Women in Blue
I talked in my review of I Am Greta of the serendipity of the decision to film this teen's school strike and having it become a global sensation. Here we have someone set up a few years back to look at women in the Minneapolis Police Department but in this case unfortunately it was a series of unfortunate events that now suddenly put this film in a spotlight. At the start of the film you have a woman as Mayor and a woman as Police Chief. She has as one of her missions to promote more women and more reform-minded officers in general in her effort to improve. Unfortunately, policing is a cargo ship and does not turn quickly so more police-involved shootings happen and activists want their pelt. The result is the chief's resignation and a retrenchment of men.
There's a leftist joke structure that would say conservatives support police using excessive force and liberals support using excessive force provided half of the police doing so are women and minorities, but the stat mentioned here is that women really are significantly less likely to use force. I believe there may be some benefit in more minority officers. So scoff, but these efforts can matter. Further there's just a general sense where nothing has really been tried yet but people act like everything has failed and the only choice is to abolish the police. The chief here specifically talks about how her efforts to reform are heavily limited because she doesn't have any real authority to fire bad cops. So we get a bit of a mixed message here...on the one hand the activists are essential to hopefully creating the conditions where those changes can be made, but on the other hand, their demands to do something after every incident make it hard for reforms to take root.
In riding along with women in a variety of capacities, it offers some insight into the challenge presented, both as cops but especially for women on the force. The problem with gender-biased fields is that often they are self-enforcing not because they aren't able to do the job but because the environment makes it too much to put up with. Firing bad officers won't just help in how the police interact with the public, it'll make it easier to address bad internal politics as well.
The Comeback Trail
A hack producer (Robert DeNiro) is in rather dire straits when he hits upon an insurance scam idea ala The Producers to make some money, but in a rather more grim fashion. And like The Producers, things don't go quite as expected. It is an enjoyable enough venture with probably the best cast I'll get in the festival (Tommy Lee Jones, Morgan Freeman Emile Hirsch and Zach Braff present as well). What starts as an incredibly cynical and callous film collapses into schmaltzy magic of cinema navel-gazing that would make this a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination if it were actually good instead of find. I don't know if it was an intentional note or not, but this does feature one of the worst special effects I expect I'll see in this festival, even though it likely has a significantly higher budget than most.