Two minor recommendations:
Robinson Devor’s Police Beat follows a West-African-immigrant police officer as he bikes his rounds outside Seattle and obsesses about his potentially-straying girlfriend. Be warned: the film is less about forward motion than surreal, sideways development. We often cut jarringly into the middle of some oddball bit of mayhem or crime, without much explication before or after, perhaps echoing Z’s experience of cop life or of America. (A postscript to the film notes that all of the depicted mayhem is taken from the pages of the Seattle criminal record.) Not much is explained; even the central story of Z’s relationship is handled obliquely. But there’s something gripping about that oblique strategy, and the images throughout are never less than beautiful. Devor apparently did the preceding film The Woman Chaser, which Mauer loved yet remains unavailable on dvd, and the recent controversial Zoo. This is a fascinating small film, with rhythms and sensibilities I haven’t seen before, and would recommend–cautiously. It ain’t for everyone.
Takashi Miike’s television hostage drama The Negotiator probably suffers from being a bit TOO much for everyone. It is overlong, sometimes (well, fairly often) drags in extended fully-explicated dialogue, and isn’t going to dazzle or confound or offend the way much of his oeuvre will. (See my comments here, here (in comment 8), and here, for examples.)
But this film had two things going for it. One, Miike’s incapable of making a film without some lovely shots, and in this film he also fractures the storyline so that pieces of the puzzle emerge confusingly, a timeline for events only becoming crystal clear as the full import of events starts to cohere. And, two, that puzzle is actually pretty compelling and complicated — I’ve seen a lot of cop films, a lot of hostage films, and yet I found myself (after about an hour’s overlong set-up) really gripped and uncertain about what was going on. Worth seeing, if not absolutely worth seeking out.