Posts Tagged "crime"

Excellent.

Another good movie for studying intrigue: it's all double-crosses and deceptions.

Both Alexis Smolensk (whose taste in films I trust completely) and Rob, one of my work customers, recommended this to me.

Have I seen this before? I'm getting deja vu... Oh yeah. As soon as we learn that mobster Yulian's little brother is the guy who got attacked on the bus, I recognized that I'd seen this once before, a long time ago.

Didn't take notes while watching, save this: when Hutch brings his wife and kids out of the basement, it's meaningful that they cover the young daughter's eyes, but the son, who's sixteen or so, gets to see the bodies and the blood.

This heist movie doesn't fall into the trap of making fun of its West Virginia setting or the characters that live there. Some characters are hugely country and, yes, simple, but they're not the butts of jokes. They just are who they are.

The autobiography of Joe Bonanno, formerly the head of one of New York's criminal "Five Families." Worth reading for extensive discussion of how the Sicilian Tradition is not limited to the cliches of mob movies -- as long as you believe Bonanno, who is surely not a disinterested reteller of historical events.

This detective novel is both a gritty murder mystery and a beautiful realization of an alternate-universe version of Sitka, Alaska -- a Jewish Sitka that never was, a post-Holocaust outpost of Yiddishkeit at the frozen edge of the world. The setting is potent; one could easily set a series of books here. The ending seemed to come on a little too quickly, but I tend to see that in most crime or thriller novels, so I wonder if it's just me.

As strong as the famous train-and-car chase is, for my money it's too hectic to be this movie's best scene. I prefer the foot chase where Detective "Popeye" Doyle tries and fails to catch Charnier, the stately criminal mastermind. The cinematography and the actors' movements make it; the steadily increasing tension of the score clinches it.

The characters in this movie about con men are hard to like, all of them, especially the main character's stupid, narcissistic wife. Certainly that means the director and the screenwriter did their jobs well! But even so, I was almost ready to give up on the film two-thirds of the way through. However, I'm glad I persevered. The payoff, in which yet another con is revealed, made the whole thing worth it.

God, this movie is absolute fabulous.

I was initially interested because it had Robert Redford and Paul Newman co-starring; having just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the first time, I was eager for more from that pair. I didn't feel so strongly about Butch Cassidy that I wanted to follow its director to this film, but then my decision was clinched when I saw on Wikipedia that The Sting's plot took inspiration from David Maurer's book The Big Con, which I read just a few months ago.