Wag the Dog
An example of what great actors, well-directed, can do with a first-class Mamet script. His dialogue, which so often sounds hollow, brittle and soulless, even when he directs it himself (especially so), here sounds spontaneous, startling, razor-sharp and jaw-droppingly funny. De Niro and Hoffman are shockingly alive and present, and all the ensemble scenes crackle with intensity and humor.
The world the script describes, which was goosed with the reality of the Lewinsky/Kosovo thing back when it came out, hasn’t aged a bit and, if anything, has become less of a satire.
The script takes a sharp left in the third act, as many of Mamet’s scripts do, going all the way back to The Verdict, but the impact of the movie is still undeniable.
THESE HEIST PICTURES
Any ideas why the gang is rarely allowed to get the loot? Only in Ocean’s 11 (and 12), The Sting, Sneakers and The Hot Rock is there actually the giddy pleasure of actually getting away with the crime.
The reason it works in these movies is because the gang is stealing something from someone we hate. Whether it’s Robert Shaw or Andy Garcia or Moses Gunn or Ben Kingsley, right up to the brand new Inside Man with Christopher Plummer, it must be a single man and he must be utterly hateable. The rule seems to be, if the gang just stealing from some institution or some country or some bank or something, the gang must ultimately lose in the end. Why is that? Why can’t someone just rob a bank and get away with it? Doesn’t that happen in real life? Why must the criminals be punished, in movies of all shades and tones, stretching back 50 years now? We keep wanting them to get away with it, why don’t the movies let them?
Yes, yes, I know that the money in the bank ultimately belongs to everybody, and you can’t support a crime against a society, but so what? We’re not talking about real life, we’re talking about movies. Can anyone think of a movie where they get away with the loot, and the only villains are the police who are trying to stop them?
Topkapi
1964. Directed by Jules Dassin.
Dassin, of course, directed the taut, grim classic Rififi. This is not that.
THE SHOT: Maximilian Schell et alia plot to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from a museum in Istanbul.
TONE: Amused, playful, smug.
Like many artifacts from the 1960s, what was once carefree, daring and liberated now seems curdled, bloated and dull. Melina Mercouri is meant to be sexy, coqettish and exotic, but comes off as haggard, embalmed and iguana-like. Peter Ustinov is a bumbling idiot who — excuse me, Peter Ustinov plays a bumbling idiot who unwittingly becomes a key member of the crew. His performance is cutesy, busy and condescending; naturally, he won an Oscar for it (as a friend of mine once remarked, the Oscar is awarded for most acting). Maximilian Schell comes off as a bizarre mix of Daniel Day Lewis, Ben Stiller and Ralph Fiennes.
The movie starts quite slowly. Nothing happens for fifty whole paint-drying minutes, as the cast romps and poses in exotic locations.
PLEASANT SURPRISE: The heist, which, like the one in Rififi nine years earlier, is played in real time and near-total silence, is still gripping and enveloping cinema 40 years later.
DOES CRIME PAY? Oh, so close. But this movie is too cute for its own good to let our heroes suffer long.
NB: Currently being remade as a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair. I can’t wait. That’s not sarcasm.
Ordinary Decent Criminal
2000. Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan.
THE SHOT: Master thief Kevin Spacey may have bitten off more than he can chew when he steals a priceless Caravaggio from an art gallery. Can he outwit the police, the IRA and his own traitorous henchmen to become Ireland’s Best-Loved Thief?
TONE: Glib, knockabout 00s UK crime drama. Guy Ritchie without the flamboyance (not necessarily a criticism). Very much Butch Cassidy in spirit, complete with Entire Police Force Surrounding Our Protagonist ending.
Keyser Sose, it turns out, is a perfectly nice guy who just wants to be well-liked. Much Irish Pride on display. Funny gangsters. It’s all a big game, even when men are shot in the face, in shocking detail.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino, two of our finest actors, play Irish. The rest of the cast are all actually Irish. These things happen. The first commercially-released film I’ve ever seen the devoted an actual close-up to a man’s penis. A dead man’s penis (same guy as the shot-off face). Take that, Tarantino!
DOES CRIME PAY? Depends what you want out of life, I guess.
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.