Could fish really fall from the sky? Ben Singer (Broderick), the world’s most negative man, refuses to believe even the tiniest miracle is possible. He spends all his time fighting the corporate super organism, otherwise known as "The Man.” That fight becomes more personal when visions of "The Man” start to visit him in his small one bedroom apartment. When his roommate, Ibou, falls ill, Ben is forced to host his Senegalese sister, Khadi (Lathan). What starts as an awkward living arrangement soon turns into something more, and Ben's usual self-destructive nature gives way as he begins to find inspiration in the most unlikely of places. SourceMy take: No comment...LOL. The movie is in post-production and no release date has yet been set.
When the movie opens, the Mattsons are moving into a cul-de-sac of pleasant new homes in a development on the outskirts of Los Angeles. (The movie's title refers to the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where Rodney King was beaten by police in 1991, but the production was filmed in Walnut, 25 miles east of downtown.)
From the start, Turner, a 20-year LAPD veteran, doesn't like what he sees next door. Chris Mattson secretly smokes and leaves butts all over. But it's more what the Mattsons represent, rather than what they do, that makes Turner's blood boil. "It's a brave new world," Turner says to Chris at one point.
A single dad, Turner struggles to correct his kids' grammar and clothing choices -- his son has to take off a Kobe Bryant jersey because, in Turner's mind, Bryant's no longer on the right side of the law. As his roughhouse law enforcement techniques suggest, he's old school -- to a fault.
As a neighbor, Turner is vigilant to a disquieting degree. He has mounted retina-burning, motion-activated floodlights on his home's exterior walls and patrols the local streets with a gun tucked into his shorts. His daughter complains, "He has enough rules for two people."
For a while, though, he's not entirely unlikable; he's a law-and-order man facing a chaotic landscape. He's hardly an overt racist in the George Wallace mold; it's more that he prefers life as it was, rather than what it has become.
Having worked his way out of South-Central to the suburbs, Turner resents that his neighbors appear to be privileged rich kids handed a standard of living they didn't necessarily earn.
"I think a lot of people will watch this movie and agree with his point of view and see where he's coming from," Jackson said. When a secret is revealed late in the film about how Turner became a single dad, it becomes more understandable why Turner feels so hostile about mixed-race couples.
Executive producer Joe Pichirallo, who brought LaBute and playwright Howard Korder into the movie, explained: "The challenge was always to figure out how to portray him in a way that while you could question his methodology, you would not see him as all bad -- that he had legitimate grievances with his neighbors."
When his two children witness the Mattsons' having sex in their pool, Turner opens the hostilities. "That's not the sort of thing you'd ever want your kids to see," Jackson said. Source
Uhmmmm....so does this mean that Jackson's racist cop character is supposed to elicit sympathy in the viewer and we are to "understand" why he hates his "bad" neighbors ? I guess we'll see on September 19.
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