something redeemable in him no matter what the character's actions. Yet Whitaker was a perfect obsessed sleazeball in his turn on TV's The Shield.
With Woods I tend to think just the opposite...that his being cast in a role means that we are supposed to look uponhim with some suspicion no matter how good his character's actions are.
But all the actors mentioned above were good enough to be believable playing against type-even Woods who, after seeing him interviewed several times, I have come to dislike so thoroughly that I can't watch him in anything anymore.
Film makers may resist it, and I think they are more likely to say "no" to the idea than the audience, but I think that if an actor is determined enough to break out of the mold and take parts that may not be above the marquee roles then he or she can make that break.
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Nov 13, 2007 2:38 AM
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I could totally see James Woods as a nice guy. No problem. Thing is... he seems to prefer darker characters or ones with ulterior motives.
Harry Dean Stanton plays the nice guy and the sleeze, and he isn't too much prettier than Jimmy!
I think the anti- in anti-hero is a gray area. But I feel that our sympathy disappears when they cross the line by doing things we never would.
In theory, I would never kill another. But I am not put into the very difficult circumstances that the movie script dictates. If we envision ourselves in that place and time, our perceptions of what is right and wrong become elastic and can change. Especially because it is a fantasy world.
But once the character does more than we think we would in similar circumstances, our empathy evaporates.
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Nov 13, 2007 12:05 PM
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