End of Watch

End of Watch directed and written by David Ayer, starring Jake Gyllenhaa, Michael Peña, Anna Kendrick, and Natalie Martinez.

Honestly I thought I was going to hate this movie.  It has the one thing I really don't like that many directors think is the only way to direct, and that is with hand held cameras and found footage.  So I went in prepared to not like this movie at all.  But I found myself enjoying this movie a lot.  It does the one thing most movies now-a-days seems to avoid at all costs, and that is it builds characters and actually develops them.  As this movie played out I found myself caring about these two guys more and more.  The conversations they had together as they patrolled their part of the city rang true with heart beats of honesty.  I don't know how much was improvised or scripted but it felt real and organic, nothing felt manufactured. 

The story line is simplistic in nature: it's about two guys patrolling their squad car through their assigned part of the city.  There are times the action of that patrolling is set aside for some views into their personal life as we get to know their wife and girlfriend.  All of that helps to establish them as characters and make us care about them.  There are few mishaps in the screenplay that I felt could have made this movie better.  Those mishaps happen when the action of a scene shifts from the two leads onto other gang members.  Narrative-wise this doesn't make sense because the opening of the movie is about how Gyllenhaa's character is going to film everything for a college class he's taking.  So by focusing on other areas where he's not present makes no narrative sense.  But I was willing to forgive this because I became really enthralled in the history, character, and relationship of the two leads.  The various episodes they find themselves into as their weeks and months patrolling made for some interesting scenarios as they find themselves going deeper and deeper into some areas they didn't mean to.  I think the screenplay would have been much stronger if it would have just focused on them for the whole movie.  Then the audience would have been as much in the dark about what was happening as they were, so when then got really bad the shock would have been more effective. I really liked how the little scenarios they found themselves in grew the over all story that started out small but slowly started to expand.  So much so that no one knew just how big a deal it was what they were doing until it was too late.  It was a good movie and worth watching.

This will be a rant, just so you're warned.  This is probably one of the best hand held camera directed movies I've seen, where the whole movie was directed with a hand held camera that didn't look like it was directed by someone freezing their butt off or someone with ADD.  Normally when the director uses a hand held camera there is so much shaking and jerky motion going on that I can't tell what is happening in the scene.  The scene becomes lost in a dizzy array of swinging motions where the action is all happening off screen, or the camera is so up close that all I can make out is a face or some part of the body that is doing something that I can't make out.  Everything becomes so cluttered and jumbled together that is doesn't so much resemble a movie as a really bad edited MTV video without the music.  And the whole production of the scene is lost because there is nothing visually to connect me to the scene but shakiness and unfocused energy.  But for some reason this kind of direction really gets the juices going for a lot of critics, who fell it helps to put them in the movie and makes them feel the intimacy of what is going on.  There's intimacy going on all right but I would put it in the instant gratification and masturbatory category rather than the communication category where all should be put.  The directors job (as is all writers and artists) is communication.  If they can't communicate with the audience then their is a problem their idea will get lost.  Unfortunately today, in dealing with all forms of media, interpretation has replaced communication.  The more vague and distant an artist is then the more wise and thought provoking their idea must be.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The more vague a distant their idea is means they have no idea what their trying to communicate, as they mask that ignorance with laziness.  Laziness has become the new medium most artist apply to their works because they are to lazy to try to establish their idea and actually communicate with their audience.  With End of Watch I never once felt lost in world Ayer presented to me.  He communicated with assured confidence and never let a scene become lost in the hand held camera world.  I always knew what was going on.  Unlike some films that masked their in-adequateness with miscommunication The Hunger Games,  Lost in Translation, and anything "directed" by Paul Greengrass, to name just a few.  I find it funny that these guys and girl use held hand camera with confusion, when Stanley Kubrick used it with great communication in 1971 (yes you read that right 1971) with A Clockwork Orange.  And he never let the scene or production get away from him with the hand held camera.  The audience always knew what was happening in every scene and got to see the production, which helped to establish the world he was creating as it communicated to the audience everything that was going on.