Street Kings

I'm currently updating my article on James Ellroy and just got done watching a bootleg of STREET KINGS. All I can say is, "Wow." That's not about the movie, though it was fairly good and far better than other Ellroy-based dreck like BLACK DAHLIA, DEEP BLUE, and BROWN'S REQUIEM. Rather, I'm agog about the marketing campaign of the film. The preview lead me to believe that Common and The Game were all over the film. This is a masterful bit of bait and switch. Despite Common being shown as one of the leads (check out the section of the preview that shows Common, Forest Whitaker, and Keanu Reeves in quick succession), he's in the film once (maybe twice). All of the close ups (including the horrible process shot of his face over a shot of a Los Angeles street) are culled from a solitary scene near the end of the film.

An urban tale to be sure, the preview/commercials portray STREET KINGS to be far more African American-centric than it truly was.