THE TOWN is a real well done, more-realistic-than-most crime drama. Not exactly a heist movie, because although it’s leading up to an elaborate caper it’s not as much about the planning and executing of the thing as it is about the people who do it. It’s also one of these movies people from Boston make where they’re real anxious to show off every last detail about the Boston neighborhoods and culture. I haven’t been there much so I got no clue how accurate it is, but it seems believable enough. There’s a part where they have coffee at Dunk’n Donuts, that part was real I know. (read the rest of this shit…)
Posts Tagged ‘heists’
The Town
Monday, September 27th, 2010The Lost Man
Thursday, September 16th, 2010
THE LOST MAN is a 1969 Sidney Poitier heist movie, a pretty obscure one, never released on DVD. Maybe if it was better known then Tony Scott and Denzel would do a juiced up remake. But actually it’s already sort of a remake, based on a novel that was made as ODD MAN OUT in ’47, but that version had James Mason as an IRA type, this has Poitier as a Black Panther type. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Italian Job (2003)
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
THE ITALIAN JOB circa 2003 is a standard issue studio ensemble heist movie, and a really enjoyable one. The director of FRIDAY and the writers of DEEP BLUE SEA put together a good group of likable actors to play the team of expert thieves, they came up with some clever gimmicks for an elaborate heist, and they executed it well with good pacing, light humor, a sense of fun but also a reasonable enough sense of danger. So it’s closer to OCEAN’S 11 where they obviously know what they’re doing but have to put in some elbow grease than OCEAN’S PART 13 where they seem to have super powers and can do absolutely anything at a moment’s notice with no trouble at all. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Split
Monday, April 20th, 2009
There are two Richard Stark based movies left that have never been released for the home video in the U.S. One is MISE A SAC, a French one based on The Score, where Parker and a crew try to rob an entire mining town. The other is THE SPLIT, based on The Seventh, where Jim Brown as the Parker character robs a football stadium and then has some trouble afterwords. My man David M. in France has seen both – he saw a restored print of MISE A SAC and told me it was great. As for THE SPLIT he did me one better than telling me about it, he sent me a recording from when it played letterboxed on the French Turner Classic Movies channel. (I don’t know who the French Ted Turner is, but it sounds like he plays better shit than the American one.)
If you’re reading this in the future maybe every movie ever made is available for instant download, but in my day you had to be patient. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to see this thing. The closest I came before now was an old movie magazine I bought at an antique mall because it had Barbarella on the cover (wait a minute, is Roger Vadim the French Ted Turner?) So I bought it for the Barbarella, because a man has needs, but it turned out there was also an “article” – really just a plot summary – about THE SPLIT. I’d been meaning to read it and write a book-to-movie-summary comparison until they get off their ass and release it. But now thanks to French Ted Turner I don’t have to stoop to that. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Ice Harvest
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
I was excited about this at one point, but I missed it when it was in theaters. I thought it was a diamond heist movie starring Billy Bob Thornton, but it turns out Billy Bob is the co-star and there are no diamonds. The ice in the title is literal, because it’s winter. Christmas Eve, to be exact. There’s not snow though, just frozen rain, which is not something you see in Christmas movies very often, and rings true to me since here we’re lucky to even see that. (I don’t know about Kansas.)
It’s not exactly a heist movie because like RESERVOIR DOGS or something you never see the theft itself. John Cusack (the rich man’s Scott Baio) is a Kansas mob lawyer and Billy Bob Thornton (ON DEADLY GROUND) is his partner in skimming. They have just stolen upwards of $2 million from their boss, but can’t leave town yet due to the ice. The movie is about them trying to hang out and play it cool for a few hours before they can leave. They figure the boss won’t know about the missing money until they’re gone, but this seems to be incorrect since Cusack keeps seeing an enforcer played by Mike Starr (ON DEADLY GROUND) going around town looking for them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Inside Man
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
INSIDE MAN has gotta be Spike Lee’s most mainstream joint ever. It’s a gimmicky bank robber thriller, not the type of story and characters he as a jointmaker is known for. You can go down his entire jointography and he’s never done this type of movie – it’s not as gritty and realistic as CLOCKERS, it’s not as meandering and novelistic as THE 25TH HOUR or SUMMER OF SAM, it’s not something he seems to be as passionate about as say MALCOLM X or the Jackie Robinson movie he’s been talking about doing for about 500 years that now is gonna be a Robert Redford Joint. (Yeah right Robert Redford, you had no idea Spike Lee wanted to do a Jackie Robinson movie. Who would’ve ever known Spike was interested in that sort of thing?)
So it’s not pure 100% grade A Spike Lee Joint which accounts for its lack of greatness, but I think it’s also kind of a good thing for Spike. He’s never made a movie completely lacking in merit (well, I haven’t seen SHE HATE ME yet) but he seems to get less and less focused as he gets older. Maybe doing one mainstream thriller will get him back in the mode of telling a somewhat concise story. I don’t know. (read the rest of this shit…)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Saturday, February 25th, 2006
This movie stars Steve McQueen as a bank robber, which automatically makes it worth seeing. And this is a good movie. But to be honest it doesn’t live up to its reputation or its potential. I know that Steve McQueen, like me, was someone who often could be spotted out and about striving for excellence. So I don’t think he would have a problem with me holding him to a high standard of achievement.
The first thing you’ll notice about the movie is that it’s very stylish. The opening and various other scenes use split-screen up the wazoo, splitting the screen into something like six different little boxes to show the different people intersecting for a heist. The cinematographer is Haskell Wexler (see TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE above for more on him) so despite all the showoffery in the editing alot of the footage is very handheld, documentary looking, like you’re there. Alot of the scenes are just dialogue-free footage of Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown fucking around. For example he flies in a glider or drives around really fast in a dune buggy. The dune buggy footage is pretty spectular, it seems like he’s about to flip over at any moment and you can’t help but notice he’s got no roll bars above his head. (read the rest of this shit…)
City of Industry
Friday, April 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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Day of the Wolves
Friday, December 17th, 2004
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. (read the rest of this shit…)
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. (read the rest of this shit…)
1. Patreon
Toss me a couple bucks a month, support the good shit, also get access to a bunch of exclusive writing. This is my primary source of writing money that has allowed me to cut down to part time at the day job. Thank you!
2. Buy my books from your local bookseller or somebody
click here for my Amazon author page (NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)
EXTRA CREDIT: Review them on Amazon! That would really help me out. Unless you didn't like them, in which case forget I said anything.
4. My exciting line of fashion and leisure products
(I get a couple bucks per item, you get a cool t-shirt, mug or lifestyle item)
-
