Sneakers
1992. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson.
One of only four films by Robinson. He waited 10 years to do his next one, The Sum of All Fears.
THE SHOT: Robert Redford, et alia, must steal and re-steal a thingamajig that could change the course of blah de blah.
TONE: Polished, smooth, thrill-seeking entertainment.
Brisk, witty, professional direction, a terrific, utterly original script that wrings tension from phone calls, car rides, flocks of ducks, computer terminals and Scrabble tiles. A brilliant hook, a compelling villain (complete with Li’l Villain Shark Tank [tm]), a great cast (Sidney Freaking Poitier! Dan Ackroyd, acting! David Strathairn Before Anyone Knew Who He Was! Stephen Tobolowsky In The Second Greatest Role of His Career!). River Phoenix is strangely underused, and Ben Kingsley has been given a bizarre accent (must be all that time spent in prison), but otherwise, superlative entertainment.
And a great capper for Redford’s career, almost a final-exam kind of picture. Draws together themes and elements from his whole career, from The Hot Rock and The Candidate, through The Sting, Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. There’s even the WASP guilt of Quiz Show thrown in for good measure.
James Earl Jones, voice of Verizon, gets to introduce himself by saying “We spoke on the phone.”
NITS (AND, SPOILER ALERT):
1. We find out, at the end of Act II, that Ben Kingsley is the guy who hired Redford to steal the whatsit. Why? I guess he knew that Redford was capable of finding and stealing it, but why didn’t he just hire his goons to go capture and torture the mathemetician? And didn’t he suspect that Redford would know what it was, and try to keep it for himself?
2. Who does Ben work for? When we meet him, he says he works for the Mafia. Then later, we find out that his office is withing the offices of a toy company. It is also explained that the toy company is a front (you know, the “mechanical dog skeleton art” in the lobby would have tipped me off that this was no ordinary toy company). But Stephen Tobolowsky really does design toys. So apparently there is some actual toy design going on at the toy company. So, is the toy company a Mafia front? And if they’re really making toys, how is it a front? Or, is the toy company simply Ben’s business (he describes the Mafia as his “day job”), the thing he does while he’s planning to take over the world?
DOES CRIMEPAY? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
pestilence update
Now that House Finches are coming to my bird feeder, I find the enormous, capybara-like squirrel who comes and sits in the middle of the seed to feed less cute. Especially when I can hear the finches yelling at him to get out.
Today I went out and, instead of merely shooing him away, I snuck up on him, then waved my arms and made a big noise. Well, he exploded out of the feeder, then charged halfway up a tree. But then he stopped, turned and started barking at me. It sounded like an apoplectic Donald Duck. It so amused me that I stood there for a good ten minutes trying to replicate the sound myself, and the two of us stood in my yard, carrying on what must have been an obscene conversation in Squirrel.
Raising Arizona
It just occurred to me, twenty years too late, that this is a heist picture.
It has always baffled me in terms of its structure, always remaining a little bit outside of the Coens repetoire, unclassifiable, even though it’s always been one of my top three Coen films. It’s clearly a comedy, sure, but what is it structurally? It’s not a domestic comedy, although it contains elements of that, and it’s not a noir, although it contains elements of that too.
No, it’s a heist picture. The baby is the Maltese Falcon, the thing everyone’s after, the thing that will change the lives of everyone who touches it, the “stuff that dreams are made of.”
It’s got all the elements of a classic heist picture: corrupt cops, three-time losers, escaped convicts, desperate criminals, crosses, double-crosses, snitches, betrayers, hotheads, even a shotgun-wielding maniac.
Now I realize that the place the Coens started was, “Hey, what if we did a heist picture, and instead of suitcase full of diamonds (or Ving Rhames’s soul), it was a baby?”
For whatever reason, when the ending comes along and Nicolas Cage goes into his dream, and we see little Nathan Jr. growing up, it always makes me sob like a little girl.
Welcome to Collinwood
2002. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo.
How lame am I? I put this movie in the DVD player, I had no idea that it’s a scene by scene, sometimes shot by shot remake of Big Deal on Madonna Street, which I just finished watching ten minutes earlier.
Last night, it was a Steven Soderbergh production of a remake of a classic Argentinian crime film. Tonight, it’s a Steven Soderbergh production of a remake of a classic Italian crime film. Small world.
So obviously, that’s not the way to watch this movie. But that’s the way this particular cookie crumbled.
Interesting as a study in contrasts. Whereas the original is full of roguish charm and bittersweet human comedy, the remake comes off as arch, forced, cartoonish, broad and insincere. The cast includes Sam Rockwell (Mr. Insincere himself) and a number of other Smart Actors Playing Stupid, including WH Macy and George Clooney, who handled this sort of task much better in Fargo and O Brother.
Where the original ended on its wistful, humanist note, the remake must Make Nice and Spell Out What It All Means, as American remakes of foreign films must. A lesson for us all.
Big Deal on Madonna Street was remade once before in 1984 as Crackers, directed by Louis Malle. Anyone see it?
Big Deal on Madonna Street
1958. Directed by Mario Monicelli.
THE SHOT: A ragtag group of lovable screwups plots a less-than-ingenious heist of a pawnbroker’s safe.
TONE: Charming, roguish humor, humming with a wise and witty stance on human life.
Heat it is not. The gang is unprofessional in the extreme. On the one hand, they don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing. On the other hand, it does not turn out that one of the gang is a trigger-happy psychopath. The love stories woven into the plot seem natural and revealing of character, instead of being shoehorned in. The comedy is easy, organic and human in scale.
The back of the box says that this is a satire of Rififi and its ilk. Satire it’s not. It’s warm, affectionate and bittersweet and requires no special knowledge of those films to enjoy.
DOES CRIME PAY? Well….no.
The Italian Job
1969. Directed by Peter Collinson.
THE SHOT: Michael Caine et alia are going to steal a whole bunch of gold from somebody or other in Turin, then get away in a trio of Mini Coopers.
TONE: Blithe, breezy 60s comedy. Women offer sex at all turns, criminals are concerned about their cars and wardrobe, realism is kept to a bare minimum. In the most fanciful moment, magic mafiosi appear on the side of an Italian Alp, complete with Piranha Brother hats, suits and tommy guns, then moments later vanish into the hillside like gun-toting fairies.
With supporting performances by Noel Coward and Benny Hill, this film can truly be said to contain the alpha and omega of 20th century British wit.
WORTH NOTING: in the original, the triumphant Mini Cooper chase is intended as a metaphor for British ingenuity. In the remake, it’s intended as a very long commercial for Mini Coopers.
DOES CRIME PAY? That is a question that is literally left in the balance.
Criminal
2004. Directed by Gregory Jacobs.
THE SHOT: John C. Reilly is a grifter who spends a day training a new partner and trying to sell a counterfeit, highly valuable piece of currency.
TONE: Sharp, sober, clear-eyed, edgy. John C. Reilly is amazing in a daring performance as one of the most unlikeable protagonists in recent film history. Diego Luna is his green, but willing-to-learn apprentice.
Many twists. Only one I found improbable.
Can’t say too much more. Don’t want to give it away.
Criminal life lived at a workaday, primitive level, exactingly recreated. Razor-sharp acting and direction. Thing really gets under your skin.
DOES CRIME PAY? Well, that would be telling.
CONTEST STILL GOING ON! TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE HEIST/CAPER MOVIES! Only, it’s not really a contest.
The Hard Word
2002. Directed by Scott Roberts.
THE SHOT: Guy Pearce and his gang of robbers are forced by an unscrupulous lawyer to undertake a job holding up a bookie convention.
TONE: Glib, sunny 00s noir. Occasional violence, but mostly the protagonists don’t seem too concerned about anything going on, even when they find out they’re being set up to be killed.
THE JOB GOES SOUTH WHEN: You’ll never guess, but there’s a last-minute addition of — A TRIGGER-HAPPY, SHOTGUN WIELDING MANIAC! In an ironic twist, he is also dyslexic. And hilarity ensues.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Strange romantic subplots that start out of nowhere, end suddenly and have no impact on the narrative. And, quite a bit more about blood sausage than I care to know.
LIFE LESSON: Women, apparently, are good after all.
DOES CRIME PAY? Ultimately, yes, very well. A number of headaches on the way, but once you finally kill someone who needs to be killed, you get to be really cool. Your gang even gets the slow-motion Reservoir Dogs “walking to the job in sunglasses” shot.
In a final, ironic twist, we never find out what the hard word is. Unless it refers to being able to understand some lower-class Australian criminal slang.
How to Beat the High Cost of Living
1980. Directed by Robert Scheerer.
Mr. Scheerer directed a lot of television before and after this picture. It shows.
THE SHOT: Susan St. James, Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange play are suburban housewives who, financially pressed by the malaise of the Carter presidency, plot to steal a MILLION dollars from a shopping mall during a promotional stunt.
TONE: Kind of all over the place. Never strays far from 70s TV movie comedy. Animated titles borrow heavily from Peanuts specials, if that gives you any idea. Senior citizens dress like hippies, adorable moppets swear like sailors, married couples trade gibes as though scripted by Neil Simon.
Susan St. James plays perky, Jane Curtin plays repressed, Jessica Lange plays flighty.
Lange, after King Kong but before Tootsie, has yet to find her voice as an actress. She’s all over the place in this, flighty and stupid in one scene, then angry and imperious in the next, then fluttery and tragic in the one after that, none of them convincing.
There are feeble attempts to deal with feminists issues, but they conflict with the scripts need to have the women be ditzy. Similarly, there are stabs at topical humor, including attacks on Carter, Reagan, the Germans, Japanese and Arabs.
Fred Willard has, for some reason, been asked to play dour and unfunny. Dabney Coleman has been asked to play sincere and heartfelt. Richard Benjamin plays his scenes as though in a completely different movie. Might have been a better one, but still.
Garrett Morris has been given a genuine “surprise cameo” appearance, complete with “turn toward the camera” introduction, as if we the audience is expected to gasp and break out into applause when Garrett Morris suddenly appears on screen.
In a moment that defines “gratuitous nudity,” Jane Curtin performs a striptease and we go in for an utterly unnecessary closeup of some other woman’s breasts.
DOES CRIME PAY? Yes, although, as is traditional in these types of films (SPOILER ALERT), at least half the money must be blown into the air to be shared by the townspeople.