How do you make a film if it has, in fact, already been made? This, I think, it the main difficulty which Triple 9 runs into. It’s good, it’s very good. And, everywhere, it’s haunted by Heat. 

Michael Mann’s movie is seminal: a fin-de-millennium classic which summed up everything that blockbuster Hollywood could offer a constellatory twin legacy of Italian American acting, whose stars had been ascending in parallel since they broke onto the scene together in the late 1960s. Everyone’s still talking about that mythological restaurant scene between De Niro and Pacino (just see Tom Hiddleston gushing out his duologue imitation on The Graham Norton Show). The riff-y, partially ad-libbed sequence which united two titans on screen together for the first time is now a bona fide piece of cinema history. It wouldn’t be nearly so iconic if it wasn’t for its place within the larger framework of a finely-tuned heist thriller, where Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight and a pre-teenage Natalie Portman supply ample heavyweight acting chops in support of the two stars; and the third protagonist of the movie is L.A. herself, transformed into an impressionistic metropolis, which is by turns a seedy vortex of crime or a beautiful canvas of hazy West Coast romanticism. The polarity of the two — the pragmatic cop’s end-of-the-century pit of decadence versus the aspirational thief’s glitteringly optimistic horizons — is what creates such a compellingly balanced cinematic playground for Mann to weave his magic within. Dissolving the divide between what constitutes bad and good guy, Heat gives its audience two champs to root for. De Niro’s Neil McCauley is a loyal disciplinarian, who might have been primus inter pares in any profession except he chose crookery; Pacino’s Detective Hanna is the last of a rare and raw breed of maverick, ideologically bruised but still (for reasons only known to his own traumatised psyche) scrambling to save his city from vice and violence. 

I say all this only to point out the monumental task which Triple 9 undertakes, angling to be considered a work with gravitas in a genre where nearly all attempts since 1995 have been duds. There was, admittedly, another strong a strong play for icon status in 2006, when Spike Lee (otherwise of a slightly more avant-garde inclination) gave blockbuster a go, and released Inside Man, which pitted a top-game Denzel Washington against a criminally underrated Clive Owen. Inside Man takes the futurist glamour of Heat and sends it inwards while revving it up — the film, instead of ruminating around the vistas of the City of Lights in wide aspect, gets caught in the claustrophobia of New York’s vertical lines. It precisely choreographs its action to the relentlessness of post-millennial Wall Street fervour. Still glitz, still glam, but a with a whole new kind of spatiality and tension. And yet, strong contender though it is, Inside Man just fails to match Heat‘s brand of cool. Once established, it seems the president of any genre is very hard to topple. 

Different times, different philosophies. That’s what Triple 9‘s director Jonathan Hillcoat gets so, so right, and what helps propel 2016’s offering to the genre out from the dirge of banality that has been clasped around the genre since the early noughties. Back then, pre-2008, the boom spirit in Hollywood was hegemonic, and the greats could afford to be cinematographically slick. Even the bleaker downtown scenes of Heat are warped by vaguely hyperreal strobe illuminations, casting everything in the comforting, fictionalising cushion of backlit, soft-core neo-noir.

Nowadays, the context’s different. The conditions of production are guided by a world which seems less satisfied with glamour than it did before, a world which keeps pressuring filmmakers to ask different, more invasive, more nuanced questions; a world which insists Hollywood should look at what’s ugly and messy and catastrophic with unfiltered vision. 

Bearing that in mind, Hillcoat takes what he does best — violence (see Lawless) — and he shoves it into a genre which bears out an aesthetics of scum surprisingly well. There’s heaps of action (some of the journalists sitting beside me in the preview said, too much action), fine-tuned to a ballet of gunfire and bloodshed; the mess never lets up. Everything propels towards chaos, towards death. What’s more, there’s no blurring the boundary between good and bad. The boundary’s more or less shoved to the side, in a story where everybody appears to be pretty damn awful. This is a tale where the cops aren’t just dirty; the bureaucracy itself is a cesspit, its infrastructure riddled with rats, moles, and guys who’re taking in just enough illegitimate cash to turn a blind eye. 

Against this backdrop, Michael (Chitewel Ejiofor) just can’t disentangle his crew of thieves from the whims of an Israeli-Jewish mafia queen, who’s played with career-defying chutzpah by a ruthlessly amoral Kate Winslet. Winslet, an excellent actress who is rarely asked to step outside of her cerebral-cookie comfort zone, has fun with this. She frosts her performance with a squeeze of icy glamour and plays things up with a flicker of theatrical eccentricity; the kind which only actors who specialise in understated nuance can pull off well. Winslet’s Irina has a complicated hold over Michael: her sister’s son is Michael’s child. It’s leverage she uses to her advantage, but she’s also unafraid to twist the fear of God into his crew with the occasional fatal warning. That crew, incidentally, comprises two active members of the police force (Marcus played by Anthony Mackie, and Rodriguez, played by Clifton Collins Jnr) and one ex-cop (Gabe, played by Aaron Paul). These are the same crooks who hold up banks only to visit them as a crime scene, flashing their badges, less than half an hour later. At stake aren’t souls and integrity, but things which must be held accountable to a much swifter and less forgiving pace: the objectives here are money and survival. As Woody Harrelson’s alcoholic police captain Jeffrey Allen advocates in a slurred, bleak apothegm to his nephew, played by Casey Affleck (Chris, the only character who seems resistant to the avalanche of corruption going on in this part of town): “out-monster the monster and get home by the end of the night.” 

Harrelson, as the depressive copper, loyal to his family and, vaguely, to the idea of law enforcement as a social necessity, but otherwise spiralling into the depths of his own substance abuse, gives a great turn in this movie. He’s been having quite the couple of years, and it’s nice to see an actor come into his own so excellently via middle age. Jeffrey Allen, it appears, is the comic book sketch of the American WASP’s reality: not so much the fantastic urban bachelor as a crumbling man on the ledge of his own sanity. Affleck is always underrated — in Hollywood terms, he and his big brother (Ben) chart the same dynamic as taciturn poet versus high school football captain — but he has a low-key talent which injects most parts he plays with an appealing level of cool. Here, he makes his own of a role that was originally intended for Shia Lebouf (the star of Hillcoat’s Lawless); one can imagine the tone of the whole film being strikingly different if that first casting had occurred, but personally I see Affleck’s addition to the cast as a welcome one. He manages to play the character as someone who genuinely wants to do good without being anything so icky and useless as a “do-gooder”, and it’s not too difficult to envisage that this part in the wrong hands would have turned it into some kind of Zodiac-era Jake Gyllenhaal, boy-scout-lost-in-the-woods type of thing. Great for that film; terrible (probably) for this. Affleck, with his laconically endearing looks and the permanent ghost of trouble behind his eyes, puts his “the cool brother” status to full use. Besides, he may be the good guy of this movie, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find him turning an almost-blind eye to a smattering of cop brutality in the dirtiest dive bar in town.  

Amoral, backstreet Atlanta — that’s the setting for this film. Roadsides roll out and they look like they got trapped in a Depression-era dustbowl. A tawny heat, captured by simmering cinematography, steams up the squalor of abandoned junkie houses; this is a toxic suburbia overrun with bitterness, distrust, inter-tribal tension, and guns. Unspoken laws rule, with transgressions punishable by death. Hillcoat takes no prisoners when it comes to smearing the film in flourishes of casual gore — a row of severed heads decorating a car windscreen, anyone? — or suggesting imminent atrocity is everyday — like a baby lying between a target and twenty pointed rifles; but you get the feeling that the movie, though steeped in reeling chaos, has a noble quest at its core. It’s searching for something that can account for the diasporic intersection of various American identities; for a vision of, if not an answer to, generationally-cumulated poverty and the complex sociopolitical issues which pulse away beneath the stats for every gun death or minority put in jail. Does it find what it’s looking for? Well, no, not exactly, but I don’t think it’s the answer that’s the main thing at stake so much as the process. This is an action film without a heart, but with what springs up in place of a heart: an angry, blistering energy, hurtling constantly towards zero. 

The shape of Triple 9 is ontologically tangly, zoning in on the messy matrixes of power which erupt in urban centres, and struggling against time to show how alliances must shift and bend to suit minute-by-minute street-side situations. It doesn’t get the benefit of a 2+ hour run, given that post-millennial filmmaking has typically been hostile to a languid structure; pity, because the complexity of plot here means we lose the chance to flesh some characters out in backstory, reverting to a shorthand of having them summed up in a fleeting snippet of behaviour or a few brief lines. Still, the performers, who are all strong — who are all committed to being “actors’ actors”, so to speak — bring their A-game, colouring what shortage of material they have with as much as they’ve got. Two heist sequences bookend the film, bracketing it structurally within a masquerade of order to contain the chaos between. That, too, is the obsession of the lens: tiny details. Architecture and bank vaults, tower blocks and safety deposit boxes — the occasional flash of regimented order, of rectangles and lines, provides the odd suggestion for film aestheticians to salivate over, as the Atlantan metropolis futilely attempts to pull the insanity of blood and consequence back from the brink. It’s a kind of deception, and it puts a half-glossy veneer over these depths of hell. Atlanta, land of cops and crooks? Enter at risk. Here be monsters.

On Shingle Street The summer’s sweet, The stones are flat, The pebbles neat And there’s less rip Where tides are neap. It’s fine to swim, or fine to try But when the sea runs fast and high The skies turn black and cormorants weep Best watch your step on Shingle Street. –Blake Morrison

The coast has always held a fascinations for us: as an island nation, we are always conscious that out there, across the sea, is a world of elsewheres. It’s as old as the Vikings and Saxons arriving in Britain from the mysterious North over a thousand years ago, and as current as the trend for ‘self-discovery’ on gap years to exotic locations in South-East Asia.

This captivation is expressed beautifully in the so-called theme of ‘poetry from the edge’ – writings on the coast, its otherworldly landscapes. We’ve all had those murky holiday afternoons where the beach seems to swallow us up and the dunes seem endless and labyrinthine – here we see this explored on the page. The boundaries of this literature are shaky at best – does the term ‘edge’ purely refer to the coast, or can it be other landmarks? Can it be internalised, mental borders? Considered this way, the genre becomes, ironically, endless.

Blake Morrison is a rare exception to this lose collection of poetic writings – terse, direct and incredibly rhythmic, his writings mirror the wash and swash of the sea tides: when his poems are read you get the urge to read them aloud, and the coastal sand seems almost to seep in between your toes. There’s no stuffy, dry John Masefield ‘I must go down to the sea’ here – it is all brutality and bare emptiness. And that’s what the coast is: it promises at the same time the allure of exotic elsewheres, and the sparseness of borders.

Britishness is so much more than double-decker busses and drinking tea. My fiancé, Richard, and I came here for our Master’s degrees. Having lived in Ireland for five months, we thought we knew what it would be like. We had traveled to Scotland and England, they seemed pretty similar, right?

Wrong. Both of us were born and raised in California and the UK is pretty alien to our accustomed way of being. Besides driving on the wrong side of the street and not stopping for pedestrians, there are many other aspects of British life that we were unaccustomed to. In my Creative Writing program, many interesting conversations arise from these incongruencies. Pants are apparently called trousers. Colorful pants are called chinos if they aren’t jeans material. And, of course, punctuation comes up a lot, from the Oxford comma to what is considered clichéd to nitpicky things, like is it downstairs or downstairs? But it is the stratification of class in every aspect of life that is really foreign.

One of my classmates said about their story, “I chose those names on purpose because they are lower-class, but I’m writing about middle class people.” He said he wanted advice on how to write a story without the class differences – my bewildered response? “Just write a story…” Similarly, when I asked what a ‘posh’ last name would be, I was immediately informed that Harrington-Smythe would be perfect. “You have to have a dashed name, the first one longer. Smythe is upper class of Smith,” I was instantly informed. It seems ingrained in my classmates’ way of life, permeated through the culture from names to grocery stores.

Richard and I are both vegetarian, I am gluten free, and he is dairy free – so naturally we have to shop at every grocery store to get all the things on our list. As Americans, we are practically trained to go for the good deal; if carrots taste better at M&S we get them there, if bell peppers are cheaper at Tesco, no problem. We don’t consider ourselves posh for wanting a free coffee every day from Waitrose. And all of these stores seem practically the same to our eyes. But from a British perspective, there is a distinction. Richard’s teachers in the business programme talk about this a lot. You have to know your customer, build your brand. One of class does not shop at Primark, and M&S and Waitrose are the only grocery stores to be affiliated with.

Fashion is another aspect that I’m sure class touches, though I am too distant to really understand it here. To me, the men with styled hair, tight pants, nice coats, and artful scarves are above and beyond what most men back home wear on a day to day basis. They all smoke like movie stars, rolling their own cigarettes in a well-practised movement. And when we lived in Ireland, the guys all wore sweats and sneakers. Pants and fancy shoes were for ‘going out.’ Through these transitions, Richard wears the same jeans and T-shirts, like I do. In Ireland I stood out from the women by this fact alone: I dressed warmly and comfortably, while they had short skirts in the freezing rain, usually no coats when out partying, and insane make-up that stayed pristine despite the weather. Here, the women are too diverse for me to comprehend, from plain to extravagant, short skirts to puffy coats.

It isn’t just the way people look, but also the way people act that is different from the States. Backhome , servers depend on their tips to make a living and are often very friendly and make small talk, asking about your day. Most jobs place great emphasis on friendliness and customer service in the hiring process. Café servers here seem very brisk and no-nonsense in comparison. Sometimes we go to Starbucks just to have someone be a bit nicer than the usual barista.

When we were applying for university, we were pleasantly surprised with the differences in paperwork from American colleges. In the States, your letters of recommendation are supposed to be sent from your teacher directly to each school you are applying for, as is your transcript, etc. Neither of us enjoys extra paperwork and we thought the ease of application process to be exemplary of Britain’s paperwork situation. Alas, the framework is absurdly bureaucratic. It seems like every extra piece of paperwork can only be dropped off in this place, at this specific time, and these three people have to have already signed it before this last person will sign it – then we can take a week just for that signature before you can get it back, turn it in to these other people, who will print up what you need within another week. If you’re lucky.

And yet some things are familiar. The gym down the street contains the grunting regulars; the children are adorable; and there are good Asian restaurants. People walk their dogs and go about their lives. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things that I prefer here and will terribly miss when we have to go back (if we go back – I mean, if Trump wins, we’re staying). The transit systems are extremely useful and use green energy, the food is properly labelled as to where it was grown and what is in it, and we even have a gluten-free bakery down the street that provides sourdough – something my California life has been lacking since I was diagnosed with coeliac disease.

Living in Oxford, I am constantly aware of the amazing history that surrounds us. The Vaults and Garden café is in a building that has been there since 1320. The Queen’s Lane Coffee House has been there since 1654. There is nothing remotely comparable in the United States, especially not on the west coast. Back home, going for a hike in nature, the world around you almost feels young and unexplored still. I think just knowing the history of the millions of people who have lived here and walked these very streets over 1,000 years ago makes everything seem far weightier.

In case you haven’t heard, Shia LaBeouf is in a lift. I am staring at a pair of lift doors, which occasionally open to see a glimpse of gawky conversers. Even as I write this, I’m still listening. And I’m not really sure why. So far people have spoken about odds on (and chortled painfully through my speakers), others have tried to discern exactly what meta-modernism is. LaBeouf patiently conducts his way through, encouraging speech out of some, backing off in others. He looks tired, in the small snatches where we see him. The door opens, and he takes his jumper off, and I wonder whether anytime soon someone will step in and say “hey, let’s sit on the floor, let’s be silent”. But as he notes himself, apparently English people don’t like silence.

At one point they all descend into existentialism. For who are the lab rats? Who is performing? Maybe they’re all scientists? They’re all waiting, whether in a queue, or in the lift. But what about me? I’m not waiting. I’m choosing to listen. There is no delay. Well. I’m waiting to stop listening, so I can start working. And I nearly do. But then I hear Stuart Webber’s tones, asking them to get on to the next person. Suddenly LaBeouf is telling Webber he ain’t being fair. “Man I’m sorry but you can’t do that, that’s not fair you’re making it weird, they can make their own decisions c’mon I know you’re the president of the Oxford Union but you can’t dictate us”. Webber presumably dissipates, and LaBeouf carries on. Fame, after all, controls the Union. This is some performance art.

Everyone wants to be remembered. And LaBeouf seeks someone who stumbles in, and gets their vibe. Or maybe he wishes he never begun. Although, against myself, I sort of trust LaBeouf, and I trust what he’s doing. And although he stands in a small square, in airless air, meeting people who have queued for hours or paid someone in the queue £50 for their spot, he takes it in. When the third person asks him how the three of them (LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner) met each other, purely within the time I have been watching, he doesn’t sound exhausted. And neither am I, listening to the answer. He finds ways of paraphrasing himself, of rephrasing. I begin to respect him as I listen. Even if it’s just for not being sardonic in the face of inanity, and weirdly broad questions. But is it art? The fatal question. I’m inclined to say no. But. It’s interesting. It’s something. And I’m still listening.