Posts Tagged ‘heists’

Day of the Wolves

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

One of Richard Stark’s most ambitious Parker novels is The Score (aka Killtown) where Parker, Grofield and a bunch of other thieves team up to knock over an entire mining town. It would make a great movie, and it already made some french movie called Mise à sac that is not available to mere americans. Day of the Wolves isn’t based on The Score but it sounded similar enough that I thought I should check and be sure. Anything to help out my man Richard Stark.

I gotta warn you, unless somebody decides to put this one out on dvd, I don’t know if anybody else is gonna find it. It’s one of those mysterious dust-covered tapes you find, recorded in EP mode, real bad full frame transfer. Movie you never heard of, director you never heard of, big cast of actors you never seen before, real low production values. The only major connection between this movie and my world is that the cinematographer, when I looked him up, turned out he did three of my favorite Steven Seagal pictures (MARKED FOR DEATH, OUT FOR JUSTICE and ON DEADLY GROUND). But let’s face it, you don’t watch Steven Seagal movies for the cinematography, or at least I don’t. So this movie is a mystery find. And usually those finds don’t amount to much. But this is one of the better ones.

A mysterious criminal mastermind brings together a team of thieves that never met before and gives them numbers from 1-7 as their names. They don’t know what the job is, just the amount they’re gonna get, and that they gotta have a beard. He flies them on a private jet (because a helicopter is hard to steal) to an isolated farm, where they practice and prepare for the big day, but without really knowing the whole plan.

So far the plot is pretty similar to The Score, except the leader is alot more James Bond. The guy in the book is obviously an amateur (it turns out he has a grudge against the town – very unprofessional) and he doesn’t have access to these private jets and shit. Also, the beards is a new touch. The idea is that facial hair will help disguise them, but the reason it’s cool in the movie is because you got this gang of 7 dudes who all have suits, ties, shades, and big, bad ’70s beards. Even if they weren’t holding guns, you’d know the second they get out of that plane that something’s wrong here. Plus, alot of the beards are obviously fake, but they’re supposed to be real in the movie. Those are not good beards. (more…)

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City of Industry

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Here’s a small time crime picture for you, never got much attention as a child but grew up to be a pretty good movie. It starts out with Timothy Hutton stealing a car (very believable hotwire scene here with actual hammering of the dashboard, not just pulling some wires out) then going to pick up his partner for a job. They eventually get together their crew for a jewel heist, it consists of Timothy Hutton, his older brother Roy Egan (Harvey Keitel), Jorge (some guy I thought I recognized, but turns out he was only in a handful of movies before he died) and an obnoxious hotshot jackass named Skip, sort of a Stephen Dorff type (Stephen Dorff).

There is a pretty strong Richard Stark feel to this for a while as they prepare their heist. No funny stuff, no fancy talk, just straight business and some primal percussion type soundtrack shit to get your heart beating. Everything goes smooth actually until after the heist when this fucker Skip decides to shoot everybody, burn down the motor home and take off with the boodle. Fucking asshole! So the rest of the movie is about Roy trying to find and kill Skip, Skip trying to have Roy killed before he finds him. Very simple. That’s what I like.

One thing weird about this movie, the two main characters are named Roy and Skip. You don’t get that too often. Usually one would be John, then maybe the other one would have a fancy name like Esteban or Molochai or whatever, but not Roy and Skip. That’s pretty unusual.

I said earlier Skip was kind of a Stephen Dorff type. That’s because he’s kind of the same character, Deacon Frost, that this guy played in the classic Wesley Snipes picture BLADE. Deacon Frost was the young spikey haired showboat who thought he was better than all the other vampires, listened to lots of techno music and scared all the old timers with his young edgy mixed blood vampire methods. This is the same thing here, he thinks he’s hot shit, he plays loud, bad music while he’s driving and he stirs up trouble with all the pros like Roy and his crew. Also he has bleached blonde hair. This was 1997 though, one year before Blade, so Stephen Dorff didn’t know yet about how motherfuckers always trying to ice skate uphill. (more…)

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Diamond Men

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

Remember for a little while there people thought Quentin Tarantino’s job was to find washed up actors who can’t get good roles anymore, put them in a great role and revive their career. He did it for Harvey Keitel and John Travolta anyway, and sort of for Bruce. He also helped bring attention to Steve Buscemi, outlaw award winner Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and others. But somehow, when he gave both Pam Grier and Robert Forster in the best roles of their careers in the great JACKIE BROWN, the same magic didn’t work.

I mean these two were incredible in JACKIE BROWN. And what do they get? Oscar buzz that amounts to nothing, and some more really bad roles. Poor Pam Grier was in JAWBREAKER and SNOW DAY. Robert Forster kept doing straight to videos, with only an occasional bit part as a generic cop or doctor in things like MULHOLLAND DRIVE and the remake of PSYCHO PART 1.

Well I’m happy to say that although DIAMOND MEN is no JACKIE BROWN by any stretch it is finally a worthy role for Mr. Forster. He plays an aging diamond salesman who, in the opening scene, keels over of a heart attack. Once he recovers he finds out that his company won’t let him “carry the line” anymore, which apparently means travelling around with a suitcase full of a million dollars in diamonds, showing them to store owners. He convinces his boss to give him one more chance training his replacement, played by Mark Wahlberg’s brother Donnie.

The cover art for this one is going to be very misleading. Here are a few things from the cover you will not see in this movie: handcuffs, cutoff jeans, a glittering diamond ring, hundred dollar bills, or especially hundred dollar bills spilling out of a briefcase handcuffed to a guy wearing a glittering diamond ring standing next to a guy wearing cutoff jeans. There is a gun but it plays a role smaller than Robert Forster did in MULLHOLLAND DRIVE. (more…)

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The Opportunists

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

What I like about this low key independent crime picture from 2000 is it’s small time in every way. I mean it’s got Chris Walken in the lead and he’s a big movie star, but everything about the story and characters goes against Hollywood’s idea of what’s exciting. The story is your usual “ex-con gone straight is running out of options and has to do one last score to survive” type deal but put in a more realistic, unglamorous, ungritty context. This is an unthriller.

Walken lives in suburban New York. I don’t remember ever seeing big buildings in this one. Here he’s a nice guy, almost timid, definitely not the King of New York. You could argue he’s a player because he goes between three places: a house with his grown up daughter, a tiny apartment above his girlfriend’s bar, and a trailer by the garage he rents out. But he’s embarassed of his past and never tries to be a tough guy about it. He’s a mechanic but he doesn’t seem to get much work and on this day doesn’t get the money because he fucked up the job.

His aunt is in a catholic retirement home, but his check just bounced and they’re threatening to move her to a hospital. He’s behind on his rent, gonna get kicked out of his garage. Some Irish kid just showed up claiming to be his cousin. And Donal Logue from BLADE bugs him for half the movie until he finally gives in to do a safecracking job. (more…)

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Ocean’s Twelve

Friday, December 10th, 2004

OCEAN’S 12 is a sequel to OCEAN’S 11 (the 2001 version [not the movie 2001, I am referring to the year 2001, the year the movie OCEAN'S 11 was made {the remake, not the original, that is why I brought up this year thing originally}]) so this will be the sequel to my review of that movie.

It turns out that the eleven do NOT die horribly as I predicted. But their past (the other movie) does catch up with them, and the sequel is all about them doing various heists in order to pay back the money, plus interest, that they stole the first time around. So that means that Ocean’s 11 actually have a net loss across the two pictures. I mean, think about that. That’s terrible! What does that say about the current state of doing a job right? You want to do the impossible, so you bring in 11 of the greatest experts from around the world, you pull it off, you win back your ex-wife, and you have a fun time doing it. And your reward is horrendous debt and threat of life and limb. That’s how this world rewards you for ambition, talent and dedication.

That’s kind of a bummer in a caper movie where you expect each one to be a bigger and better heist. But it’s nice to be able to have another ending that’s not one of the standard caper movies endings (A: they get away with it and are last seen chilling on a beach somewhere; B: they almost get away but die tragically, probaly ironically.) At the very least this movie will probaly be a big inspiration to those of you with large credit card debts.

As you know from my original O11 review, I was already ready for a sequel. And I always pictured it as a tighter version of 011, maybe a little harder. As much as I enjoyed that movie it was no THE LIMEY or OUT OF SIGHT which are the movies that really told me this Steve Soderbergh was capable of a top notch crime picture. I thought they would follow the same basic formula of Part 11 but with the characters already introduced, they would be able to have a more detailed and realistic look at a heist, maybe some gritty everything-goes-sour type business, who knows. But with the same charismatic cast and bouncy sense of humor and funky David Holmes soundtrack. (more…)

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