{"id":1245,"date":"2024-06-20T04:23:37","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T04:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/asphalt-city\/"},"modified":"2024-06-20T04:23:37","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T04:23:37","slug":"asphalt-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/asphalt-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Asphalt City"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may remember a scene in the cult classic \u201cRepo Man\u201d in which, during a high-speed auto repossession, Emilio Estevez exclaims, \u201cThis is intense,\u201d and Harry Dean Stanton laconically replies, \u201cRepo man\u2019s always intense.\u201d Same goes for being a big city paramedic, and you might not even need the movies to tell you that. \u201cAsphalt City,\u201d directed by Jean-Stephane Sauvaire from a script by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, adapting the 2008 novel Black Flies<\/em> by Shannon Burke, begins in the middle of a particularly fraught outer-boroughs NYC emergency medical intervention, as hapless, new-to-the-department Ollie (a fresh-faced but still beleaguered looking Tye Sheridan) tries to treat a gunshot victim after a housing project shootout. Screenwriters King and Brown don\u2019t overexert themselves concocting fresh-sounding dialogue; \u201cI\u2019m trying to do my f**king job here,\u201d \u201cfu**ing rookie\u201d and even \u201cI\u2019m getting too old for this s**t\u201d are heard on the busy, multi-channel soundtrack.<\/p>\n

Director Sauvaire likes to chronicle extreme life situations, and his style of sound and vision overload served him reasonably well in the boxing-in-a-Thai-prison punchfest \u201cA Prayer Before Dawn\u201d in 2018. That movie had an unusual narrative that kept it unusually buoyant. The story here is more familiar. <\/p>\n

You know the deal. You become a big-city paramedic to help people. But the people themselves are a nightmare! Not particularly into self-care, often living in squalor, they don\u2019t speak the language, and they don\u2019t even say thank you after you save their lives! It can get to be a real grind. Ollie doesn\u2019t help his own existential outlook by rooming in Chinatown with a couple of ancients, in order to save money while he studies for med school. He\u2019s also in an intense and arguably odd sexual relationship with a single mother with whom he doesn\u2019t communicate effectively, to say the least. <\/p>\n

A bigoted white male urbanite watching this movie might get a particular message\u2014and it\u2019s possible this isn\u2019t intentional, but still\u2014from its first half hour of emergency sequences. That message being, every ethnic group he finds frightening, he is correct in finding frightening. Hyped up Black kids with guns! Chunky shirtless Hispanic guys with gallons of ink on them messing around with pit bulls\u2014the mean kind, not the ones they\u2019re always telling you are safe for adoption! Heroin-addicted maybe-Filipino women spitting obscene invective for minutes on end in the back of an ambulance! It really IS a jungle out there! Holy moly! <\/p>\n

If Sheridan\u2019s Ollie has a hard time keeping his head above water, his good shift partner, the older, grizzled Rutovsky\u2014Rut for short\u2014seems to have things relatively figured out, at least at first. Played with commendable understatement by Sean Penn, Rut is not a total cynic after years on the force. He knows the moves, and has a pronounced sense of pragmatism, which leads him into very dark moral waters as the movie goes on. (Rut has an estranged partner played by Katherine Waterson, whose Expression of Disapproval shows her as a true chip off the old block, that is, her father Sam.) Michael Pitt, beefed up and puffy-faced and coming on like he wants to be in the next \u201cBoondock Saints\u201d movie, plays bad shift partner Lafontaine, and he has the worst lines in the movie: \u201cI don\u2019t know if I believe in Heaven but I believe in Hell,\u201d hoo boy, and, in case you weren\u2019t paying attention to that one, \u201cI ain\u2019t Jesus, I\u2019ll tell you that.\u201d On the other hand, Mike Tyson, as Ollie\u2019s gruff station chief, is so credible that the phrase \u201cstunt casting\u201d barely has a chance to form in one\u2019s head before completely dissipating. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may remember a scene in the cult classic \u201cRepo Man\u201d in which, during a high-speed auto repossession, Emilio Estevez exclaims, \u201cThis is intense,\u201d and Harry Dean Stanton laconically replies, \u201cRepo man\u2019s always intense.\u201d Same goes for being a big city paramedic, and you might not even need the movies to tell you that. \u201cAsphalt …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[45,37],"class_list":["post-1245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-drama","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1245\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}