End of Watch

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

End of Watch  (A-).  I had heard that this cop movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Source Code) and Michael Pena (Babel) was good, but it was even better than I was expecting.  Gyllenhaal and Pena are Brian and Mike, a couple of ordinary cops in Los Angeles, and basically the movie plays like a documentary about life on the beat.  (Brian is supposedly filming stuff for a film class, but that has no bearing on the plot.)  I have no idea how accurate the movie is to real life, but it felt very real.  Brian and Mike aren’t sticklers for the rules, but they are plainly decent guys who enjoy being cops and who are good at their job.  Along with plenty of tense moments in the field, we also get to see glimpses of their personal lives, with Mike’s pregnant wife and Brian’s new girlfriend (an unexpected Anna Kendrick, 50/50).  America Ferrera leaves Ugly Betty far behind as another cop on the force who turns up from time to time.  Suspense begins to build as the two buddies unwittingly cross a drug cartel that is trying to solidify a base in south-central L.A., and by the end I was on the edge of my seat.  I thought it was a very interesting movie with some fine performances.  It’s not for the squeamish, but I highly recommend it.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

From the desk of The Movie Snob:

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (B). Recalling that this movie was well-reviewed and seeing that it was playing at the dollar theater, I decided it was time to get in touch with the 16-year-old girl within. Actually, it’s a pretty good movie, if a bit manipulative at times. Four best friends are going their separate ways for the summer for the first time in their lives, and shortly before they split up they find a seemingly magical pair of jeans that fits each of them perfectly. So they agree to mail the pants to each other on a weekly basis. But the movie actually rotates among the four more a little more quickly than that. In turn we see shy, withdrawn Lena (Alexis Bledel, Bride & Prejudice) come out of her shell on a beautiful Greek island (and with a hunky Greek); brassy Bridget (Blake Lively, The Shallows) sets her sights on a college-aged coach at a soccer camp in Mexico; Carmen (America Ferrera, End of Watch) goes to South Carolina to visit her dad, who walked out when she was ten; and acerbic Tibby (Amber Tamblyn, The Grudge 2) stays home to work in a retail store and work on her movie, a self-proclaimed “suckumentary.” I think the movie kind of went off the rails at the end, but overall not a bad coming-of-age flick.