Training Day

Saw Training Day. A lot of movies are about wish fulfillment. Mobster/gangster movies often feed us the promise that by being smart we can become respected and feared, that we can become strong. Police movies peddle the dream that by merely being virtuous we are already strong. These two flatting viewpoints are excellently played against each other in this movie by the jackal-grinning Denzel Washington and the overgrown kid Ethan Hawke. Ultimately the movie comes down on one side about a half-hour to the end but until that point, it's almost perfect ambiguous which way it'll come out. Awesome. I wound up liking the film a lot more that I thought I would. I assumed the film would be a lot of macho posturing and frowns. There's a bit of that, but only enough to pass a cursory inspection. Not your average gangster or police movie.

I did think the closing lines, though cute, were stupid. Oh well.

Bonus barely-related trivia:

• This blog suddenly saw a whole mess of traffic from Russia that came from an obfuscated link source. Yeah, no.