A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise, the post-World War II-set "Gangster Squad" comes from the director of "Zombieland," Ruben Fleischer. It's clear Fleischer, who also made "30 Minutes or Less," hadn't worked through his "Zombieland" jones by the time he got to his latest film. I liked "Zombieland," which made a strong case for its brand of viscera and wisecracks. But "Gangster Squad" is a different sort of picture, or should be.
It's based partially on the real-life 1940s square-off between a secret cadre of Los Angeles Police Department officers and their mobster nemeses, led by the notorious Mickey Cohen. In the opening scene, Cohen, played with scowling Neanderthal relish by Sean Penn, oversees the murder of a soon-to-be-ex-associate. We're up in the Hollywood hills, just behind the sign that still reads "Hollywoodland." The man is pulled apart. In half. Maybe it happened in real life, and maybe it didn't, but launching your gangster picture on such a ridiculous note of bloody excess is certainly a risk. A misguided one.
Josh Brolin, better than his material, narrates this highly fanciful bash, which denounces its heroes' methods of payback even as it celebrates the cinematic possibilities of gun-related violence. With the blessing of LA's valiant police chief (Nick Nolte), Brolin's character, Sgt. John O'Mara, back from the war, assembles a team to take out Cohen, who has made LA his playground too long.
Ryan Gosling, who never really seems to be acting in any period other than 2013, plays the lady-killer copper who falls for Cohen's mistress (Emma Stone). Robert Patrick and Michael Pena play a double act brought into the project; Giovanni Ribisi worms around as the electronics ace in charge of bugging Cohen's digs and providing what little moral conscience "Gangster Squad" accommodates.
Some of these characters are based on the record, others are made up, and most of the dialogue is made of wood, befitting such rejoinders as: Let's give him "a permanent vacation in a pine box!" The template for "Gangster Squad," based on Paul Lieberman's nonfiction account and goosed up by screenwriter Will Beall, is clearly Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables," written by David Mamet. Good template; weak variation.
The original cut of "Gangster Squad" featured a movie theater massacre, which was taken out and rewritten and re-shot in another location. You don't really notice the lurch in continuity, because although "Gangster Squad" boasts swell art direction (I love the nightclubs, Slapsy Maxie's and Club Figaro), it's really just a series of gory, impersonal tit-for-tat revenge killings. Only Penn's line readings feel completely fresh. He may be made up to look like Big Boy Caprice in "Dick Tracy." He may be playing a copy of a copy of a movie stereotype. But like Brolin, Penn seems to be living and breathing convincingly in another time, another place.
The need for community engagement in the provision of public services is at a peak.Legislation demands it, stakeholders insist on it and citizen journalism drives it. Waste management often sits at the heart of the debate.
Consultation on emotive subjects such as waste is difficult and can be combative. Getting it wrong can at best lead to significant delays to a scheme and, at worst, such schemes collapsing.
What is needed is meaningful engagement rather than passive consultation. If public bodies and commercial developers can engage in a meaningful way with their communities and discover what their concerns really are, then resources can be more effectively targeted.
The first step in a successful engagement programme is to listen. The sheer volume of noise created by tweeting, blogging, posting and videoing can often drown out people’s real opinions. The key to understanding is the ability to combine information from a variety of sources, and to use those findings to address issues of importance.
Lord Toby Harris, formerly of Haringey Council, says: “When I was council leader, keeping my finger on the pulse of public opinion was a difficult and arduous task. With current Freedom of Information requirements, a method of trawling all internal information would be helpful. Even better would be trawling outside sources to see if the research findings are still valid six, 12 or 18 months on.”
There are now technologies emerging, including the Symfonix platform, where tweets, emails, comments and other digital media information can be combined with an organisation’s existing data such as meeting minutes, letters, and research reports, and then plotted on a map. Such systems can even analyse the sentiment, location and volume of debate on any given issue.
But understanding what is important remains a challenge. To know that thousands of people have tweeted about an issue is not particularly helpful - content and sentiment are critical.
By casting a net wide to include, for example, blogs, pressure group websites, local media and online communities, a more complete picture will emerge. Understand-ing opinion can be the difference between backing or backlash.
Real insight is achieved only when knowledge is gleaned from various information sets, by understanding the strengths and limitations of those sources and then combining knowledge pools.
It is vital for both the private and public sectors to engage when introducing waste management schemes, tune out background noise and focus on those conversations that really matter. Time and tools are factors, but the cost of not engaging will be far higher.
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